Chapter 4: The Trial of Dreams
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As Astrada strolled calmly into the abode of feathered foxes, the gates swung open. The foxes built large homes made of specialized wood from the world trees, which served as gateways. Large hanging roots featured massive treehouses to accommodate multiple feathered foxes in a single space.
While she continued to look around, Astrada could smell the sweet scent of incense hanging from treehouses and hear the wind chimes whistling quietly under the multicolored sky.
Her bare feet rested on the soft soil. She had noticed small, sparkling white dots of hollow energy floating in the air, seemingly true essence that continuously flowed outward into the sky.
Shortly after, she noticed many foxes walking along mystical stone pathways of different colors and patterns, alongside a mixture of adult & adolescent feathereds. They looked towards Astrada with hesitation and confusion because he was an outsider.
With Shoki still at Astrada's side, leading her through the home of her people.
One of the younger foxes walked up to Astrada, tapping her with one of its tails. The young fox smiled at the deity.
"Uh mmmmm… excuse me, big lady, but who are you? We foxes have rarely seen anything come into our home except a few, but we've never seen you before, and we usually don't get many visitors this far out." The young fox wagged its tail with a friendly but curious demeanor.
Astrada smiled, then waved her off.
"Don't worry, child, I will bring no harm to this home of yours, and in fact, I'm willing to understand the ways of your lifestyles to better serve & protect the universe."
The young fox's three tails curled slightly above its head, and it turned around, walking away calmer than before.
Sensing that the nomadic deity had no ill intentions, thanks to a feather fox's natural affinity for dream and emotion sensing, down to the spiritual level of one's own soul sanctuary.
Astrada turned back to look at Shoki, the female fox, now shifting into a more humanoid hybrid wolf-shift state, with alabaster skin and a deep magenta hue swirling in Shoki's eyes as she gazed onward.
She formed robes of pure white silk and deep purple, and above her head, a spiked, flowerlike crown of pure hollow energy, with both her ears perking upwards and multiple tails waving softly around her body.
Shoki then turns back to look at Astrada.
Snapping her fingers twice between the index and the palm, she instantly brings the nomadic deity into a deep, dreamlike state; countless layers of multicolored skies overlap, creating a scene straight from Astrada's inner soul and very own memories.
Before she realized it, Astrada was inside the inner Boundaries of her soul. She watched as countless versions of her walked past, doing different tasks of spell arts or traveling between different realms.
She wanted to reach out to one of them, but sadly, her hand passed through the spirit-figured bodies roaming the dream.
As she continued to walk through this inner dream, she saw many other people whom, along her travels, she had met; in bursts of different memories, she saw her first meeting with the seven visionaries, the first battles and meetings of both the weavers of balance and the calamities of destruction, and even as far as seeing an aged old doctor who wrote knowledge of his own.
However, after a moment of silence. All of the versions stopped, then turned slowly and looked back directly at the current Astrada. All of them formed into her boundless memories while the shapes of light began converging into a singular ball of gargantuan hollow energy.
Astrada navigated her endless storm of emotions and thoughts; around her body, she felt memories reshape and fuse back together, weaving into a fateful pattern of life & rebirth. Astrada felt her sense of self churn in the vast ocean that is the soul sanctuary she had produced by her own will, then pierced. Soon after, Astrada realized she was walking through an ocean of her innermost feelings while her trial was underway.
Shoki appeared to form an aspect specific to Astrada's trial of dreams, one that challenges thy mind and body simultaneously and continually.
Yet Astrada did not waver in her walk towards that blinding orb of light ahead of her.
Every fiber of her body was screaming for her to stop, and with each step she took, enormous waves of pain flooded her body continuously until she could no longer give.
***
Seven days later, Shoki has maintained the dream state she placed Astrada under. Forming a protective barrier around herself and the nomadic deity, she peers once again into Astrada's soul sanctuary to see how far her walk of the path less traveled in the trial has led her.
Deep in Astrada's subconscious, what had been only seven days in real time had been hundreds of thousands of years inside the trial for Astrada's mind.
After so much continuous exposure to the dream's intense ravings, she began to blur the lines of reality and the trial itself.
Entering a new state of higher being, she slowly came to a halt.
Everything from the ravings to continuous overlapping memories and mind-bending, owing to take each step after the next.
The silence finally came, but that wasn't all; the orb that had manifested at the beginning appeared, bringing a faint, warm feeling of relief.
As she walked the final steps up to the beautifully colored orb radiating warmth, she gently held it in her hands, bringing it to her chest for a brief moment.
The warmest point in her life she had ever felt, and deep within it were even moments yet to come, and from within those memories she saw a future of her holding two twins under her arms, in the shine of moonlight.
For a second, Astrada's mind lay still, and her body began to feel everything drop inside, seeping deep into her core.
Taking one last step, her chest and eyes bled a colorful stream of blood, forming a continuous looping pattern of fate seeping into her mind and eyes, reshaping Astrada's body to beyond what she thought was possible for her.
Deep into her countless fated loops, she saw herself again, realizing her soul sanctuary was now brighter and more profound than before, with an elegance conferred by the status of the title nomadic deity.
Her body reformed into something new, and from that new state she began to feel anew, like a butterfly at the apex of its metamorphosis, evolving into its final shape.