An Illusion...

The sky was a silver-blue canvas smeared with streaks of swirling clouds but the snow that fell was unnaturally soft.

Nightfall had already begun to consume the land in the usual way of the fourteen-day long night, blanketing everything in hues of deep indigo and soft gray. When Elyonari crested the final cliff, her body shivering with exhaustion and soaked in sweat and drying blood, she wasn't prepared for what she saw.

The village was rustic with a line of two perfect rows of log cabins, perhaps a dozen on each side, facing one another with symmetrical elegance that didn't quite feel natural.

Each cabin was constructed from logs, the roofs sloped precisely for snow to fall without gathering. The doors were dark with carved patterns curling near the handles, and the windows shone dimly with firelight.

Smoke rose from a few of the chimneys, not thick enough to mean something was cooking but just enough to suggest warmth.

Elyonari's breath turned to mist in the cold and she coughed once, breathless and drained, but even her weary instincts told her something was terribly wrong. The snow on the path between the cabins was untouched. There were no footsteps, no drag marks, not even prints of birds or rodents. It was as though the world had been reset recently.

Her bow was still slung across her shoulder. She knew she was running on reserves but even then, caution gripped her spine. She walked forward, her boots crunching the thin, crusted snow.

"Hello? Is anyone here?"

She called out once, her voice cracked by fatigue. Her voice echoed between the cabins and died fast, muffled by the snow.

No answer.

She called again. Then again.

Nothing. Not a soul stirred, yet the place felt alive. She walked up to the first cabin on the left, her heart pounding slowly now, more from unease than exertion.

Her hand reached for the handle. It was warm. Her fingers gripped the metal and turned. The door creaked open with barely a sound, swinging into the dark interior that smelled faintly of cinnamon, firewood, and something oddly sweet, like lilies and ink.

Inside, it was dim. The hearth burned, casting flickers across the walls. The room was familiar… eerily familiar.

Then she froze.

Her eyes adjusted quickly on the wall above the mantle was a portrait.

It was her.

She stepped deeper inside, past a table laid with parchment with her handwriting. A pair of gloves she had lost back in her childhood days lay perfectly folded beside the quill. Her old cloak that she used to wear a a child hung on the peg beside the fire. She still had it back in Mintheris.

"I never gave this away," she whispered to no one.

Before she could question it further, something happened.

Her vision warped. The cabin dissolved into smoke and burned light, and suddenly, she wasn't in a cabin anymore.

She stood in Mintheris, her homeland.

But it wasn't whole. It was engulfed in flames.

The trees that once spiraled with living light now nothing but black skeletons clawing at the heavens. The sacred pools were boiling, their waters red with blood. Elven bodies—hundreds, thousands even—lay scattered across the marble streets and altars, torn apart in horrifying displays of violence.

And atop a ruined platform once used for rites stood a figure covered in blood.

It was her. Elyonari. Or rather… a version of her.

She wore a dark crown made of obsidian bone. Her bow, longer than anything she'd ever wielded, was strung with black lightning. She laughed as she loosed arrows into crowds of fleeing children. Her face was cruel, twisted with delight. Her eyes were now glowing with corrupted gold.

Elyonari stood rooted and helpless, watching herself rip apart her homeland.

The other her raised her hand and from the sky descended thorned vines of molten bark, latching onto temples and homes and tearing them from the soil. She walked slowly but every step cracked the ground beneath her.

The Elyonari watching could not look away.

"Why…?"

She tried to say, but her throat constricted. The monstrous version of her turned slowly, almost as if hearing her whisper.

And smiled.

Then, as she loosed another arrow into a priestess begging for her life, she spoke.

"This is what you are beneath the mercy. This is what you become if Vastarael dies."

Elyonari stumbled back and fell hard onto her knees. The illusion began to blur. Flames crackled into whispers. Smoke became fog. The ground trembled and then she was back inside the cabin.

She was breathing heavily, her sweat mixing with the snow on her cloak. The hearth still crackled but the warmth was gone from the air. The fire now flickered cold blue.

She reached up and touched her face. She hadn't realized she was crying.

A sound caught her ear. She turned.

There was a journal on the table.

She walked toward it slowly, picked it up.

It was hers.

She flipped through the pages, each entry penned in her own hand. Many were real, familiar, things she had written during her childhood. But toward the end, the entries became… foreign.

Violent. Unfamiliar.

The final page read:

"The first cabin is only the beginning. Don't open the second. You will not survive the sixth. And if you reach the twelfth… then may the World Tree forgive you. You knew this would happen. You always knew."

Elyonari dropped the journal. She staggered back, her hands trembling.

"All the cabins. All the doors. Do they each show me… versions of me?"

Her fingers hovered over the journal as if its pages had turned into blades. She stared at the final page for one more second before her instincts screamed at her with a singular command:

Run.

Elyonari slammed the journal shut with a breath that came out more like a gasp and sprinted for the door. Her boots hit the wooden floor with hard, anxious steps, her entire being pulsing with the need to escape. She had barely grasped the cold iron handle of the cabin door...

She froze.

Time slowed.

Something thick, serrated, and unnatural had plunged straight through her back, exiting through her abdomen.

Pain did not register first. Shock did.

Her mouth opened to scream but the sound was locked in her throat, clenched by fear and disbelief. Her head slowly turned as her knees buckled, and in the fading periphery of her vision, she saw it.

Towering over her, was six limbs chittering, obsidian chitin gleaming, and from its glistening mandibles dripped a venom as green as the fire of her homeland.

An Exo Beetle.

Her blood painted the floor.

The beetle raised its mandibles again and then—

She gasped awake, choking. She was back inside the cabin.

Her back was not bleeding. There was no wound. Nothing.

She dropped to her knees, her arms gripping her chest as if to check over and over again. Her heart was racing in panic but her body was whole.

"…It wasn't real," she whispered to herself. "It wasn't real, it wasn't real, it wasn't—"

She shut her eyes and curled slightly inward. It felt so real. Every nerve in her body screamed as if the pain had been genuine. The phantom sting still clung to her spine. She had felt the mandible tear through her. She had tasted her own blood on her tongue. It was real.

But it wasn't. That's the trap.

That's what the Mountain of Illusions did. It wasn't just fog and shape-shifting. It wasn't just false landscapes. It built entire realities around you and then made you question which reality you'd left behind.

She slowly stood, trembling, her fists clenched.

"…I'm not playing your game."

Elyonari held out both hands, her fingers forming a tight diamond-like seal of invocation and from the center of her palm flared a green fire in its rawest, angriest state. Unlike normal fire, it hissed with energy, burning with a controlled roar, illuminating every corner of the cabin with emerald brilliance.

"I won't be your puppet," she hissed, stepping back as the fire licked the wooden walls and caught flame.

The walls didn't resist.

The cabin howled as it was engulfed, crackling with eerie screams as the green fire fed on more than timber. She stepped outside and turned her gaze on the next cabin. Then the next. She raised both hands, and slammed them into the snow with flames.

Dozens of roots exploded out from beneath her feet, twisted with fire and sap, coiling around the cabins. They surged up the log walls and ignited, turning into Nature Energy alight with cleansing fire.

Elyonari was done.

All the cabins burned with green flames against the backdrop of endless snowfall. The snow didn't douse them. It couldn't. The air stank of burning wood and seared lies.

She panted as the entire village crackled and fell apart, the illusion struggling to reweave itself, but her Nature Energy clawed through it.

One last time, she looked around, watching the final cabins collapse into ash. The village was gone. Every log was drained of Nature Energy. Every leaf scorched. Every mirage slain.

The snow began to fall again.

Elyonari hugged herself tightly, her breath misting as her body cooled, and for the first time since entering the mountain, she whispered with finality:

"…This truly is the Mountain of Illusions."