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The desert stretched on and on, from horizon to horizon. Had the young Tharja ever seen the ocean, she would have likened it to that- a vast sea of sand, broken only by the occasional rocky outcropping or soaring dune. But Tharja had never been to the sea. Indeed, she had ever been anywhere but the desert. Although she was just a little girl, she felt that she could see the entirety of the world… or if there was anything beyond her line of sight, it was doubtlessly the same as the desert she stood in. The sand underfoot was not especially hot or coarse, it simply was. The air was not particularly dry or arid, it simply was. She did not consider her life to be especially difficult, for she had nothing else to compare it to. When one's hold world is made of sand, the sand itself becomes entirely unremarkable.
However, there was one feeling that she could sense, and which presently defined her life- hunger. Perhaps if she had never eaten, she would never know the pain of an empty stomach. But, alas, she had once eaten her fill, and done so regularly over the course of her 8 years of life. When her family was in regular contact with tradesmen and travelers, they certainly had enough food to get by. But those ties seemed to have vanished in recent months. Instead, her family survived only off what they could find- if they could find anything.
How long had it been since she had last had some substantial meat? Days? Weeks? Years? Time itself had long since become impossible to keep track of. When the only change from day to day was how much emptier her stomach was than the day before, those days blurred together into one long painful hunger.
It doesn’t matter… none of this matters…
That lone thought pounded through Tharja’s hunger-pains. That cold nihilism filled her mind as easily as the hot air filled her lungs. As she wandered aimlessly through the sand, she could not focus on anything, nor form any tangible thought- only wallow in a despair as dark as the sun’s light was harsh.
That dreadful monotony was broken by a dull pain. She had stumbled and fallen, landing face first into the sand. For several moments, she simply lay there, unable to find the motivation nor the energy to pick herself up. She laid there, eyes closed, breath slow and belabored. She did not know how long she stayed prone, and had she been able to, she may have stayed that way for the rest of her life, however cruelly long or mercifully short that might be.
“Tharja?”
Something stirred her. A noise… no, not just a noise… a voice.
“Tharja? Tharja! Is that you?”
Tharja knew that voice, didn’t she? Her mind was still foggy, still unable to process what was going on. Even so, she knew she ought to respond. The voice was coming from behind her. With great effort, she pushed off the sand with both hands, slipping slightly. She settled for laying on her side and turning back towards the voice.
Mother.
Indeed, Tharja’s mother was running- running to her. The brutality of the desert had taken its toll on Tharja’s mother. Her long black hair, once carefully combed and treated, now clung to her skin tangled into knots and mats. Her eyes, once a vibrant and bright green, now looked sunken and hollow, punctuated by severely irritated blood vessels. The beauty of her full and smiling face had long since been replaced by the melancholy of anxiety and starvation.
Lacking the strength to even call out to her, much less pull herself up, Tharja reached out a trembling hand towards her mother. Finally, she had found some small sliver of hope to hold on to.
It will be okay… mother is here… it will be okay.
She could picture it now. Her mother would come to her side, pick her up, and hold her close. She’d take Tharja somewhere cool, somewhere safe. Maybe there would even be a dried meat or a crust of bread… But even if not, she would be safe, she’d be home.
What little strength she had left failing her, Tharja’s hand fell to the sand with a soft thud. Still, she kept her eyes fixed on her mother, now only a dozen yards away. Tharja wished she were closer, wished she was faster, wished… for so much that to name all her wishes would take more energy than she could afford to spare. Her vision of her mother blurred as tears began to pool up in her eyes, overflowing and trailing down her young face. The teardrops fell to the ground, shinning in the sun’s light, quickly evaporating on the burning hot sand. Tharja wiped her eyes slowly and looked back towards her mother.
But her mother was not there.
In her place, only a few faint purple embers blew in the wind. A moment later, even those embers disappeared.
“Mother?” She called out once in a trembling confused voice. Then again, fear taking hold, she cried out in a high, unsteady scream, “Mother!?”
Panicked and fueled by the adrenaline coursing through her veins, Tharja stood up quickly, turning around wildly for any sight of her mother. But no matter where she looked, she only saw sand… sand stretching out till it met the empty blue sky.
“Mo-Mommy…”
Her eyes filled once again with tears… tears that streamed down her face and into her open mouth as she let out a long, desperate, pathetic cry. Her dehydration made those tears especially salty, and Tharja nearly gagged as she tasted them. Desperate to calm herself down and stop crying, the young girl bit her bottom lip and looked up to the sky.
And what she saw made her mouth open wide in shock just as her eyes grew wide in fear.
High above, where the dome of the sky reached ought to have reached its peak, there was instead a black circle. She could describe it as nothing other than blackness, blacker than any blackness Tharja had ever seen. At its edge, where the circle met the sky, there burned a ring of dark purple flame. The fire scotched the pale sky, leaving nothing but the pure blackness in its wake. As the young girl stared, the darkness only encompassed more and more of the heavens.
Unable to hold back any longer, tears once again escaped her eyes, and fell to the ground. As they fell, violet sparks shot off from the ring of flames and fell from above, instantly incinerating the ground where they landed. Those sparks created new rings of flames and disks of darkness, growing just as quickly as their progenitor.
This could have gone of for hours, or could have been over in moments, Tharja could no longer tell. But nothing could stop or slow the darkness, nothing could defend against it. It consumed sun and sky and sand as if they were all the same. And once it had, sun and sky and sand were all the same- all blackness. The world and everything in it, all she had ever known or pondered, hoped for or feared, loved or hated, was destroyed before Tharja’s eyes.
Invariably, her turn came.
The purple flames licked up around her but did not bring any pain. Instead, they brought only emptiness. In the instant they touched her, she could no longer feel herself. It was not as though her legs, which were the first to be taken over by the fire, had been severed from her body… no, it was as if her body never had legs to begin with. More than that even, it was as though the very concept of legs was foreign to her. How could she miss something she had never had? How could she mourn the loss of what never was?
As the flames licked up around her neck, she shook her head.
No! No! You must remember! You must remember Mother if nothing else!
But even as the thought crossed her mind, it too felt empty. Try as she might, she could not remember. She could not remember her mother’s face, her mother’s voice, her mother’s gentle care. She must have had a mother, mustn’t she? Yet despite racking her young mind, she could not recall. She could not call out to her- who would she even be calling for? She could not weep for her- who would she be weeping for?
And thus, the last moments of Tharja’s short-lived existence may well have been her most tranquil. There was nothing to concern her, nothing to fear. There was only blackness, a blackness that stretched on even further than the sand had… whatever the sand was. There was only the peace that came with perfect, unending, unbroken emptiness.
This peace lasted until only Tharja’s eyes remained unburned, grey lights the only thing left that broke up the darkness.
Or so they would be. For just as the flames licked around what little was left of her, Tharja saw six crimson lights shining through the eternal darkness. Two symmetrical rows of three red lights, growing larger and larger as if growing nearer. As the flames took up more and more of her vision, Tharja’s eyes strained to see what was lurking here in the dark.
And in her last moment, she saw it.
Beneath those lights… no… those eyes... sat an impossibly large dragon’s mouth, open wide, consuming all of creation.
An adult Tharja woke up in her cot. Despite her light bedwear, she was soaked through with cold sweat. This did not bother her… at least not nearly as much as the streaks left behind by her tears bothered her.
Getting out of bed and throwing on a cloak in one swift motion, Tharja stormed out of her tent. The cool night’s air only made her tired eyes sting more, but she would not be deterred. Without knowing where she was going or what she would do, Tharja walked. Her breathing, which she had not noticed till now was quick and shallow, became deeper and steadier as she felt the cool wetness of the grass under her feet. The moon above, though largely obscured by clouds, shown its gentle light on the field that stretched in front of her.
It’s real. This is real. You are here. You are real.
She on clung to these simple thoughts desperately. They grounded her just as much as the earth underfoot did. Even so, a fiery rage still burned in her chest, unable to be so easily extinguished. Had any of her fellow Shepherds been awake, none would dare have approached her for fear of the murderous intent that hung all about her. Indeed, not even Robin would be a welcome sight at this point. But for once, her anger was directed not towards her peers, but towards herself.
You promised yourself you would never cry again.
Never again.
Never…
A few moments later, that promise was broken yet again.