72--Where That Place Used to Be

[Think of a place you went to when you were younger but it now no longer there or is something else. Capture your feelings about this in your writing.]

Hmmm…I can't think of any personal experiences, so I'll do something fantastical. Also, lol. A typo in the prompt.

…

Hot, arid winds blew, causing hills of sand to shift. A large sand hill in particular was affected by this flowing of air, as its structure was unstable and on the verge of great change. It began with just a few sand grains, but as they fell, the grains jostled and collided with many more, causing a few meters of sand to dislodge and fall. The cycle continued until the sands totaled to many tons, causing the ground to shake as they all slid downward at the pull of gravity.

When the millions of grains eventually settled, where the largest sand hill once stood, sat a large crystalline structure—seemingly uncovered by the shifting sands. The crystal resembled an egg in shape as it shined and sparkled brightly in the harsh, piercing sunlight.

Then, the crystal egg shook, and a crack formed on it. It was small, at first, merely a few centimeters long. But with more quaking, the crack grew longer, sounding like shattering glass as it extended from the bottom of the egg up, and eventually going down the other side to connect with where it began.

The next moment, releasing an earth-shattering roar, it split.

"HAHAHAHAHAHA! I DID IT, FOOLS! I WIN!"

The figure of petite woman clothed in celestial robes shot out from the crystal egg with a shockwave, flying up into the air with her arms over her head in celebration. Only once she finally opened her eyes did she stop cheering, her arms slowly falling back to her sides.

"Uhhh, guys?"

The woman's eyebrows shot up as she inspected her surroundings.

"Why the hell would you move me while I was trapped?" She yelled, releasing her spiritual sense to search for her friends. When she didn't find any traces of life, she focused her attention on the flow of the local space.

"Hmmm…no, this is the same position on the planet. Yet, why is there a desert here? And why is it so dead? Why would they bother to replace the grasslands with sand and prevent life from growing here?"

The woman released her spiritual sense again, but sent it all in a single direction, hoping to find where the desert ended and the previous biome began again.

"No way…" She muttered under her breath. "That's a lot of sand! It would have taken them a few years to move all that. I failed the challenge? Why didn't they wake me?"

Anger and mischief replaced her previous confusion as she realized that her friends pulled a fast one on her. Anger at being duped and mischief at the thought of getting them back. After all, SHE was the Queen of Pranks!

The woman thought back to when she'd found the crystal egg in the grasslands and discovered its ridiculously powerful sealing ability. When she led her friends to it, one of them challenged her to trap herself within it to see if she could escape within five years, since the egg clearly made use of Soul Arts to produce its effect and the woman was weakest at said Arts.

"I broke out, but building this desert would have taken more than five years, even if all of them worked together. They clearly dug their own graves with this stunt!"

She floated higher into the sky, wanting to check out the scope of what they'd built.

"Wait a minute, the climate is different too." She soon noticed. "There's basically zero water in the local atmosphere! Why would they bother doing that?!"

Still flying higher at speeds unobtainable to mortals, the woman frowned, feeling something very wrong with her situation.

"My gut is often correct, and right not it's telling me that an investigation is to be carried out!"

Eventually, the woman felt the need to stretch her arms and back, twisting her body in such a way so that her head faced the sky.

"N-no… Why???"

She quickly straightened herself, still gazing up.

"Why would they destroy this planet's only moon?!" She yelled, panicking because in the sky above her was a sight she never expected to see—the moon their planet once had was now only a collection of jagged rocks in orbit, even somewhat forming a ring.

"No, this can't be true. They had every reason NOT to destroy the moon! This, this, uh, it must be an illusion! It must all be an illusion!" She cried, not believing her own words as she gathered a good chunk of her internal energy, forming it into a spell.

"I-if this is an illusion formation, this should b-break it…" The woman's teeth chattered at this point, her spell shooting down toward the desert below her in a magnificent, multicolor display of sparkles.

Then, the surrounding air and sand for hundreds of kilometers were vaporized, not even turning to plasma, but bypassing that state of matter to convert into cosmic energy, which was instantly reclaimed by the cosmos.

The woman stared forlornly at the gargantuan hole she'd just put into her planet, terror coursing through her as she realized what the damage meant.

"N-no illusion formation could have si-simulated my spell. This is all…real."

The last test she could perform to verify her hypothesis—connecting to the flow of time—was the last straw as tears flowed down her face.

"They w-wouldn't have let me stay trapped for these h-hundreds of thousands of years." She sniffed. "Something must have happened, which the divine sealing crystal…protected me from."