Aurora stared at her soul, a third of which was covered by a misty, shifting veil of illusion, another quarter in a multifaceted, glimmering iridescence, and the remainder was marred by a gaping abyss gnawing away at her dreams, and future. Everything had been going so well before it all fell apart. 

It was agonizing to see her very being warped and twisted like putty while there was nothing she could do about it. Aurora had just over two-thirds of her soul attuned to illusion and iridescence before splotches of void began appearing with every clash between elements and every minute gap where, for a brief moment, there was nothing her soul was attuned to. They sprung up in an unstoppable tide, perforating her soul and rapidly swallowing every other attunement in their wake, leaving a black splotch that seeped into a third of her soul after mere seconds.

It all spiraled from there. Whatever had happened, not only was the void strengthened to an unholy degree, but she seemed to be entirely cut off from any source of iridescence, and there was only a faint trickle of illusion flowing into her soul. She'd never heard of something remotely close to this happening during anyone’s attuning—meaning it was likely nobody lived to speak of it. The worst a void-attuned kitsune was known to have recounted before their execution was having void slowly seep in on all angles, an unending tide no matter how much was quenched. It was a far cry from the sword of Damocles that spontaneously materialized over Aurora.

She was slowly letting illusion seep into the region of iridescence, subsuming it to at least attempt to combat the void. She couldn’t even remotely perceive her body, which was probably for the best. The agony from the connection to the soul being partially disrupted wasn’t something she was keen to experience on top of everything else. The pain ripped across every fiber of her being in waves, and with each one a little bit of iridescence faded from her soul as her focus gradually slipped. 

A tendril of void lanced through her bastion of iridescence as Aurora’s response slowed for just a brief moment, but that was enough. She had no way to recover the lost ground, and it only continued to grow. Void spread deeper into her field of iridescence, rapidly extending throughout it in ugly, throbbing veins, like the roots of some twisted tree. If she attuned to void, she would die, and if the kitsune can’t change the course of the battle over her soul, it would be torn apart, the core that constituted her being passing to wherever it goes after death. She knew that.

Despite how sluggishly her field of illusion grew, it was able to expand, although all Aurora could manage was maintaining its current size as the glimmering, multicolored face of her soul shattered. 

She could barely hold onto her mother’s attunement before, and with the network of void extending throughout that quarter of her soul, the abyssal tide swallowed every last glimmer of iridescence in a horrible cascade. Only a misty third of her soul remained undevoured, and any chance of gaining her mother’s attunement was gone.

The clashes at the start of her attuning seemed like gentle ripples compared to the ruinous crescendo the battle had now reached, the exterior of her soul fragmenting as small bits broke off and vanished into the ether. As long as the interior remains untouched, she would live, despite the gargantuan amount of time naturally healing soul damage takes. Although, with the current state of things, she can’t do anything to prevent her outer soul from shattering, unless she embraces void. But she’d almost certainly be killed immediately after her attuning finished, the only difference that her parents would watch.

Aurora couldn’t expand the region of illusion any further. It was extremely sluggish in its growth after the void sprung up, and it was taking every iota of her focus to prevent it from being subsumed in mere moments like her iridescence was.

At this point, her life was forfeit, and Aurora knew it. There was no way to save this disaster of attuning, and trying to reach an equilibrium between void and illusion just wouldn’t happen. With how voraciously void strikes at other types of mana, it won’t rest until nothing else surrounds it or the void is utterly depleted. Yet if she maintained this state much longer, the clashes would seep too deep for her to survive, tearing her outer soul to shreds.

Maybe if she stopped resisting and let her illusion be fully consumed, her parents might spirit her away to live her life in isolation rather than let her be executed, hiding from the rest of the world. But she’d never leave that cage.

If she could’ve moved her body, Aurora would have cried.

She'd long since lost track of how long it had been since her attuning started, and she hadn’t reclaimed a speck of her soul from the void, the sea of illusion, her last bastion, dwindling at a snail’s pace as pain rent her mind, her conscious reeling with each clash between attunements. Each burst hurt more than the time she temporarily lost her arm, but if Aurora gave in, she would have to watch her parents see what she’d become. 

Aurora didn’t know how they would react if she attuned solely to void. And half-delirious from the agony that washed over her in waves, Aurora didn’t want to know, even if it killed her. She didn’t want to see disappointment and revulsion cross their faces. With each clash between the energies, torment like she had never felt poured over her. And unconsciousness never claimed her.

As more time passed, the agony only grew worse, the situation stagnant. There was nothing for her to do other than wish that something would allow her to push back the never-ending tide of void. The fractures from each clash reached deeper and deeper as Aurora, barely able to think straight, struggled to stay alive. She poured all her concentration into making the perimeter of her illusion an impregnable wall, her final bastion. Then a fissure tore the surface of her soul and something cracked, slipping loose.

=====

The kitsune was confused about what was happening, but the abyssal void was relentlessly trying to snatch away their birthright, and they couldn’t let that happen!

But they couldn’t quite muster their illusion to make a proper counterattack. The kitsune knew that they should be able to do so, although they couldn’t quite recall where they learned that… but that doesn’t matter! They need to save their birthright! Their connection to the essence woven throughout their being!

Waves of void violently besieged their bulwark of illusion, and they remembered that the shockwaves of force echoing from each collision should cause them immense pain as the ground shattered beneath the reverberations, but they couldn’t feel a thing. How weird was that!

They needed to stop the siege on what belonged to them fast, but they couldn’t push back the nihility striking at them again and again, and if they stayed like this for too long the landscape would be ruined. The ravines were such an eyesore! The kitsune mentally facepalmed, although whatever that meant was beyond her.

The kitsune didn’t have enough illusion to do much without losing it all, and making an illusion of something else wouldn’t be able to do much more than it already has. Whoever fashioned the perimeter into an illusion of those impenetrable walls did a great job at it! It gave her loads of time to think. The ground had crumbled into thousands of pieces, though, with fragments from the walls gradually joining the rubble. That was a problem.

Launching a basic attack wouldn’t do them any good, and they had no way to fight that black tide, hmmm… tricky! The kitsune shaped a blob of the landscape into an illusion of a noble hero who was destined to vanquish their foes and tossed it beyond the walls, but it swiftly drowned beneath the tide of nothing. A shame.

The kitsune knew from some forgotten moment that it wasn’t possible to manipulate this… place? They can’t remember what this place was called, weird! Anyways, they remembered something about manipulating this area as it was being impossible, perilous, and pointless. Whatever told her that was so wrong!

Yet as the kitsune kept trying things, none of them were working! They had tried to defend themselves, but even if they took chunks out of the black tide it just regenerated within a second.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” the kitsune recalled someone they couldn’t remember saying in a husky, forgotten voice. The ravines in the broken landscape only grew in number, and they knew they should feel pain, that they should fear what might happen, but they were incapable of doing so.

So the kitsune molded the misty fractured walls of illusion into fragmented walls of void. But it was still an illusion, and the tide of void continued to strike.

The kitsune then reshaped the illusion so the entire third of their soul mimicked that abyssal ocean, and the tides of void paused before the inky black walls, which stood defiantly. Then they slammed into the walls again, the illusion ineffective.

Of course it was ineffective, and the kitsune could tell why. The inky, abyssal emptiness would never form walls to protect itself, not when it devours all in its wake. Why defend from something when you could consume it?

So the kitsune let the walls crumble, the final defenses sloughing away as they melded into the inky black emptiness, exposing everything inside them to be unmade. Yet as the void rushed in, it only met the illusion mana searching for something to consume just like it was; there was no distinguishable difference between what should be consumed and the void.

The void tried to feast on the illusion, but nothing changed. The surroundings remained covered in the same, lightless void.

The void gnawed at itself like a snake biting its own tail, while trying to find the illusion, which was attempting to consume itself all the same. As the void had nothing more to absorb, it relented, and the fissures in the landscape stopped growing.

As the kitsune looked at the region belonging to them, two-thirds of it were blotted out by void, while a third remained attuned to illusion, marred with deep canyons piercing down into something that shouldn’t be exposed, into…

Aurora passed out.

=====

Groaning, Aurora pushed herself off the cold, smooth stone, sitting upwards as she scratched between her ears. Her memories had grown fuzzy at a point, but she could still recall the gist of what happened in that detached state. A third of her soul was attuned to illusion, but the rest…

Aurora peered inwards with her mind’s eye, and wept at the sight of the inky blackness. She could use illusion in addition to void, so now she might not be executed immediately if her parents didn’t do it themselves—the thought of which caused her to choke out another sob—but her place in society was forfeit. There was no way her parents wouldn’t be able to tell she was attuned to void, either,, even if she tried to hide it. Maybe she could convince her parents to help her flee the city, set up refuge in the wilderness, or anything other than having her executed? There’s no way she could survive alone for any significant amount of time in the wild without them even if she tried to run; forget finding food, she’d probably bleed out after fighting a fragment somewhere before that ever became an issue.

She looked up at the smooth stone ceiling, tears dripping down her cheeks, and then froze. She shouldn’t be here—the damage to her soul should’ve taken months, at minimum, to heal. Aurora shouldn’t feel the cold stone floor she attuned on below her. Why was she here?

Aurora peered inwards again, and amidst the inky depths of her void and guised illusion affinities, the exterior of her soul was still shattered. The deepest damage seemed to have healed over, but she shouldn't be conscious, much less able to move. She waved her hand in front of her face. How could she do that?

Aurora stood up from the ground, head and ears swiveling around the room. All the artifacts laid out for her attuning but one—a crystalline eyeball—were gone, and the wall beside the door was absolutely obliterated, rough chunks of stone strewn haphazardly around the area. More importantly, an entire side of the room was replaced by a gaping hole in the world, leading to an endless abyss.

Then something placed a cold, pale gray hand on her shoulder.