Aren’t All Lies Truthless?

  Yana stepped out of the dimensional door onto a ledge of lightning glass. The ledge was dense and had tendrils of glass reaching out as if it had been water frozen in time. She looked around her and felt the wrongness. It was like she was no longer tethered to reality, as if she walked in someone else’s dream and they were trying to rewrite her existence.

  She was in an illusion. She narrowed her eyes and looked around carefully, her illusion magics igniting within her and turning her eyes into swirling orbs of darkness. There was a noise of shattering glass in her ears, but nothing changed before her eyes. Her frown deepened. She was in an illusion based in truth? She had to find the lie.

  As the thought washed over her, the tower swayed and, instead of coming out of the illusion, Yana went deeper into it. The glass swayed and shattered only to reform around her again. Her mind buckled with the weight of the sight as she began to become lost within the regenerative cycles of the tower.

  “Mistress!”

  A voice broke through her mental fog and heat scorched her right cheek.

  “Mistress! Open a door now! Move to another side! Look! Look!”

  The voice was clear now. How long had Mag been calling to her? Where was she? The tower—what tower? Yana’s mind was fuzzy, but she increased the outflow of her illusion magics on instinct. Her brain began to clear, and with that, her vision cleared as well.

  Mag had finished her evolution only a little while ago, and this was Yana’s first time seeing her. Her blue flames were now a light, vibrant purple, and her once-white core was a dazzling vermillion. Her flames seemed capable of burning shadow and darkness. Yana’s face began to heal as Mag relaxed her flame. The shadow spark had also grown; she was not a full-fledged flame yet, but she had moved past the ember stage. The being encased within the flame seemed to be more a piece of coal than a smoldering leftover.

  “Don’t stay here, Mistress. The glass is not good. Starlight says it is too pure. You cannot find the lie in this purity, and she cannot come out to help you because her light will intensify that purity.”

  Yana nodded and reached into her soul sea, opening the lines of communication between her and her pets further. It seemed the illusion had cut them off and isolated her. She pushed her illusion magics to their limit and looked to the layers. The swirling darkness in her eyes intensified and the world around her changed.

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  The purity of the glass became blinding light, and she saw the same as she looked into the side of water. The side of darkness seemed to have solidified into an impenetrable wall, and the side of sand beckoned ominously. Yana rolled her eyes and opened a dimensional door to the side of sand—Mag quickly re-entering her soul sea.

  As soon as she stepped through the door, the sands around her stopped flowing. Sheets of sand hung before her like thin curtains across windows. She brushed past the first sheet and a scene opened before her.

  It was a tower in the center of a deep valley. She frowned as her swirling black eyes recognized the Truthless Lie Tower at once, but this version was three sides of complete darkness. Within the darkness were four kernels of truth, cast out to be lost and forgotten but fighting to be remembered. These four kernels of truth were only allowed to exist in the most central part of the tower, thick darkness eternally born around them and flooding out into the outer reaches of the tower. Suddenly, water, ice, and dense waves of thunder hit the tower as one.

  The Winter Soul was born, and it was a sinister, sentient object that wanted cold, malice, and hate to fill all of existence. This spread throughout the tower, and the darkness worked to fight against it. As the eons passed, the tower weakened and the Winter Soul strengthened. One day, Yana came and spoke to the Winter Soul and struck a deal.

  Before she could understand more, the sound of glass shattering rang in her ears and the sands began to pour around her. She had broken a layer of the illusion.

  Sand poured all around her but avoided falling on her directly. She was breathing hard, and she realized that she had truly struggled through that bit of the illusion. Suddenly, the sands stopped once more, and she cursed. She hadn’t worked out the first kernel of truth yet. Was it the Winter Soul, or was that just thrown in because she was here for it? She couldn’t remember how she obtained the item, so she could not confirm the tale.

  Was it just the knowledge of the three kernels of truth? Were there even three kernels of truth, or was the tower playing on its three sides to create a lie? She sighed and brushed the new curtain of sand from before her and stepped forward. She had rationalized that the first illusion shattered because she had understood the truth within it. But the issue was that she had not realized it—her illusion magics did, and at level 3, it was not high enough for her to discern from it well.

  She stepped through and looked at the scene with her swirling eyes of darkness, and the scene before her shattered instantly. Yana frowned and realization washed over her. Her illusion magic had leveled up, but her connection was broken inside the tower—or she hadn’t learned how to use it fully—and there was a disconnect. She cursed, and the sands again began to flow around her, the sound of shattering glass fading from her ears.

  She suddenly had a sense of foreboding. The sands shifted, and she was sucked down into them as if she had been standing in the center of an hourglass the entire time.