[WIP] In the Face of Twilight - Zoe lore, EDGE Edition
It's good to have a lighthearted character every now and then, but what if Zoe's EDGE meter was cranked up to eleven? I'm not saying it should be, but that it wouldn't be very difficult to derive tragedy from a situation like Zoe's if one really tried. Like, what if at first she just wanted to go home? She'd be pretty screwed. And it presumably isn't until later that she truly takes on the mantle of 'Twilight's Herald'...not because it's a preset role that needs filling, but out of a personal sense of obligation grown from her own scarring brush with the Aspect of Twilight.
Zoe drifted through the dark rift
between dimensions, in a place outside of the usual rules of time and
space. Sitting upon one of countless craggy 'islands' of rocky
debris, that floated about endlessly in a boundless black aether, she
let out a sigh.
“Welp...I'm bored!” She mused to
herself.
Sulking, she ventured another scan of
her surroundings, on the off chance that anything had changed:
In every direction, still, she saw
nothing but the scattered debris, distant glimmers of stars, and
glowing pink and purple bands of light, like cosmic roads winding off
into eternity. Perhaps she'd marvel at the view, if only she had
someone else to share it with.
However, Zoe knew she wasn't alone.
A pale human face – smooth but solid,
like a mask – fazed into corporeality within the previously empty
space before her.
“Why the long face, kid!?” It
barked with a rough, obnoxious voice, like if a dog could talk.
“Listen, Twilight,” she said,
trying to avoid the entity's harrowing gaze. “Thanks for bailing me
out back there, but unless there's something else you wanna show me
I'd really like to go home now.”
But the mask kept up with her movements
by gliding freely through the void, its features fluctuating in
conjunction with the ever-changing quality of its voice:
“Home!? Back to those mean old
elders?” The Aspect said in a child's voice, not unlike Zoe's.
Zoe gave it a little thought. The
Aspect of Twilight hadn't done anything specifically bad to her yet,
but there was something decidedly off about
the extra-dimensional being, if only she could put her finger
on it...
“Come on and stay a while,” it said
in a charming man's voice. “Next round's on me!”
A tendril sprouted from the dark, then
coiled around her neck. Not tightly enough to choke her, but enough
that she could recognize that it was a possibility.
Zoe shivered in the Aspect's ice cold
grasp.
“No...thanks,” she struggled to
say, and made a feverish attempt at tugging the tendril loose, to no
avail. “I'll just...be on my way!”
The Aspect, giggling gleefully at her
flimsy resistance, simply tightened its grip.
“No, my sweet,” it said in a warm
but firm tone, like a mother talking down to her unruly child. “I'm
afraid that won't be possible.”
Before Zoe could protest, she became
enveloped by darkness.
“The world you hail from is no
longer,” the Aspect of Twilight cooed softly, rippling across her
senses like a pebble to still waters.
Suddenly, a portal opened in Zoe's mind
that dissipated the pitch black. Through it she was able to glimpse
the familiar cliffalong which her Lunari tribe had lived,
sequestered in caverns and subterranean tunnels by day to avoid the
ever-watchful Solari's detection; only emerging to forage in the
nearby woodland under the solemn watch of the moon.
It was during the daytime, particularly
at a time when the sun reached its zenith in the sky and Zoe knew
most of her people would be asleep, that the Solari attacked.
“No! Stop it!” Zoe screamed at the
unfolding scene as even the children, many of whom she recognized,
were not spared the sun's wrath. “They're just kids!” Realizing
her pleas were futile, the fervor in her voice waned to a meek
mumble. “W-w-we didn't hurt anyody...”
One-by-one, she watched as the Lunari
were being plucked from their caves by warriors clad in shining gold
armor, and then --
“Lo, the brutality of man!” The
Aspect cackled upon the falling of a Solari blade, its voice hoarse
and gravelly like an old man's.
As this tiny window into Zoe's world
faded, she could feel the Aspect of Shadow drawing her inward, into
its farthest depths, attempting to merge her with the innumerable
lost souls of those who were also drawn in by Twilight's trickery, or
reassuring whispers.
Zoe resisted with all her might, and in
doing so so a light started to grow within her.
“It is your destiny, Zoe!” they
beckoned to her as one in a resounding chorus, as she struggled to
break free. “Why go back, when you can stay with us? Together as
one, in eternity...”
“Destiny!? So, you mean...it hasn't
happened yet?”
“Nothing can change destiny,” its
voices reverberated. “All life will one day pass.”
“B-b-but why me!?” she pleaded.
“Why did you choose to tell me, over everyone else?”
The responses of the individual souls
were non-unanimous isolated echoes, ranging from “because
you're so carefree,” and so funny,
so cute, so energetic,
so naive, so
young...
“It is you we wanted,” a lone voice
added, deep and dramatic like an old cleric's. “No one else...”
Zoe felt the light within her surge –
she'd always been the best at tag, back at home.
“First, you'll have to catch me!”
Ripples of the power she'd gained in
her new astral form shined outwards, shedding away the Aspect's
shroud of darkness.
“Foolish girl!” The Aspect's
comprising denizens simultaneously shrieked in anger.
It pursued her in a form like a blot of
ink spreading across the subspace, consuming everything in its path.
Hands emerged from the inky depths,
grasping for Zoe, but she found she could materialize her new powers
of starlight into projectiles that she continually fired at the
rapidly approaching shadowy mass, just barely keeping the raging
Aspect at bay.
Zoe plunged into the flow of one of the
glowing bands of light she'd seen previously, and found herself being
swept along in a warm current.
Content that she had escaped the
Aspect, she simply curled up and cried, letting the current take her.
She never in a million years could have
imagined missing her life among the Lunari. However, even as tiny
portals into the infinite number of parallel dimensions started to
pop up, like bubbles, in her midst, home was the only
destination on her mind.