"None of us do, but our faith must continue. It has kept peace within our kingdom. It must not be allowed to die."
They walked out of the temple and down the steps. Soon they were out of sight, while I had another piece added to the mystery puzzle involving the Time Master's disappearance. The people here knew nothing about it. One day, their Lord of Time had simply… disappeared.
Nightmare's blade glimmered red for a moment, reacting to the gemstone infusion. Its hum became audible, sending shivers down my spine. "We've got our next destination," he said.
I joined him and Dream as we walked out of the temple, space bending to our collective will. We jumped off the stone steps and through a massive wormhole made of blackness and wandering stars. Swirls of pink-and-yellow stardust flashed around us. Solar storms burst in bright explosions, until our feet touched ground again and another planet took shape from below.
As we breathed out, simultaneously, we found ourselves on a small but ravaged planet. Dream scoffed, shaking her head with sheer disgust. "We're in the Mirinin constellation," she said. "Still in the Earthly Dimension."
"Where's that?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter. No one would come here willingly," she replied.
No wonder, I thought, as I took in our surroundings. The planet was dead, nothing but red rocks and dust beneath a foggy crimson sky. Daylight barely breached through, and the wind blew with raging strength across the stone and sand.
City ruins poked out from beneath. A fractured tower here. A cracked dome there. Objects of civilization were scattered everywhere, with millions of bones between them, forgotten by everything and everyone. Nothing lived here anymore. Not even insects or animals of any kind. No trees or patches of water. It was empty. Defunct. Lifeless. And it broke my heart to think that innocent creatures had met their end here as a species.
"What happened here?" I asked, trying to cope with the ghost of an unprecedented disaster. The air was thick and smelly, making my nose crinkle. I caught traces of molten tar and acid fumes. Fortunately, I wasn't alive anymore to die all over again just from breathing it all in.
"Doom," Dream replied.
When my sideways glance made it clear that I needed more to go on, Nightmare stepped in. "An asteroid. It's the very last place where we saw several of our First Ten brothers and sisters, including Time and Spirit."
"There is no oxygen left here, is there?" I asked, realizing what it was about this place that made me feel so heavy on the inside. Since we didn't belong to the living anymore, we couldn't drown or suffocate or suffer from any kind of poison, but we retained our sense of smell, and we were able to identify whether air was breathable or not.
"There is nothing left here," Nightmare replied. "There's barely any gravity. All that you see here has been preserved for millions of years due to a combination of toxic fumes. Whatever that asteroid was carrying, it spread and took over this entire rock."
I looked at him. "And you two were here."
"Along with Spirit, Time, and Unending," Dream said. "We'd managed to reach out to one another. We were looking to organize a reunion of sorts. Back then, the people here were still alive, and one of them had been tracking the skies. He'd spent years warning the others that something awful was coming from the sky. Guess he was right."
Figures moved through the distant mist ahead. "I thought you said they all died."
"Of course, why?" Nightmare replied, then followed my gaze and frowned. "That's not right…"
Within seconds, we had already crossed several miles of barren desert. We reached what had once been an oasis, the water dried up and replaced with yellow dust. Broken foundations emerged from the red sand here and there, but that wasn't the most intriguing part. The figures we'd seen were not living creatures. They were spirits, and, judging by their pale and downtrodden appearance, they seemed to have been wandering around for ages.
"No one's reaped them," I said.
They moved in herds, dozens at a time, with no direction or purpose.
"He's here," Dream gasped. "I can feel him!"
"The Time Master?" I asked, nervously glancing around.
"Yes. He's here. He's definitely here," she replied.
Nightmare sighed, glancing down at his scythe. The blade glowed red, much like the gemstone he'd used to track the Time Master here. "It took us to the right place, then. But where is he?"
One of the ghosts looked right at me. He stilled, and I felt my heart skip a beat, before it contracted with what I could only describe as raw uneasiness. He could see me, and it didn't look as though he had friendly intentions. In fact, he seemed angry. We were trespassing.
"Why weren't these people reaped?" I asked, hoping Dream and Nightmare had a good answer. They didn't.
"I'm not sure," Dream said. "For a calamity of such proportions, there should've been hundreds of Reapers dispatched. Yet I see no trace of them. I can only feel Time, and he's in so much pain…"
I frowned. "What about your telepathic connection?"
"We've both been trying to reach him over the past couple of minutes," Nightmare replied. "He's not answering. Like I said, something is off here."
And it probably had the Spirit Bender's involvement written all over it. The spirits screamed—their pitches high and scratchy, like banshees from the depths of the most savage dreams. They ran toward us. Masses of abandoned spirits, snarling and clawing as they surrounded us.
"Hold on," Nightmare said. He stepped forward as the circle of spirits closed around us. Fear coursed through me, and I couldn't understand why. These were dead people. We were Reapers. What was there to worry about? "What happened to you?" he asked one of them.
The spirit wailed and slashed out. Her claws cut through Nightmare's tunic. He winced from pain. He’d gotten slightly hurt.
"Holy crap," I croaked. "How… How is that possible?!"
Drawing my scythe, I knew now that there was a fight coming. But I couldn't process how it had come to pass, in the first place. Spirits couldn't hurt us… so how had they managed to cut Nightmare?
"Oh, snap," he said, moving back to us. "Sis, we've got a problem."
"I see it now," Dream replied, worriedly glancing around as the spirits got closer, hungry for something that they didn't even know they wanted. These weren't mere ghosts. They could hurt Reapers, and they were supposed to have been so rare that their collective presence here boggled our minds. "These are specters."
"How can this be?" I whispered, breaking into a cold sweat. "We've yet to ascertain how specters are made, to begin with. I have never come across one myself, but I've heard stories from other Reapers."
"Ah. I should apologize on behalf of the First Ten, then," Dream replied. "We kind of made them."
"What?!"
