The hues of spring and summer faded into a monochrome darker than winter could have ever brought. Anhedonia, the statue in the garden, still held out a heart. Blood thick as molasses dripped slowly through the porcelain fingers. As the final color within sight, the scarlet of blood, turned black and splattered grey, her bleak transformation was complete. It all meant nothing.

The shadows were her friends. Her only friends. Her only enemies. Even without much light, they crept through the room, mocking her, twisting themselves around her, pouring through her mouth and eyes as she sat still and hunched on the grimy tile. She lived in an eerie, quiet, empty room, as empty as herself. But Avolition was not nothing. She was even worse - a pathetic, pitiable, mournful creature, overwhelmed by creeping dark. There may have been sunlight streaming through the small window at one point, but if it was still there, the glass was so thickly coated with dust and cockroaches that it was impossible to tell. Her sisters were out in the maze, creating and witnessing wonders and horrors past imagination. But for Avolition, no amount of desire could give her the momentum to regain strength and shake the thick rusting and heavy shackles that bound her weak limbs to the walls.

Catatonia had awakened a little earlier than the rest of her sisters had. Time passed in an indistinguishable wave. There was a deep foreboding within her, as she shifted, the movement impossibly uncomfortable, feeling the cold ground hard on her spine. Something was to come. Her eyes would not close as she watched rotten bones grow from the dirt in once-beautiful gardens, and the skies rain acid from clouds of sulphur.

She hovered above the ground, gliding through the shifting and pulsating maze, rising above them all, the only one who saw the truth, who saw reality for what it was from her platform. The maze continuously birthed deformed and diseased creatures, each with milky white clouded eyes and misshapen heads. They crawled slowly but voraciously ripped apart any other beings they encountered. They attacked each other and everything in their wake–arachnid limbs were scattered along the corridors and blood-tinged slime dripped from the walls.

It was hard to tell where her body was in the maze. She could see through the monstrous eyes on the walls as if they were hers and wave rotting hands and feel rats gnawing the bones exposed through jaundiced skin. The screams echoed around her. Over and over again, calling for help, screaming her name. Or was she hearing her own screams just trying to make herself snap out of traumatizing reality, before she grew indifferent to the shifting horrors that held her locked brain hostage? But it was never her desire to go back into the grey static of blank hazy sludge between her ears.

Like waves to the ocean, her power came washing over her—she grew stronger and stronger. From a small hypothetical of the mind into a whole, actualized being. She was no longer a fleeting thought, no longer just a symptom.

She held a hand up in front of her face, her palm and fingers cupping a glowing indigo orb, vibrant and swirling with starlight.

Blink.

Now no orb. An empty hand.

Blink.

Now a small bird sat in her palm. It had two eyes, then three, then four, then rows and rows of snarling and pointed teeth as it’s beak opened wider and wider and wider and-

She shut her eyes, before it could peck them out.

Open them.

She looked at where her hand had been, replaced by a giant, pointed, rotten tooth.

Blink, and it returned to her usual hand, but in rose marble. It pinkened to the color of flesh, as if an apple ripening in fast-forward, then browned, and then it was her own bronzed skin again.

She, Hallucination, was God of this realm.