The choir of realities hushed its calls as my foot crossed over the threshold. The air was damp, heavy, but filled with that sense of familiarity that had greeted me outside. I stood within a wide antechamber lined with burning, ichorous spheres, each hovering above its own pedestal against the wall. They melted away in endless trickles that pooled into rune-shaped reservoirs carved into the tops of the pedestals, each rune different from the others. The overflow ran to the edge and poured into thin channels carved in the stone floor. Strands of red and gold within the anima streams glistened through the shadows by light of the fiery orbs, revealing a labyrinth of intertwining deltas that converged into a solitary, shimmering river flowing into the next room.

I had feared this matter—from when it thrashed and heaved in the sky until it mutated and formed the sanguine void that delivered me to this realm. But as I examined it within the antechamber, I did not experience that fear—I questioned it. Hungry, volatile, alluring—the anima was all of these things, but ill intent by way of any of these traits was not in its nature. It simply existed.

I extended my hand toward an orb. As my fingers hovered closely above I watched the material lightly pull toward them in disobedience of its spherical origin, hungering to bend to my will. I pulled back slowly, taking care to not heavy-handedly startle it; the matter retracted submissively to its previous state. 

The temple remained quiet, patient; it seemed tempered by my presence as if everything was now in alignment. I glanced back to the river of colors flowing into the next room.

Come.
Pray.

The familiarity of Ixh’reya’s voice beckoned from the darkness beyond the threshold. And my voice—no longer a choir, but mine. The two overlaid in their words, giving the impression of a third, entirely different entity who spoke with greater seduction.

***

I followed the voices into the next room, but no life could be felt except my own. It was roughly half the size of the antechamber. On the floor, a small, dust-covered, satin pillow with apparent indentations lay in front of a cracked stone altar. The anima channels on the floor consolidated into six larger streams as they traced their paths toward the altar and ascended the sides. On top, the streams pooled together creating a font, on which floated a single, brightly, ever-burning feather that looked identical to those of Ixh’reya’s wings, though it held none of the same color nor vibrancy.

It is your time.
Pray.

The unfamiliar, the choir, Ixh’reya, and my very own—the voices whispered from the shadowed corners of the altar room where the feather’s light did not reach. I knelt down onto the pillow and felt the firmness of the stone floor through the satin covering. My hands clasped together on my lap, I bowed my head and closed my eyes.

“Pray,” the voices had said. I had prayed already—when I watched the sky tear open above the valley, when Ixh’reya made her descent from the tremors toward me, when the void had consumed my reality and bore me into this one—but what had I been praying for?

I had been so engrossed by the preservation of my own mortality that I had failed to embrace its very existence. It was only when I had relinquished my search of survival and sought understanding to thrive that my path had been revealed to me. My mind and its worries had become a vice—a blemish on the credence of my fate. 

Pray.

I could hear the voices inching their way out from the shadows and toward me with growing urgency. I began to feel the gravity of their words take hold.

Your mind is all that remains between your flesh and ours.

A barrier—that is what my mind had become—a limitation to the full potential of my existence simply because it was conscious of itself. Without it, there were no limits. I prayed for a release from the impediments of my mind—a release from my mortal consciousness.

Hold high the spoils of your body.
Relinquish the mind and grant the flesh control.
Embrace the Umbradawn!

Closer and more urgent the voices swelled, no longer whispering but muttering in ritualistic recitation. The inside of my eyelids grew a harsh black as my blindsight began to manifest the sanguine void—mutating, beguiling, empowering.

Our flesh is our reality; you will see.
All-knowing. All-consuming!
Pray!

Without the mind, the body was free to take the path it was offered. The flesh had control. And with that control, it could thrive—I could thrive. I could assimilate with their reality, understand it, harness it, be it. All-knowing. All-consuming.

The void was becoming clearer. My mind was folding in on itself with the weight of a blackhole. The more it collapsed, the more I felt myself manifesting within my own vision, within the void, within the flesh. 

See what we see!
Our reality. Our flesh!
Pray!

The voices hissed, their power casting away my mind and granting my body the control it had hungered for. I felt myself beginning to fall endlessly through the sanguine void of my mind. I could see my body, my flesh—I was there now. I was unbound, ready to walk the path of grace and pray to the Umbradawn.