Sonder stumbled.
It was only a single step.
Her boot caught on something that should not have been there.
She looked down.
Stone.
Broken stone.
She lifted her gaze.
Ruins stretched across the landscape before her. She had stumbled over a part of a broken wall in front of her.
She blinked and then they were gone.
The wall was replaced with a gentle hill covered in green grass and wildflowers that swayed softly beneath a warm breeze.
There was no sign that anything had ever stood there.
Birds sang and the sun shone.
It was peaceful.
But when she blinked again, that peace vanished.
The grass withered into gray dust; the warm breeze became cold and still.
There were broken towers that clawed toward the sky like skeletal fingers.
There was no life there. Nothing lived and nothing moved.
This place was abandoned by even the most hardy of creatures.
It seemed like it had been forgotten long ago, like it had always been dead.
She stood motionless.
The world shifted once more.
Green fields.
Then ruins.
Then fields again.
Neither vision lingered for more than a heartbeat.
Sonder closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, both landscapes seemed to exist at once.
The flowers grew through shattered stone.
Sunlight rested upon dead earth.
The wind carried both birdsong and silence.
She could not tell which one was real.
Perhaps both were.
Perhaps neither.
For a fleeting moment, she wondered whether this was simply another symptom of the veil clouding her thoughts.
Yet, there was something familiar about this place.
Like she could remember how it existed in two different ways, but couldn't remember which memory was the real one.
A faint ache settled deep within her chest.
She couldn't recognize it by sight alone but by feeling.
She couldn't name it.
A pull kept her going. A shard was here.
Without another thought, she stepped from the road and began walking toward the ruins, or toward the meadow.
She stepped between broken columns, or perhaps between old trees.
She passed the remains of what might once have been a fountain.
For an instant, clear water flowed through it.
The shard was close now.
So close that the nine fragments already embedded within the wood seemed almost eager.
And with every step forward, the land became clearer.
She walked in silence.
The staff guided her more than she guided it.
Every few steps the world shifted again.
There was no resisting the changing visions.
Sonder had to need to regard or disregard them. She simply walked through them.
Suddenly she stopped, and she knew where she was.
She knew both worlds.
She was in a throne room.
The throne room of the palace of Irath.
The broken walls around her straightened for the briefest instant. Then everything faded again.
Everything rotted away, and windows shattered.
The throne dissolved into weathered stone.
Only its empty place remained.
And there, resting upon the floor where the throne had once stood, lay a single fragment of dark glass.
The final shard.
It was strangely unremarkable. Nothing came from it. The pull had seemingly vanished altogether.
It simply waited.
As though it had always known someone would eventually return.
Sonder approached slowly.
The nine shards within her staff waited for its return to be whole again.
She knelt.
For a long moment she simply looked at the fragment. She reached down.
Her fingers closed around the cool surface.
The instant she lifted it from the stone, something changed.
Not in the shard, in the land.
The dead silence broke first.
A breeze swept through the throne room.
Gentle.
Warm.
The grey dust scattered into the air like forgotten ash.
Cracks in the stone filled with green.
Wildflowers pushed through the floor.
The terrible weight that had lingered over the ruins dissolved like morning mist.
The two landscapes no longer struggled against one another.
The dead kingdom released its grip upon the living one.
The meadow remained.
The palace became what it had always been meant to become.
The past, not a wound.
There was a sadness, there would always be, but the terrible darkness that had haunted this place had come to an end and would go with Sonder instead.