PHANTASIA by R. Atlas

all securely wrapped up in a mixture of flazb and other fungal substances. Some of the bodies were old, and had already lost their flesh, leaving only the skeleton of a corpse behind. Others looked fresh, recent even. He could feel the fear begin to pound in his chest — Raven’s stuck somewhere here . A few of the bodies even had academy uniforms on, and Red imagined that this was where most people ended up if they fell through one of the whirlpools on the surface like they had. What is this place ?  
    At the center of the canyon was a single blue crystal that hung weightlessly like the clouds around it. Its radiance was blinding, but magnetic — a dazzling light that pulled Red’s attention away from the rest of the room. Just as he was about to stare into it, to get lost in its radiance for only a moment or two, he heard S shout a warning.  
    “DON’T STARE AT THE CRYSTAL!”
    “What? Why not?” He was surprised at how disappointed his voice sounded. He didn’t realize how much he was tempted to do exactly that.  
    “I know what this is… I know what this place is supposed to be,” S replied hurriedly.  
    “That’s an ainmosni crystal.” Magnus said while gesturing to the center of the room.  
    “Yeah. That blue crystal in the middle, if you stare at it, it puts you into a trance-like deep sleep. Those things — the mushroom like things, I’ve heard of them, in a story about blood elves once. In their homeland in Karth, to ascend to their highest caste, certain members meditate in these caves with creatures that are supposed to make your nightmares come true. This must be a cave similar to the ones in the stories. Those toadstool things, they’re like parasites of your dreamscape. They feed on your imagination by circling you through your nightmares.”
    Red stared at her wide-eyed, imagining that he knew exactly which nightmare he’d be stuck in if he gazed into the crystal. The thought made it easy for him to avoid its light, no matter how tempting the aura. S fixed her microAI over her eyes, and then shifted the device to its vizor mode. Red heard a click as the gadget strapped around her head, and then watched as she scanned the entire room, zooming in and out of different regions. Eventually, she motioned towards the second spire on their left. It took them several hours to climb across the ceiling, careful as they were not to accidentally pull a rock loose and drop to the bottom of the chamber. When they were directly above their target spire, they let go of the ceiling and used an air resistance cast to land softly at the cusp of the tower. Red calculated that he’d make it halfway to the floor of the chamber, if he dropped straight down from the top of the spire, before he ran out of energy (a bearing that can cause death on its own). Every second of an air resistance cast drained exponentially more energy to match the increasing velocity of a fall. A few minutes after climbing down from the top, S motioned towards a fresh looking gap in the spire, one that looked like it had recently been disturbed. Red held his breath as she clawed out its inhabitant.  
    Raven had her eyes marginally open, with a passive but slightly disturbed expression glued to her face. Her pupils looked cloudy and lost, like she had accidentally wandered too far into a daydream. Red immediately shook her, intending to pull her out of her sleep, but she remained unconscious.  
    “You can’t wake somebody out of the sleep of an ainmosni crystal. The only way out is if they escape their own nightmares,” S said bleakly.  
    “What does that mean?” Butz asked.  
    “I’m not sure, I think it depends on the nightmare, and the person having it,” S replied. “There’s a story about a blood elf that feared the stars, and to overcome his nightmare, he had to fly into the center of our galaxy with his eyes open. He awoke only after an entire month, and they say the experience had left him mad - always ranting