It was quite cold wherever she was. Cira wasn't sure if the surroundings were actually chilled or if it was just her mind playing tricks on her. It did not matter now. The torture had stopped.

She could not recall any of the past events in her life. Everything seemed to flow together in some sort of altered time frame, not past, present, or future. Events she once knew seemed to be something that could never have been. Cira was perplexed about existance.

She dared not move her limbs again. Fear of shattering pain shooting up her spine held her back from such a deadly mistake. Blood still trickled down her forehead from her last attempt to move.

It almost was if Cira had wings of her own. She was floating, unable to feel sturdy ground to stand. Centuries seemed to pass by since she entered this frozen tomb. She wondered if she was dead every so often, wondering if this is what the Underworld was really like. She didn't know why she would pass to the Underworld-- she just felt she belonged there.

Her body felt stripped. The horrible sensation of what was done to her still lingered in the back of her mind, the pain was inescapable. It felt almost as if her soul was torn from her body and shattered like delicate glass. Shimmering bits of light in the darkness were the left over shards.

Cira's world was so quiet. So still. If, that is, it was a world at all. If this wasn't the empty shell life fled from so long ago. The void seemed to be so lonely, so unsure of itself. Almost as if it could collapse in from uncertainty. But, Cira knew worlds did not have unsure moments.

Unknowingly, Cira closed her eyes on the ebony world.

She opened them to find herself in a different realm.

Cira first saw the barren floor. Dead plants wilted in the gray soil, somber colors flowing through the shriveled leaves. Dim flames crawled from here to there on fallen tree limbs that were bare and stripped of their life. Water, even a minute droplet, could not be found. The world was a barren dessert.

Gray blanketed the sky-- clouds colored even darker scrambled across the air in haste to escape the awful realm. Reddened lightning struck down onto the bare earth and retreated back to the skies. Even the electric bolts seemed to be saddened.

Cira could only detect smoke in the air. Small clouds of it puffed up from the bare earth through cracks where liquid fire flowed in a path of destruction. A crimson reflection echoed up onto the surface through the chasms.

As Cira unknowingly cried at the sight, her tears sizzled off her face immediately, leaving grains of salt left on her singed cheeks.

A scorching wind whispered in her ear, "This is the world you will leave behind should you not tolerate the torture."

Down her face ran tears of darkened blood, hot from the hatred inside.

"And you shall continue to cry your crimson tears should we survive."

With that, the voice and the wind dissipated leaving Cira alone again in the world of the wrong. All she wanted to do was leave this horrid place between the worlds of life and death and be free again.

As her eyes closed, the pain shot up her spine once more.

Help me.

***

As if the flow of time was sped up just to get to this moment, Li, Trenton, and Xander were standing face to face with the haunting woman. Li's crystal, green eyes stared into the unnatural ones of the wiry haired, ash faced female who seemed so intent on letting this moment come. Li knew those eyes.

His words came in a soft whisper, and Li would have doubted their existance had the woman not raised her head just slightly enough for Li to know she was attentive.

"Decymber."

The woman's hair bobbed in the wind that somehow came to life once more as she nodded, "Li."

His name was almost a signal to the world to stop for one split second so that the two siblings could embrace each other for comfort. Li cried holding his sister in his arms, thanking Ribatus that she lived through whatever evil swept through their home. Decymber just stood there, unable to reciprocate the embrace and unable to express the tears.

"Oh spirits, Decymber. What happened? What happened to Aryne?"

Decymber only shook her head and motioned the three deep into the city of the dead.

The streets that had once been wide enough to fit three trading carts abreast were now only able to allow one person through at a time. Decymber headed the line of people, followed closely by the anxious Trenton, then Xander, then Li. His delay to look at the city from the outside left him last.

Bodies where everywhere. Overturned carts filled with trading goods, and the people trading them, were left to rot on the cobbled streets. Some of those who were lying in the rubble had the skin stripped off their bones, like a horrible personification of death had come and peeled it away like a ripened banana. Clouds of flies covered any opened wounds. If the evil had not killed these people, the flies would have.

The world hadn't stopped moving until the fatal winds had picked up.

But even as the world had stopped its turns, the four walking bodies moved on. They were the only ones though.

Trenton had trouble breathing in such a place. The air seemed to have already buried the dead, becoming almost unbearably heavy and a considerable shade of black. He wondered if the wind would bother to wipe away their footprints in the dust that they had unsettled as they walked. He wondered if it was worth it.

Xander just wondered.

When the group had walked a considerable amount through the narrow "streets" of the city, Decymber came to a quick halt. It was without warning, and almost as if she had been shocked. Almost.

Li managed to wiggle around the two other men to make it up to the shoulder of his sister, "Decymber, what is this?

The sight was nothing but ashes, barely even recognizable as ashes. The color seemed to blend in perfectly with the darkened sky, and it almost looked as if the pile of rubble wasn't even there at all. The destroyed buildings and towers around it seemed to be just placed in the view without thought. Nothing seemed to really fit together. Images jutted out of the landscape screaming that they didn't belong. They were right, they didn't.

Li placed a placid hand on Decymber's shoulder, "Decymber, what is this?"

The woman only pointed to a white marble tower that had been cracked through every inch. There seemed to be a force outside him that pulled Li into it, but there was a force within him that pulled him back. Despite the cracked façade, Li detected a slight familiarity from the spire.

Trenton knew immediately what Decymber had pointed out, and in hopes of it not being true, ran towards the leveled remains, searching for something that wasn't really there. Kneeling down in some of the marble chips that had been blown away, Trenton picked up a small, silver bowl that belonged to a previous fountain. A little more searching revealed the tarnished face of the faerie that used to belong to it. His questioning eyes stared at the wizard and the prophet.

As the painful realization washed over him, Li ran to the tower, hoping that the true was false and the possible impossible. His hopes were crushed with the silver fountain and moonlit gardens that used to exist. They were now existing only through memory.

Decymber and Xander trotted off behind the distressed wizard, leaving Trenton behind in the rubble. He couldn't believe that suddenly his life as a soldier had fallen with the Palace of Aryne.

***

When they entered the surviving spire, Li could hardly believe his eyes. Decymber only stood watching Li's reaction, as she so commonly did under any circumstance, while Xander stared in an ignorant pool of confusion. He'd never seen this place before, and he never would.

In the center of the room, the only thing that remained standing, was a column. Around it, the chamber had been singed beyond recognition, and the white marble walls were blackened with soot. They gave the appearance of an endless night. Hypnotized by the confusion the walls held upon them, Xander merely stared in awe. Had the walls on the outside not been a dulled gray, the soldier probably would have never known that the tower's interior was ivory at all.

The column seemed to stand out like a beacon. It's black marble, though just as dark as the walls, seemed to have a luster that no other stone could possess. The fact that made it clearly visible however, was the reddened stone that sat upon it.

Swirling in a vile cyclone, matter that could only, but not fittingly, be described as clouds of darkness washed through the translucent red of the stone. The "clouds" moved in such a way that reminded Li of dreams he had once had of the spirits in the Underworld. The stone seemed to be breathing in the life around it, and the "clouds" moved in rhythm with each exhaled breath.

The translucent, scarlet coloring reminded them all of one thing. Blood.

The shape of the stone and its ultimate smoothness reminded them of one thing. Tears.

Decymber's gloomy voice shattered the shocked silence, confirming what Li had already feared.

"The Stone of Crimson Tears has been opened."

***

Outwardly, Cira stirred.

Inwardly, she screamed.

That was when, unexpectedly, the pain had stopped. One breath had saved her from ripping in half. Once again, however, she was back in her darkened tomb, void of anything that even had a life to begin with.

This time her body felt as if a weight had been pulled off it. Almost as if her body was just about to wake up from a deep sleep, but her mind didn't know it yet. She felt a tingle in her toes, almost as if it wasn't she who felt the slight tickle, but rather, she was watching someone else's foot tremor slightly with the odd sensation. Deep in her mind, Cira hoped that it was not the pain's manifestation back into her soul, but she dared not pray to Ribatus that it wasn't. She remembered the last time.

For some reason, she felt… at peace for a minute. There was a well of strength that had somehow surfaced within her for a period of time, just before the pain had come to a halt. But, that feeling had diminished with the pain as well, and although she wished that the sensation would return, she did not want to experience the shattering hurt that might come along with it.

While her thoughts remained intangible, the universe where she was living seemed to crumble in on itself. Cira was still unaware of the currents that might just crumble on her as well, until the air beneath her floating body seemed to scurry away, leaving nothing in its place. Cira felt as if the world was falling away from under her, and in truth, it was.

The darkness absorbed her chalky flesh in a quick sweep, but at least the pain did not return.

***

From the shelter of his arms, Xander felt Cira's unconscious body stir on their way out of the crumbling tower. Li said he wanted to get out of the marble room immediately, that its evil was radiating throughout the city. Xander didn't understand why Li thought the stone was vile-- he merely followed orders, taking a quick glance back towards the reddened orb.

As the group made their way out into the once beautiful courtyard, the moon had already risen over the rotting walls that had protected the city from outside invaders. It didn't protect Aryne from invaders within.

The milky moonlight now fell on fallen rubble instead of the once gorgeous courtyard that had grown there before. Trenton, still in a state of shock, was holding the silver faerie's face in his hands. He was staring into its eyes as if asking for an answer it could not give.

From the corner of her eye, Decymber noticed color in the rubble. Gently snatching Li's white, dusty robes, she came to a halt once more, only this time, more gradually as if trying to determine if what she was seeing was real. Li followed her lead.

Emerging from the piles of marble and stone was a white rose, growing right before them and wrapping its thorny limbs around fallen debris. The bloom matched the unsurpassed purity of the moonlight that was cast down upon it. Hope bubbled inside of the siblings.

When Xander finally set his eyes upon the ghostly rose, the petals quickly dried away and shriveled up into a blackened collection, dark enough to belong to the endless night within the Stone of Crimson Tears. The rose's life had fled almost as if it was scared of the gaze Xander had set upon it.

As an ebony petal fell from the rest of the bloom and became suspended in the wind for a moment, Li wondered if maybe the rose was scared by the gaze from within Cira's closed eyes.