Nothing.

Nowhere.

An in between. A breath held. A heartbeat paused.

It was a twisting sea of night. Of shadow. An unrelenting and unceasing darkness. It had no ending and no beginning. Eternity. A deep unbroken void that seethed with power. A dark energy, almost magic but not. It was inexplicably other, unfathomably ancient. The fabric of reality, unspooling and retying itself into new shapes.

Elianna fell.

No was flying.

Or was she tripping sideways. Slipping. Sliding. Weightless and weighted. There was no pain. No air. And she felt no pressing desire for either.

Infinity could have passed or mere moments.

One thousand years or a handful of seconds.

Time was lost.

Swallowed.

Along with her.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Had she travelled through the centre of the world? Would she wind up on the other side?

Perhaps she had gone straight through it. Shot out into black emptiness of the night sky. To tumble with the stars forever.

So cold.

So achingly lonely.

The darkness ended with no warning. A chasm of light expanded from a pinprick to a gaping maw beneath her. It wasn't bright but after so long in the darkness Elianna was blinded. She didn't see the rush of grey stone until her face crushed against it. The rest of her body thudded heavily a moment later.

The pressure difference made her ears pop. A high pitched ringing consumed her hearing. A heaviness pressed her down, like a demon sat on her back. It took several beats to remember how to draw in air, how to make her chest expand and her lungs fill. She inhaled. Deep, shaking breaths she could not even hear. They tugged against something. It pulled wrong. Something dormant, numbed but waking. Aching.

Elianna's awareness slipped away from the sensation. Avoided it. Instead she concentrated on the ground. From where she lay crumpled, she could get an eye open. At first she saw only shadow. But after several blinks her eye adjusted. She seemed to be in a corridor of some kind. Cracked flagstones spread out in every direction. Filthy, gritty, and so perfectly solid it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It did not ripple with a mind of its own. Did not fall away to nothing. It was strong, steadfast. Perfect.

It bolstered her. Gave her the confidence to move. To use her weak hands and push upwards.

The scream that tore out of her managed to cut through the ringing in her ears.

Numbness evaporated as hot agony blazed through. The thing that had felt wrong with each breath was her shoulder.

Andruil's arrow had found its mark, she finally remembered. A ripping, rending of flesh, and blood and maybe even bone.

She nearly collapsed. Her right arm became limp, weak, useless. It took a strength of will and gritted teeth to get her left hand under her, to push herself the rest of the way. Her body had never felt so heavy. So uncooperative. By the time she lifted herself and slumped back against a wall, a cold sheen of sweat had collected on her brow. Her breaths were like a drowning man surfacing for air. Deep, quick, panicked. Her limbs shook with surprising force. Unsurpressable. She felt it down to her bones. Like she was one strike away from crumbling to ash.

The leather armour at her shoulder was torn. Shredded outwards like a star burst explosion. The skin beneath had not fared much better. A hole, over an inch across had been cast straight through her body. Blood, deep red and weeping, made a sluggish waterfall down her front, down her back. Still warm but cooling fast in the open air. Elianna paled even further. She could feel the blood drain from her cheeks. Like probing fingers of ice pulling downwards.

Was she bleeding out?

Mamae had taught her some healing skills. Told her that if she ever got pierced by something she had to leave it in. That it may be the only thing keeping the blood in her body.

Only the arrow was gone. Vanished like it never existed. Though the damage was enough to prove otherwise. It had definitely been firmly lodged in her shoulder when she fell but now it was nowhere to be seen. Not just that. The loop of rope that had been embedded in her right ankle was also mysteriously gone.

Perhaps things created in the fade, remained in the fade.

A thought for a time when she wasn't actively dying perhaps.

Elianna reached for magic and came back bitterly empty handed. Her well of mana had dried up. Not even a spark remained to help seal her wounds. She was lost, and dying, with no help in sight.

Helplessness hung like a shroud and Elianna's head slammed back against the wall. Her left hand fumbled along her neck until she encountered the smooth surface of something familiar. The edges of her pendant bit into her palm as she squeezed. Her thumb traced the carved lines of a wolf with halla horns. A piece of Papae and a piece of Mamae rolled into one. It warmed beneath her touch, the calming magic imbued into it barely a drop in the ocean, but the familiarity of the gesture was a small comfort amidst the chaos.

Sound started to return in a jumble. A thudding, clanging, shuddering she struggled to make sense of. Was someone coming?

"Hello, is someone there? I heard screaming."

Elianna gasped. That voice. Impossible. She recognised it instinctually, innately. The recognisable cadence had her sobbing in an instant.

"Mamae! Mamae, sathan ma halani!"

A body rounded the corner, gasped sharply with a breathless "fuck!" and rushed to her side.

Elianna spied her mamae's white hair through the blurred wave of tear filled eyes and half collapsed into her arms. Her scent was the same. Her warmth was safety. Elianna buried her face into mamae's neck and wept.

Mamae held her. Pressed a tentative hand into her hair like she was afraid of breaking her.

"Who did this to you, da'len?" Mamae asked.

Elianna squeezed her eyes shut, not wanting to say the name. Mamae should already know. Why was she asking her?

"It was her. She h-hunted me. Hurt me."

The hand in her hair tightened "By the creators, who would do that to a child?"

Wait. That. That wasn't right. Why would mamae swear to the very gods that had hurt her? Why would she do that?

"Da'len, what are you doing here? Where are your parents? Your clan?"

"What?"

Confusion stopped her crying. Elianna leaned back to cast a glimpse at her mamae's face and flinched violently away.

It was her, but it wasn't.

Lines carved by age had been smoothed flat. Hair grown to her waist was shorn at the shoulder in one severe line. And perhaps the worst of all were the curved, dark lines of vallaslin that marred her face.

Andruils vallaslin.

A vicious mockery. Like the world was laughing at her misery.

Mamae's hand came to rest on her cheek. Her left hand. The one that had been lost well before Elianna's birth.

Reality was a slap in the face.

This was not her mamae.

Not yet anyway.

She was staring into the face of a woman not even thirty.

Mamae mistook the horror in her eyes for something else. "I know I am not your mamae, da'len, but I promise we will find her." Mamae reached into a pouch at her hip and withdrew a small glass bottle. She held it up to Elianna's lips. "Drink this first, it will help."

The earthy flavour of elfroot and the subtle metallic tang of magic blended across her tongue. A sensation of cold dripped down her throat and suffused into her blood. The sharp, stinging, itch of healing made her gasp and look down.

The footwraps around her right ankle had completely fallen away, giving her access to see the mess. Deep gouges made by thorns grew smaller, the burgeoning bruise less pronounced. It wasn't fully healed but it may be enough to stand again. Her shoulder wasn't as lucky. While the blood slowed, it did not stop altogether. The wound was too big for a simple health potion to fix.

But the numbness it provided was an exceedingly welcome relief.

"We need to move. Can you stand?"

Not-Mamae tucked her hands under Elianna's armpits and pulled upwards. Elianna was a deadweight, until her mind caught up and she got her feet under her. She hissed through her teeth as distant pain bled through the numbness.

Not-Mamae started guiding them down the hallway. Tremors swelled up her legs and it took tremendous effort to remain upright.

"What are you doing here?" Not-Mamae repeated. "This is no place for a child."

No place for a child.

The echo of Papae's words hit her. Back then they had been on a battlefield, but now–

The sounds Elianna had been blotting out crashed into the forefront of her awareness. Screams and thuds and clanging metal. There was fighting. Above her, below her. Through a small slit of window she could see smoke rising in the distance. The tremors she had felt in her legs was not simply weakness, the whole building was shuddering. She had fell from one warzone to straight into another.

What was happening?

"Somebody help me!" a terrified voice rang out in a thick orlesian accent.

It came from up ahead, a few doors down. Not-Mamae was dragging them both over to the plea with little hesitation. Elianna was less keen. She wanted to bolt. Wanted to leave this dark, strange place and go home. Whatever was behind that door was bound to be another horror to endure. She'd had enough torment for one lifetime.

But she did not really have an option, as Not-Mamae picked up the pace and burst the doors open with a kick.

Elianna was correct of course.

It was a horror.

A twisted nightmare given physical form. A monster contorted into a flawed facsimile of a person. They got the number of limbs correct but they were too long, too sinewy. Its face was a melding of flesh and lyrium. Misshapen and ugly. And it loomed, taller than even Andruil had been.

When would malicious monstrosities stop popping up in front of her? It wasn't fair. She wanted to go home!

"What the fuck are you supposed to be?" she blurted, thoroughly sick of everything now.

A beat later Not-Mamae shouted "What's going on here?"

Then Elianna took in the rest of the scene. A group–at least these ones looked normal–had gathered in the centre of the room. Above them, suspended in the air was an old woman, dressed in chantry regalia. The woman's head whipped around at the sound of their entry.

"Run while you can! Warn them!"

The walking nightmare fuel turned to glare at them.

"We have intruders! Slay the elves!"

With his concentration now firmly on them, the old woman swung out, batting away a thing held in the creatures outstretched hand. It smashed against the ground and rolled towards them

A globe of some kind. An orb. It slowed to a stop at Elianna's feet. She reached for it before her brain could catch up with her.

One of the dumbest mistakes she had ever made.