Two young girls explore a shattered world, filled with sound: a past to be uncovered...
Each awakens in this blank, ruin-dotted world to discover that she is equally blank, remembering nothing of what came before.
And then they make a second discove...
To many of those come to Arcaea, the world once white also appeared as a world of endless day. But, in time, night fell. A border between day and night formed. On the darkened side of the border, two new lives drifted down to the earth like fallen stars. She was the second, and in her very form she showed herself to be a mirror to the first.
A dark and purple-dotted sky, a cloudless firmament, a night with no moons...
Maya woke to all this through a blurred view. Her eyes were full of tears. When she could think, when she could feel, she became overwhelmed by grief and she sobbed into her hands.
When one comes to this world of glass, they are made anew— given "nothing" as a blessing, as a kindness.
But this place, found after the end, is broken— in ways it tries to be perfect, but it is a broken place to its core.
She actually welcomed the dark, and felt at ease within silence.
Whenever a rare ray bounced from the glass fragments surrounding her, instead it seemed to her like sudden intense light in horrible colors had bombarded her vision. If a nearby ruin creaked or fell apart, the resulting sounds seemed more like a cacophony of wretched noise accosting her ears: lighter scraping, and the heavier, guttural, almost primordial groans from the earth; with a noise all throughout like high-pitched wind, rising and rising—
If anything broke the shadow and quietness of the night, memory would accost her. And while she did not belong here, she was nonetheless pitied.
This unusual girl with two-toned hair and eyes— This strange girl who would often sleep, yet still cry—
Arcaea pitied her. Unfortunately, she quickly grew to fear its glass.
Shards met with her often enough under the open sky that—although she liked the calm and stillness of the endless night—she began to seek shelter. Maya rested within the fractured shells of buildings, and made herself familiar with any cave in this world she might find. Glass was always there too, yes, but without a clear view of the sky it reflected very little. And besides...she could not—and would not—peer within. She would travel through mountains, only seeking peace. She would step through pitch-dark tunnels following forgotten roads.
Until she stepped out of a shadowed hall one day, and her eyes caught sight of the daylight border, so very near.
Those sounds she heard were screams. Those sights she saw were the cause. Bright light fell from the sky in violent pillars, tearing at the earth. Her home became ravaged in what she'd hoped would be seconds, but instead it had been a nightmare of hours. Agonizing, she had—she had...
She knew people on the other side of the earth, and heard they were dead. She froze under commands from soon-lost voices. An entire connection she shared with an entire world was lost over a slow, thorough, and merciless course. And, with it all gone, she had woken up here—alone in Arcaea.
And the horizon before her now was like sunset, or—it was like a world on fire.
Maya crumpled alone at a tunnel's exit, hearing and seeing things that weren't there. She shivered and cried, feeling as if a spike was driving through her heart. Through horrid pain, nausea too began to plague her. Horror after horror, all of it impossible to bear, and one thought worse than all others weighed on her mind like an anchor. One truth that seemed ready to almost kill her:
"I am still here."
And her pain, and her heartache, it all cried out beyond her voice. Arcaea would hear all of it.
