Arcaea: The World of Glass

[Short] Astral Sea

Dreams don't tend to feel so real.

This is the conclusion she comes to—and yet, it must be a dream. There are incredible sights to be found in the waking world: fields of flowers painting a solid color over the entire expanse, enormous caverns  and canyons carved through the earth by mere rivers, water frozen mid-fall in winter to make miraculous  towers of shimmering ice...

Miraculous though they seem, they are not miracles. Dreamlike though they seem, they are ever reality.  While these sights arrest the mind, heart, and imagination, they are, with thought, explainable. They  are aspects of nature made possible by basic processes of the world...

What's more, an understanding of them is easily within reach, and she clearly remembers those grade  school classes that taught her about plant growth, the water cycle, the effects of temperature...

But this is a miracle. This is a dream. No class, no lecture, and no amount of reading has ever told her  about, or explained to her, the magic of glass flying through the sky.

The girl bears witness to the world of white for the first time in its entirety, standing on a cliff which  overlooks the abandoned, or perhaps archived, buildings standing across the pale and still earth, some  straight, some crooked. "Arcaea" is the name in her mind, but no "Arcaea" exists within her memory.

The shards of glass float through the air reflecting other people and other places, many of which at a  glance seem like movies—surreal, like fantasy. These, too, are "Arcaea". Watching it all, she knows it must  be a dream.

And yet, dreams don't tend to feel so real.

"..."

She is silent for a moment.

And then she flinches, a shock running through her. That of realization—that of another name.

"That was it!" she yells over the landscape. "It's a 'lucid dream'!"
And at once, the girl grows excited. She bounces on her heels.

"Can I? C-Can I...?" she whispers, loosely holding her hands before her chin—her mouth. "Can I—fly!?"

She puts her foot over the cliff's edge—

And she stops there.

Shying away, she squeals and shakes her head wildly, smiling to herself and asking, in her thoughts, just  what is she thinking? "Noooo! No, no, no! Stop that! Ahhh!" she whines, fear and giddy elation muddled  inside her. The fear of falling had entered her gut in the moment she'd taken that step. The world is not  real, but it feels like it is.

"Ahh!" she moans, irritated. "But I've never had one before!" A lucid dream: actualization amid sleep. To  dream and, in the awareness that you're dreaming, gain incredible power over "reality": to fly through the  sky, to experience the world as a bird or butterfly, to wish...

But what a shame—her realization of her "self" seems to be directly in the way.

She is not a witch or wizard. She is not a bird or butterfly.

Her name is Nami, and she is an ordinary high school girl.

She searches the area, finds a path leading down, and begins to descend.

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If she cannot change the world or herself despite her awareness, then she may as well enjoy some  exploration of her subconscious mind while still consciously aware.

This is the conclusion she comes to as she walks down from the cliff where she previously stood.
Like any path one can find in the world of white, this one is lined with coy glass; it leans away
from one's touch, yet leans in against anyone's wishes. She can see well the sights within them—most  are ordinary but, again, many are strange.

In one she sees what can only be called magic: shows of color sparking and smoking between the hands  of people in robes. In another she can see a cliff and valley similar to where she is now, though  reversed in color. A pair of horned humans—or maybe, demons—looks out over a glowing  cyclone of energy...


"Cool..." she breathes. She reaches out to see this scene more closely—yet, again, this glass forbids her  touch. She frowns, grumbles, and reluctantly continues making her way down. For her own dream, it really  doesn't seem to care about her input or will.

While this colorless world is a first experience for her, she has walked on a cliffside before.

Her country is a mountainous one. She's familiar with green ridges—forested horizons bordering Heaven— that she can go to, if she ever wants. She's rarely wanted to, but at the least, she's spent a vacation day  within one with a friend and that friend's family.

She keeps her hand to the white rock wall beside her now, and thinks—though it's white, it isn't limestone,  is it? She thinks about what she knows of geology. She doesn't know much. What are the categories again?  Porous, sedimentary, metamorphic...

For her, school has been valuable outside of its classrooms, not during any lectures or labs. Sports are fun.  Playing instruments is fun. Rocks are not.


Still, though, she can't deny the fascination brought by an alien landscape. She mutters, "No wonder I'm  thinking of rock class..."

While moving down she comes to notice glass disappearing into the wall out ahead of her—as if it's phasing  through, or there's a corner, or—

"A cave...!" she exclaims as soon as she comes up to it. She enters just as quickly.

Nothing cooler than a cave, she thinks.

She runs through heedlessly, thrilled. The glass seems to guide her, bouncing with her steps, flying faster  and faster the further she goes...

She goes to the end—to a great and wide atrium. To a place she's not sure could even conceivably fit within  the cliff she'd been standing on just minutes ago.

And there, she finds another miracle.

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Could you "think" a world into being?

There are circles of thought that equate perception with reality. If you know what you are, then that is what you are. If you dream of being a butterfly, do you become a butterfly? Or, of course, are you simply a butterfly that's dreaming of being human? Regardless...

What you know encompasses your world, so fragments of what you know are pieces that comprise reality— a world. You carry your world in your mind. If those thoughts and feelings and days gone could be made physical, could you link them together and create something new?

All of this comes to mind as she witnesses what seems to be just that. An archive—a record...


The inside of the earth has spread out into a secret library that is far too big. To even call it something as simple as a "library" does it no justice.

As the girl walks deep into the earth, it's as if she's come across Heaven's gates, and those gates have opened unprompted. Light and glass fly out before her in a spiraling, crystal pathway leading to the hollow core of the mountain, and from there glass arranges itself.

She finds herself in an ever-sorting, ever gathering home of almost infinite "ideas".

From behind her, new ideas set into glass drift in. Above her, light from glass illuminates the gargantuan space. When she steps forward, she finds that her eyes have tricked her; the path lit below is not glass, but an impossible and white cobblestone way. The inside of this mountain has been fused with a mishmash of man-made architecture.

At once she knows that this place both was and wasn't meant to be.


The dazzling world around her is inviting, and as she steps down new stone ways and past spiral staircases, shelves, and sideways towers, shards of Arcaea come down to her, following at her shoulders.

The light from those glass shards warms her skin. She stops beside an inner wall, brings her hands before her chest, and breathes as she looks above herself.

"...Wow."

She exhales that word, out from her heart. And after—

"I think I love this place..."


A single piece of glass comes down from the flowering walls of shards. It comes to rest above and between her palms.

In its reflection is a world of waves and water.

She gulps.

She wants to go there.

And this world—this dreamlike place that is no dream—will grant that wish.

As her wants resonate with glass... as she accepts the encroaching world...

...the world of Arcaea also accepts her.

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A dream within a dream? No, not quite. This—

Before her thoughts can complete, orange waters quickly surround her. It's twilight—sunset. She dives in backward and beneath a hundred waves. She is submerged, and surprised, but surprised all the more that through some means she is able to breathe.

Her head fills with thoughts, and though it feels natural, it is not. These thoughts are not hers. Someone else had dove here. Someone else had experienced this.

And so lucky they had been.


The cool water, the warmth of an undercurrent—the gentle churning all around her; she can't
suppress her laughter.

"Where is this?" she asks aloud. Her voice carries clear through liquid, and she remembers: she
is not alone, here.

Nami turns her head as dozens of colorful fish begin to converge and swim around her. To her left is someone "she" knows: a young child, easily making her way here. The child reaches out, and of course she takes that hand.

It feels right—all of this.

Not facing the sea floor, the two girls look instead up toward the sun. Its rays scatter through
the waves above, spreading light brilliantly into countless beautiful fragments. The child beside
her squeezes her hand and she squeezes it right back. The colors of sea life—the prism rays of the sun—the warmth—this heaven here...

...is a memory.


It is an odd realization. Comfortable, but so strange...

Yet the girl experiencing it puts that all aside, holding the other girl's hand more tightly... until the sun fully falls. Until stars begin to dabble the darkening sky, shifted by the sea...

This comfort is simply impossible to deny.

It is a memory. That world "before"... was a world full of memories.

When the memory ends, she won't wake up; she will instead return to that world.

But that is fine...

There were so many other lives there, waiting to be seen.

Her smile is bright—brighter than the sun.

And her heart, too, is light...

This is satisfaction. This is paradise. And yes...

She could live here forever.