Heavens Inverted

"Admiring the light of the stars,
He gazed into the heavens -
And madness gazed back from afar.

The firmament will drown,
All become as this blighted earth.
Let him bear his shattered crown."

The storm rolls in far quicker than I had predicted. As the sun begins to descend from its zenith, rainclouds are already gathering further south. Before nightfall, the stars will already have been obscured. Hopefully, I'll still have some time to map out the night sky's tapestry and update today's records. The sooner I collect the data I need, the sooner I can leave this cursed island.
Gwir is not a place meant for ikayal. It is not a place meant for anyone, in fact, except those abominations that were once called the Endsworn. They and their unnatural magic have poisoned everything, even centuries after they were wiped out. The earth is lifeless, and the groves of trees which dot it have something sinister about them which has prevented our party from staying within them too long. River water is clean and drinkable, but lacks the life that I am used to, and the wind is cheerless. What little wyr remains in the air cannot infuse the tainted environment as it would in any other place in Wyral. Gwir is a place of death, and the living do not belong here.
Yet here we are, trekking across the mournful remains of a once-lush land. There are only three of us, both to minimise unwelcome attention... and potential loss. Njali, an earth mage who specialises in healing; Andira, a storm mage who helps alleviates the effects of such sparse wyr on our bodies... and me. I am just a night mage who wanted to understand the stars' passage. It's only in my more romantic moments when I think that maybe I'm aspiring towards some higher truth. But my meticulous nature is what singled me out for this expedition, and I won't let the higher-ups down.
I glance down at my notebook. Constellations - some official, others right out of my unconscious doodling - curl across the page. None of them are very scientific. I turn a new page. It's taking too long for the sun to set. Star-mapping is the part of this ordeal that keeps me sane, and it is the only area in which Gwir might have an edge over my home in Liyru. Here, there are no artificial lights, no giant magical Lumes to drown out the night sky. Here, I can watch the sky turn above me in total solitude.
"See a good place to make camp tonight?" asks Andira in my ear.
Well, almost total solitude.
Andira is unfairly beautiful, although I would never point that out and kill her warm smile. Despite the conditions in which we've been travelling, her grey eyes are still bright, and the crystal shards in her arms and face catch the sunlight. She's one of the luckier nexhi, because she was born with those fragments in patterns that look practically crafted by hand. A ring made out of magic glows on her finger - the nexus of her power, where she stores energy. If her personality were a little different, she would be insufferable. But she's just friendly.
"I'm not sure," I say. "It doesn't much matter if we have a good view of the sky tonight - that storm doesn't look friendly. What about that tower?"
The landscape before us is a bleak plateau, rising up to hills on one side, and sloping down to seacliffs on the other. At the seaward edge of the plains stands a lone tower - probably a relic of the Endsworn nation which once inhabited these islands. We have come across such ruins before on our journey. Each time, Andira must use her sense of wyr to check if the Ending has somehow infected the structure. She has never found anything out of the ordinary, but there is more than one reason that we are analysing this island. We do not talk about the sense of urgency with which we were given our orders. The Council fears something here, and we would be better off not to meet it.
The afternoon and evening pass in motion. We cross a river, hike across the plateau, and I destroy a swarm of soul-draining insects when they try to go after Njali. Two things are starkly clear by the time twilight has fallen: I have no chance of doing any star-charting whatsoever tonight, and this will be a monster of a storm. It might just be the dimming daylight, but these clouds are so dark and heavy that they might as well be a replacement for the night sky.
Finally, we reach the ruined tower, which is the only shelter we'll reach before the clouds break. It is definitely centuries old, from its crumbling walls and ancient architecture. There are the remains of an observatory platform at what is left of its top, probably meant to stargaze. Someone long ago might have been as drawn to the night sky as I am. That ambition is all that the world has cared to remember about them. I feel in my satchel for my book of observations, just to give me comfort.
But before I can even start down the blasted-earth slope toward it, I stop. There is something off about it - the way its edges look against the stormy sky, the faintest remains of its long shadow. I shake my head and continue, under the confused gazes of my companions. This twilight is really throwing me off.
Yet, halfway down the slope, I halt again.
"What is it?" asks Njali, his voice mildly concerned.
"Are you two... seeing that?" I ask. "Do you think there's an illusion up ahead?"
Njali squints. "Hmm. I doubt it. But the earth is completely barren around it, and I do not trust that. Andira, can you check the ruins from here?"
Andira nods. Her magical ring sparks as she casts a circle of runes, leaving the symbols hanging bright in the air. A matrix of silver nodes opens up around her, connected by thin buzzing lines. She's tried to explain to me how it works, but it doesn't make sense. She can't quite describe how her sense of wyr works, whereas my sense of the ever-present Dark beyond reality is closer to a sense of touch - I feel its ebb and flow, like an eternal ocean beneath the world.
But I don't need to understand how it works to know that the fact that half the nodes just turned dark is a bad thing.
Andira stumbles back with a cry, cutting off her casting. As the magic fades, I catch a faint smell: something sweet and decaying, like rotten fruit, that lingers far too long in my nose and makes me a little sluggish. Njali cries out as if he has been burned, and calls healing magic to his hands in preparation for a fight.
"That was it, wasn't it?" he says sharply. "That was the Ending. We need to leave."
He is absolutely correct. The Ending devours wyr, and we ikayal need wyr to live. If we are around it for long enough, we will suffocate. It is the danger that we have never spoken of but always feared during our expedition. Even without its corruptive, destructive influence, Gwir's wounds are still wide open. Worse yet, if this place is inhabited, there might be Endsworn around. Childhood stories - a man whose presence heralds catastrophe - race through my mind. I clutch my notebook so hard that a few loose papers fall out of my bag.
But Andira shakes her head and says, "No. There's something else in there, like lightning hidden in the clouds. It's - it's brilliant."
"Are... you all right?" I ask.
She turns pleading eyes to me. "We need to know what's in there. This is what we were tasked with. Please - go in there and check. The concentrations of the Ending aren't deadly."
"That is a terrible idea," says Njali. "Andira, sensing that power has confused you. We should be close to our final destination by now, we should seek shelter there."
A peal of thunder directly overhead punctuates his words. If the underground settlement is nearby, its entrances will no doubt be up here instead of at the bottom of the cliffs. We would be safe there, and we would be able to take the nexus carriage back to Liyru. We have our measurements, more than enough, in fact. The Council couldn't ask for anything more.
But if I died, I would at least want my star-chart notebook to survive. How can I just leave this tower, the final relic of that long-gone stargazer, to crumble into nothing?
I cast a rune, and I am falling down, backwards, left. When my body reforms, outlined in silver, I have left the world and entered the Midnight. A washed-out mimic of reality - hills, plains, the tower - stretch out around me. The other mages have become so faint that it is difficult to even tell where they are. I rush down the slope towards the ruined tower, shadowy currents tugging me gently in every direction. We don't have much time until the storm breaks, and I can't spend long near the Ending.
I ghost through the tower courtyard, but even beyond the confines of reality, a growing pressure still closes in on all sides, making my chest tight and breathing shallow. I look around - the sooner I find whatever Andira sensed, the better - but everything is layered with an unfamiliar interference. I can't make out details, not even the general structure within the tower. When I'm in this realm of shadows, illusions are burned away, so this is beyond any true magic. Someone or something lives here.
And then I see him.
He is the only clear thing around me, but there's still that maddening fade-out around his face. Clothes of white and violet, auburn hair... and a thick cloud of dark mist behind him, barely tethered back. Sharply-contrasted chains hover at his back, moving as his arms do. There are chains around each wrist, too. There's no colour in the Midnight, there shouldn't be. This man breaks every law of my power without trying.
"I see you," he says pleasantly, and the words reach me even in the shadows. "Leave me to my work, little night mage. The stars are not welcoming tonight."
I turn heel and run, but the mist follows me - and Gwir has come terrifyingly alive. The storm in the real world has broken, but I don't dare step back into it. The Ending only gets more overwhelming by the second, and that's before I return to reality. But it's not just in the endmist behind me, not just in the tower that I've left behind already. It's everywhere, rising from the earth, falling from the sky. I can't escape it.
At some point, the mist stops following me, but I don't stop running. The others must have found a hideout somewhere, because they're nowhere to be seen. If I can just get a brief glimpse into reality...
The Ending is choking even as I (rise/step/fall) back into the world. There's no light at all from above, only a pounding rain which drowns out every sound and makes it impossible to see more than a few paces ahead. In my run, I've lost my sense of direction. I could be running straight towards the cliffs for all I know. Lightning cleaves the air in two, striking the ruined tower and leaving afterimages in my eyes. But I still glimpse the chains shooting out towards me.
I have no chance to resist, not weakened and choking. My wrists are shackled, but the chains' momentum doesn't stop. More coil around my neck, my waist, carrying me backwards in an unbreakable embrace. If I scream at the pain of contacting the Ending, even I can't hear it over the downpour. No one could.
And then I'm falling, falling towards the ocean far below, poison in my lungs and creeping across my skin. My bag strap breaks, sending it and my precious notebook sailing somewhere into the air. I hope, briefly, that it will find its way far from this island of death and ruin. I hope that Andira and Njali are safe.
My last impression is a spinning view of the pitch-black sky - or the ocean. All the stars have been snuffed out, and I can't tell the difference between the two.
It's a horrific display, as if the heavens themselves have been inverted.