“I am Syleah, Lady Dream and Goddess Of The Waking Night. I have here a quest I must entrust to you. The recent campaign to reclaim the core has failed, yet not all is lost. The core has remanifested once more, so journey again to a Temple Of Caesi and reach my eldest sister, the Lady Reality; she will reactivate the pathfinder. But take heed: although for now they are not in proximity, the Shades remain on the hunt. The activation of the pathfinder would spark a race for the core, just as it had.”

Her voice, heavenly and enchanting, fills the echoes of the large chamber. Upon hearing the title of the lady before him, the knight takes a knee. The goddess does not lift her head, keeping her gaze on the cracks on the eggshell she sits in, her hair phasing between colourlessness and an effervescent violet.

“You shall not receive my blessing, Ser Knight, for your patron goddess awaits elsewhere. She is my most beloved younger sister, the Lady Luck, cast down from the heavens to aid you in this quest. Ah, she is who shielded you from the fate of your former comrades. The both of you share a past that you have no memory of, so do not try to understand everything right away. All will be clear eventually, I guarantee. Rise, Ser Knight, you have inherited the duty of the thousands that lost their lives in battle against the Shades. This is your answer.”

An answer it is, but it is no conclusion, and it explained little. But the knight makes no complaint and stands up.

“There is an underground path that leads out of the fortress from this dome. My sister awaits at the exit; ensure that no harm befalls her. Now, I have delivered my message. Goodfaring, Knight Diastre, if luck allows it then we shall meet again.” With that, she lifts her eyes to the ceiling and a bright flash of light envelops her figure as she hardens into glass, a statue that gradually shatters into sparkling dust. Her overbearing presence vanishes; the Lady Dream has left the mortal plane. What remains is the statue.

He observes the chamber, noticing a lit torch at an end and so proceeds towards it. A broken door hangs from its hinges, revealing a wide stairway going downwards into pitch darkness. Some of the stone steps are cracked and bulging out of proportion, but the knight decides that this should be the underground passage the goddess mentioned. Removing the torch from the wall, he starts down until he reaches a walled tunnel. Blue lights dimly illuminate the path – the waterlamps doing their work – though most of them have fallen from the ceiling and now sits damaged as water dripping from above pools into singing puddles. Both the ceiling and the floor is split by large fissures, just like the aftermath of an earthquake. It is as if everything in the world is laid to smoking waste save for the seemingly untouched chamber of that dome.

Carefully, the knight makes his way to a daylit opening, navigating the terribly uneven floor that has holes large enough to swallow a leg. He arrives at what could have once been an enclosed garden, for the bushes and hedges have wilted, and ferns and long grasses has sprouted unchecked. The path he has just used must have been a servantway. A sphere of ash hovers by the gate near a slanted bench. He wonders if it is what he should do: to find out the clues of an unseen past by igniting the ash just like before. He has never encountered the like of such a thing, yet for now it is his only source of information.

A thrust of the torch and the sphere bursts into flame, and the fiery painting depicts an armoured brute of a knight with a missing arm and a limp leg struggling to keep himself on the bench as blood leaks from his shoulder. It is the general himself, the knight realises. “Forgive me, beloved Caesi…I had no choice.” A familiar voice this is, interrupted with unsteady breathing and heavy sighs. “We have failed you, and it was so close…We had it. So close, and no one to bring you word of how close…we were.” Accepting the fact that he cannot keep himself sitting, the general stumbles to the gate, heaving himself against it with all his might to push it open and wide. The flames begin to fade as the general continues out before dissolving entirely.

The torch has gone out too. Once again taking a knee, the knight sullenly places it onto the bench and whispers in his heart a silent prayer. In that stance he remains for a long moment, recollecting his senses, thoughts and composure. The afternoon is waning, and the day will soon set into twilight. Before that, he has to find this Lady Luck, who has suddenly become his tutelary. Is it true that he has lost fragments of his memory? Perhaps it was because he survived the explosion of that core. That core…Eitherhow, the goddess will grant him more answers.

He decides that the conclusion is still very far off.