The old woman jolted awake, sensing with bone-deep certainty that her end was near. She eased back into her rocking chair, her gaze unfocused as she watched distant fireworks blossom across the night sky.

  “We should have been there, celebrating the Winter’s Eve festival together.” She said, voice strained with a desperate yearning. She should have been there with her family but here she was, alone, stuck in a cold home that had once been so full of love and warmth, in a quaint countryside village that had all but forgotten her.

  And now, it appears that she never will.

  Her frail fingers traced the contours of the peculiar device that had kept her company these past five years. It was an iridescent, crystalline-blue orb, adorned with concentric circles and crowned by two thin receiving rods. With a thought, she reached inward, grasping the dwindling remnants of her magic, and fed a single strand of prana into the orb. It pulsed to life, filling the air with light. More than the towering spires of the capital or the abominable super-weapons Sedia made in defiance of the divine, this singular wonder of magical engineering spoke of the end of an era and the dawn of something new.

  Chaos greeted her senses - a cacophony of foreign languages and overlapping broadcasts. The device, still flawed in its infancy, struggled to isolate a single signal amidst the noise of an ever-expanding world as the revolutionary technology spread like wildfire. With practiced ease, her fingers traced the concentric rings on the orb and pulled them towards the bottom, dragging the receiver away from the unresolved mess that was the global [Broadcast] and towards the more ‘local’ ones.

  Music filled the room - bawdy tavern songs that carried the echoes of a youth long past. A wry smile tugged at her lips as she reminisced about the reckless days of her youth, days spent in adventure and folly. For an hour, she listened, letting herself be transported to places she would never see again. Then, with a final flicker, the orb fell silent as her magic waned.

  She wished she could listen a little longer, but she had little strength left to spare. She once had what most considered a prodigious amount of magical power, but age had whittled her power away, siphoned endlessly just to hold her failing body together.

  But what was the point of it anymore? She had persevered, fought against the inevitable with every last bit of strength she had, all so she might see her children and grandchildren one last time.

  But no one came.

  Her weary limbs protested as she rose, shuffling toward the shrine in the eastern corner of her home. She unlatched the door, stepping into the small indoor garden, and knelt before the stone altar of the ancestral sun god her family had worshiped for generations. Hands folded, she sent a prayer of thanks and gratitude, for all the joy and pain she experienced over a life long lived.

  “I’m a bit sad,” she admitted softly. “There won’t be anyone left to tend to your shrine after I’m gone. I’ve failed you as a priestess, haven’t I?”

  She was likely the last living follower of a religion that had endured since the first era after the Great Cataclysm. Her children had abandoned the faith for the gods of the cities, and her husband, though he had gone through the motions with her, had never truly believed. Every other practitioner she had known was long dead. A legacy that had persisted for three centuries would die with her tonight.

  “It seems I will be seeing you shortly.” she said, before rising and stumbling back towards the front porch. She looked down at her husband's old armchair, and remembered how fond he was of that silly thing.

  He had died in that chair.

  She relaxed into the creaking rocking-chair right next to it, a ‘matching pair’ with similar detailing they had commissioned from Meldr, a town renowned for its craftsmen and artisans. Arguably, it was the most expensive thing in the house, if only because anything of more value had already been given away as inheritance.

  The old woman gazed up at the starry sky, watching as bursts of color painted the night with fleeting brilliance as the festival raged below.

  She closed her eyes, and loosened her grip on the magic that held her together. It was only delaying the inevitable. Her breath suddenly labored, and darkness encroached the edges of her vision.

  Maybe it was her clouding vision, her slowly fogging mind, or maybe even something more but the flowers in her garden seemed to lean towards her, the vines and creepers slowly clawing and curling their way up the sides of her home, reaching towards the sky.

  A lone orchid in a hanging flowerpot rotated, slowly turning towards her, as if to face her.

  “They didn’t come.” It said, not in words, but as an impression upon her fading mind.

  “They didn't,” She agreed.

  “Do you regret how your life turned out?” It asked.

  She rolled the question around her head, and her mind raked through all the things that had brought her to this point, both significant, and trivial, and came to a realization.

  “No.” She answered. “There were many things I did wrong and many more I wished I had done differently. But I lived a life worth living. I only hoped that they would put aside our grievances and visit one last time.”

  The orchid stayed silent, as if it was contemplating her answer.

  A red spider lily that grew outside the porch bloomed and turned to address her. “If you were given a second chance at life, would you take it?”

  “I don’t want to change how my life turned out. My past is my own.”

  “You misunderstand. If you were as strong and able as you once were, unburdened by age, what would you do?"

  “I would explore the world, see all that I’ve yet to see, learn all that I’ve willingly ignored, and go through all the things I was too afraid to do. I’ve lived my entire life afraid. I played it safe, cautious. Mundane. I ignored my dreams in favor of my family’s desires and expectations. But if I had the chance… I would go out on an adventure, dangerous as it sounds. I would travel across the world and fulfill all the goals and dreams I’ve forgotten and pushed to the wayside. From my silly childhood fantasies to my shameful desires, to my grandest ambitions, I would try my best at all of it. It’s not as if I have anything left to live for.” She was wheezing by the end, her vision almost entirely gone except for that single red flower that seemed to dominate the entirety of her awareness.

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  “Why don’t you dream of it then?” It asked. “Dream, of that life you could have led, and I will allow you this one last boon, this one last fantasy until that fire in your heart fades. And then, and only then, will I return to collect my due.”

  “Thank you.” She said with a soft smile on her lips.

  The old woman took one last breath, and stilled.

  The Sun priestess took her first breath, and rose.

  She looked down at her hands, smooth, youthful and unblemished, all but glowing with the vigor of youth. Her reflection in the window revealed a woman in her early twenties, radiant with vitality. But there was something… off about the way she stood, how it was almost as if she was barely connected to the ground by some tenuous force rather than her own two feet. Her hair was a shocking, brilliant red rather than the fading grey she had expected to see. But something about her current state felt… ethereal, as if she was wholly separate from the world around her, as if she was an ephemeral fantasy dreamt by a fading god.

  It might as well be the case.

  “Hm.” She caught something in the mirror, and blinked, turning to look at the rocking-chair she had risen from mere moments ago. She stared at the old woman, sleeping, with a peaceful smile on her face.

  She would never wake up again.

  The Sun Priestess scowled.

  “Why are you smiling, you old hag? Aren’t you supposed to scream? Rage? Cry? Why are you so… content?”

  A single tear escaped her eye before she turned away, stepping towards the door. But not before shooting one last fleeting glance at the old armchair next to the corpse.

  She paused, before turning back to the house. Would the old woman’s children return to collect the house? Would they even come to attend her funeral?

  Would anyone even realize the old woman was dead?

  It was custom to cremate the body or bless the corpses of individuals with a large amount of magic in order to prevent the rise of the restless dead, and while it probably wouldn’t be an issue in the old woman's case, it was still best not to take any chances. And even if her corpse chose not to rise, just leaving it there to be infested by parasites and rot caused her gut to churn.

  But on the other hand, she couldn’t afford to let the local villagers know of any connection between the two of them. And while she could perform the funeral rites on the old woman herself, she was instinctively petrified by the very thought.

  She frowned, closed her eyes, and finally gazed at the armchair next to the corpse one last time. And then the answer came to her. She might be the only one to attend but the old woman deserved a grand send-off in any case, and that idiot of a husband had always been ‘scaroused’ by her pyromaniacal tendencies so he wouldn't complain considering the situation. While she was technically the old woman still, she wasn't either at the same time; for the Sun Priestess was but a fleeting ephemeral dream.

  She reached inwards, to the constellation of ‘stars’ and power that represented everything she was, and everything she could have been. And while it seemed far more… static than it had been in life, now crystallized and unchanging in death, it still stirred as she grasped as many strands of prana as she could hold. It came far easier than before, but it made sense. Her body wasn’t ‘real’ in the same physical sense of the term as it used to be, and thus lacked the same hindrances the mortal flesh used to have. And while she did need to expend some power to fuel her current existence, her current body didn’t require anywhere near the same upkeep to work in optimal condition as a withered old woman whose every organ was failing by the second.

  Her prana settled into a familiar shape as she gestured at the air, like a conductor of a play, or perhaps a dancer.

  “O' Sun, I return your blessing unto thee, so I may invoke the shape of the stars.”

  Grass withered under her feet and trees dried up, insects and worms and vermin crumbled dead, as the blessing of 'life' was retrieved by the very force that had granted it motion.

  Solar radiance rose into the night sky like a field of fireflies, before it started to drift; bending and converging into an orb above her, distorting her vision of the surrounding area as light itself was forced into place by the gravity of her magic. The converging radiance ignited into a ball of super-heated air and agitated light.

  The heat produced by concentrating the rays of a noon-day sun, focused through a glass lens is enough to set leaves on fire. But this was several orders of magnitude worse, as stellar radiance turned infinitely in on itself until it became something... other. A purer form of energy, of sorts. Even at night, with only the reflected light from the moon and the distant blessing of the stars available to her, it was enough to form an orb of transcendent fire the size of a boulder.

  It wasn’t one of those fancy, hyper-efficient killing spells the military were drooling about these days, nor was it as simple as a classic fireball. It was far larger and its heat far more potent. It took decades to visualize and master it with any degree of proficiency, and even then a novice is more than likely to blind or kill themselves with it's poisonous light long before they managed it with half the proficiency she displayed. And if one failed to contain it properly, they would die to its simulated star-stuff just as gruesomely as their potential target.

  Under ‘modern’ categorization, it would be classified as a ‘siege spell’, and she, for the umpteenth time, laughed at the thought of the faces the local garrison commander would make when he realized that he had a tactical military asset sitting under his nose the entire time. Serves him right to call her a relic of the past, however true it might have been. There was such a thing called tact, after all.

  No, she wasn’t a paladin, but it should show those idiots not to underestimate a priestess just because she didn’t belong to one of the gods currently holding ‘authority’.

  It was the difference between setting off a wagon of alchemical explosives under the enemy’s feet as opposed to shooting them with a flintlock pistol. It was an issue of efficiency and the required investment in training and resources involved to achieve the same result. And yet, the [Solar Vestige] was still an incomprehensibly powerful spell indeed. There was a certain weight behind it that allowed it to blow through most defenses like it was nothing. Nothing was so capable of killing as the thing that had granted it life in the first place.

  Many would argue about whether or not the time invested into learning it was worth it or not, However, it was a widely acknowledged fact that large explosions had a tendency of magically vanishing things you wanted gone.

  And she was vindictive enough to acknowledge that she didn’t want those ungrateful little shits to have any of the old woman's stuff or property when they left her to die alone when she had explicitly told them that her time was almost up. The stellar poisoning would ensure that they couldn't even use the land for at least a few generations. Thankfully, she was skilled enough to contain the damage to her property.

  The gargantuan orb of fire, slowly, ponderously, started to shift as it gravitated towards the source of her ire. At a certain point, it started to pick up speed, accelerating until it resembled a shooting star.

  And then it crashed into the house. For a single moment, between the fire orb deforming as the energy contained within burst from it’s vessel, and the house crumbling and vaporizing from what might as well be the impact and force of a superheated boulder, she could almost see the silhouette of a man leaning back in his favorite armchair, smiling fondly while complaining about her aggressive personality.

  Yeah, he’d approve of this, that idiot.

  And then the night was lit up once again by a violent flash of light, followed by an explosive conflagration that rose up into the sky as a pillar of fire that reached for the heavens. It was one last firework for the night, the celebration of a life well lived.

  A celebration of old and forgotten dreams given life once more.

  It probably wasn’t how the festival was intended to be enjoyed but if someone didn't blow up something at least once, could it truly be considered a festival anymore? Mages were so very cautious these days.

  But such a philosophy had no place in her life. Not anymore. She was to be a bright flame, glorious and incandescent. And when this passion, this dream, this fantasy finally dies out, so too will the phantasm named Aurora Del Sol, end.

  The embers of her burning past spoke to her one last time. "Seek the man lost in time who would tread the void, seek the kindly necromancer who would spurn destiny, and the star-child that heralds doom." it whispered.

  "Lost in the tides of a celestial calamity, you shall find what you seek beyond the veil of distant worlds; for in those transient junctures you shall achieve enlightenment."

  "Burn bright, O' dancing flame, and then perish unto eternity."

  Art of Aurora: