She stared at her reflection in the mirror, almond-shaped eyes of amber wide. Her black hair was shorn short, framing a slender face with angular features. Unblinking, she regarded her face, which seemed like the face of a stranger to her. Something wasn't quite right…
Her eyes drifted from her face to the oval mirror in which it was reflected. The edges of the mirror were rich with filigree, including delicate, curving runes. When her eyes reached the edges, she was surprised to find no wall, but an endless field of mists. She stepped back, blinking her eyes in surprise. The mirror was just hanging there in thin air. She was surrounded in rolling gray mists, so thick she couldn't see even the vaguest shape through them.
Turning away from the mirror, she began to walk through the mists, her hands outstretched before her. The mists condensed on her hands, leaving them with a wet feeling. Pulling her hands back to her, they felt like they belonged to someone else, disembodied and ghostly pale. Her heart hammered in her chest as she looked at her palms, damp not with condensed mist but crimson rivulets of blood.
Wiping her hands on the diaphanous white gown she was wearing, leaving smears of scarlet down the front. Fear seized her, and she began to run, heedless of direction. She sprinted through the mists, blind to where she was going. There was a dark presence behind her, something evil and shapeless, a formless horror seeking to devour her soul. She ran until she could run no longer, collapsing to ground, scratching her palms on the triangular tiles of the street…
Street? Triangular tiles?
She blinked and looked down, her brow creased. The roadway was paved with dove gray tiles, triangular in shape, linked together in geometric perfection. She ran her hands along the tiles, feeling a strange warmth. Wraithbone. Raising her head, she found herself in a city, but not of the megalithic and austere Imperial architecture. It was a city of tall, slender spires of bone white, with elegant arched bridges connecting the towers in a graceful latticework overhead.
I know this place… She thought. Ulthwë…Craftworld Ulthwë… But the closer she looked, the more she realized that all was not right. The towers were just off the plumb, leaning drunkenly. They weren't straight and evenly tapered as they should have been, but slightly twisted or curved, their diameters inconstant. The arches and bridges were gnarled or broken. Blood dripped down their bone-white walls, streaking them in garish crimson.
Looking down again, she saw the edges of the tiles were ragged and irregular. The color of the tile seemed to take on a pearlescent quality, shifting slightly in the corners of her vision. She peered intently into the tile, unable to tear her gaze from it. With growing horror, she recognized the shape of a face writing in agony. A face that seemed so familiar…
The bile rising in her throat, she scrambled to her feet, backing away with her heart thundering. A piercing pain between her eyes intensified to skull-splitting intensity. She backed through a door, tripping over the threshold. Vertigo overwhelmed her senses as she seemed to plummet down an impossibly deep chasm…
She hit the ground with bone-jarring force. Despite the intense pain, miraculously, she seemed to be unharmed. Rasing herself to a kneeling position, she looked around to find herself on the concrete floor of an Imperial building. The Gotho-Roman architecture was unmistakable with its columns, balustrades, and ubiquitous Imperial Eagle insignias. Hanging from the ceiling were hundreds of iron chains, festooned with spikes, hooks, and barbs. They creaked and clinked gently, swaying in hypnotic randomness.
The muffled sound of weeping drifted through the sea of chains, and she could not prevent herself from standing and making her way toward the sound. The hooks and barbs caught at her tender, pale skin, scratching shallow wounds in her. A curious determination overcame her, and she pushed forward, trying to "swim" through the chains. She cried out as deep lacerations were torn in her flesh, gritting her teeth against the pain. Every meter she moved came at a terrible price, and was more difficult than the meter before it. In a surprising expression of willpower, she fought on, unyielding.
