For the first time in sweeps, Nyrita is home again. It feels like another person who first sat here at this desk, placed the discs in the computer, and damned Alternia to hell. It certainly was a completely different person who built this hive in the first place. Someone with a bloodline. Someone with a color. Someone with a future. Nyrita was glad Hassab was her server player. She could remodel obediently, not comment even a little, and keep a secret better than anyone else. The scars of old violence became monochrome reflections of the hemoanonimity she had embraced. And the walls went up and up and up, a hive on Alternia becoming a spire in a fantastical land. The land had changed, too. The Land of Smoke and Runes was gone, devoured almost completely by Nyrita during her ritual. The land that stretched out from the window is the Land of Smoke and Ruin. Great, gaping holes are more present than solid ground, bare scraps and edges of the grand runes carved into the land itself. The great pillars of smoke that rose from pits are just bare sputters from vast canyons. There are no more consorts. There are no more underlings. Everything important about the land is woven into Nyrita’s soul. Above her sits what was once Skaia. The Frog had eaten it, born and grown as a normal one. But it had been sick. Tainted. Manipulated by Yamrtu Tarrus, the Muse of Doom, to a paradox sickness, the puncture wound that would have torn all of existence into nothing. Such a thing could not have been allowed to exist. So they had killed it. Its great rotting corpse now takes the place of the battlefield. Putrescent flesh sloughs off of exposed bones, pus and rotten guts fading into dust and nebulae and great, vast swathes of shadow. A dead universe doesn’t smell, at least. Small mercies. But Nyrita isn’t here to sit on the roof and look up and think about the past. Her future starts here. She takes out the disc, and her hand only trembles a little as she puts it in. She fights the urge to smash her computer as it slides into place. She knows how useless that would be. A familiar bootup procedure, and the screen shows herself, hunched over the keyboard. She’s her own server player. That’ll be straightforward, at least. Down goes the equipment. She stands up and goes to the cruxtruder. She floats up above it, gathers herself, and slams down on the lid. Pop. Out comes the kernelsprite. And immediately she can see the difference. Flickering lights and swirling spirographs, certainly. A silver color, just as she remembers it. But the whole thing pulses, beats like a heart. And then she can feel the pull. The distant tendrils crane towards it like gravity, the dust rises up and is absorbed, her chair is gone, and - Her soul is ripped from her chest. Slides out without any resistance. And fear fills her, a bone deep terror she hasn’t felt in a long, long while. She lunges for it, pink and silver and dark gray, exuding smoke, every millimeter of its patterns and movements memorized. But she’s too slow. Her soul enters the sprite and is gone. She can only stare in horror as the sprite grows, and grows, and grows, and devours the incipisphere.