The land was barren of life, long deprived of the ability to sustain any semblance of life as its present incarnation was nothing more than endless dunes of golden and crimson sands. That being said, there were two instances of sentience in the lands of sandy hills. Had they been in their original states, the smouldering heat might have given the good-natured of the two some trouble.

  Of the two tallest stacks of sand, one is red and the other golden. On the red one was a lean, solid, pale cyan male with nine, bushy and large kitsune tails. On the other side of the sand hill stood a similarly built male silhouette of the dark grey tint, with his non-human features constantly flickering in and out in some bizarre, glitchy purple effect, acting as if no one option was the correct one. The two stared the other down: one containing brash heroism, while the other embodied unbridled amusement.

  Occurring within the smallest fraction of a second, the opposing silhouettes launched themselves from their respective stationary positions so fast it seemed they simply teleported, blasting the tops of the hills behind them into sand clouds. One moment, everything was fine; the next, constant shattering all within the vicinity like glass, not even the air was spared from being treated with such an absence of concern. Those shards, small as they were, crumbled towards the sand far below, staining where they landed solid black.

  "What is with these two resembling stick figures with correct anatomy?" Enetha asked as she sat, in her usual manner, in the crossed arms of Base Ring Mode: Silver King Golem, sporting a more ethereal body, due in most part to the world not being anywhere near tangible.

  At the call of the little princess verbalising her observation, the combatting silhouettes froze mid-battle. Merely inches away from clashing, the way they had attempted to halt their movements came off in such a way that it would be hard not to compare it to someone pausing a video on a TV: not that that comparison was far off.

  Sitting on a large pillow that shared the same oversized plate that SKG and it used as a floating platform, Lizu swished her tail back and forth, playfully doing so to keep herself from getting outwardly peeved at Enetha from interupting her memoria demonstration: "Look, I'm not thrilled about it either. I tried to get the best mental image of those two, but the very act of looking at anything describing them directly hurt my brain, so I used my first bit of memoria to block myself from picturing anything that would cause similar results... which resulted in the pictures getting all blurry, so the silhouette recreations in my dreamscape were my best workaround."

  "I see," Enetha said calmly as she glanced slightly to her side, watching a small crack in space creeping nearby. It seemed to be spitting out a small black liquid, but the little princess chalked it up to being a result of using memoria and simply resumed staring forward unperturbed. Lizu jumped up when a sudden thought popped into her mind, followed by a lightbulb forming next to her head and lighting up.

  "Say... how are you even in my dream anyhow?" Enetha lightly shrugged, not bothering to look Lizu in the eyes, and instead chose to close her eyes to ruminate on a fitting response.

  "Given our proximity in the real world, I was able to use the powers bestowed to me by my stigma; after all, entering the surface-level of your soul was a simple endeavour."

  Lizu playfully rolled her eyes, flicking her tail in all manner of directions until finally allowing it to fall upon Enetha's direction, trained directly at the side of her head. The dragolyte struck linguistic gold. Lizu had come upon the perfect combination of words to get back at Enetha, opening her mouth to unleash her witty response, but then...

  "Are you two little missies finished with your riveting conversation? I was just getting into the reenactment of history being put on here," the voice of an overbearingly teasing male announced. The voice rang through the girls' ears, almost as if the voice originated directly from their brains, yet still knowing where the owner's voice was relative to them; in spite of that making no logical sense, the duo subconsciously chalked it up as a quirk only a dream could achieve.

  Now, where was the origin of this new voice: right where the two silhouettes had been left hanging.

  "Please do... refrain from doing such scary acts," Enetha whispered as she watched the shadowy ooze forcing its way out of the black silhouette, straining the thing's body to its limits and forcing its already cracked form to fracture further. In an endless cycle of perpetual ruin, the more shadowy ooze to seep forth from its body, the more it cracked open, leading to more manifesting nightmares to fester.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  The increasingly darkening silhouette snapped its head directly at Lizu, showing no wasted movement that indicated organic life, and causing the two girls to jump from its unnatural movements, let alone that it moved to begin with. Despite lacking eyes, it just stared daggers at her as a fissure shot across its face and formed into a twistedly smug smile, bursting with as much condescension as it did endearment, somehow.

  "What do you take me for?" Lizu snapped back in a whisper, struggling to raise her voice any higher than that when her own memoria creation was seemingly sizing her up.

  "Are you implying that wasn't your doing?" Enetha whispered back, somewhat concernedly, as SKG settled Enetha down on Lizu's lap. Lizu could only puff up her cheeks to the point of them reddening at Enetha's instance; she was trying to scare the little princess with such straightforward methods.

  "I'm not implying anything, and who's to say it wasn't your doing somehow with those soul powers of yours." The two stared the other down, not wanting to let up on their respective denial, or the haunting implication that neither was lying and that the voice they heard held a more unnerving origin.

  As if having had enough of the two girls' back-and-forth, the now fully shadow-made silhouetted being with a faint violet-purple glow dropped down onto the platform. The weight behind his landing managed to knock the platform off balance, despite not being a feature Lizu had imparted into it. As he offhandedly crushed the disembodied head of the golden silhouetted being in his hand, reducing it to the same shadowy goo that littered the mindscape, Enetha jumped right into Lizu's arms, not caring in the slightest if the girl's bosom was in her face.

  [{You know, memoria isn't something little girls should be messing with so carelessly... you might end up inviting...]}

  [{Nightmares]}

  "Is that supposed to be scary?" Enetha managed to mumble that question out as she faintly shivered, despite her face remaining perfectly absent from any identifiable expression.

  [{Not unless being given a heads-up from a stigmai scares you, Tiny Tiara]}

  Enetha huffed out a squeak of frustration, not heeding what the Stigmai of Nightmares had said other than his choice of nickname for her and how condescendingly teasing the tone he employed to say it was. However, neither she nor Lizu had any chance to respond to the stigmai's teasing as they felt something cold [{no heat/memoria draining]} crawl over their feet.

  Unbeknownst to the duo, the shadowy sea of tangible nightmares had been slowly rising from below, after having long overshadowed every speck of sand the eye could've seen, and was now up to their ankles, ready to plunge them into darkness.

  Luckily for them, it was the shock to their systems to free them from the memory-abundant dreamscape, which didn't feel like much of a good thing as Nightmares continued to snicker even as they were whisked back to reality.

  Lizu snapped her body up in Mal-Co's backseater bed, shortly followed by Enetha clocking her in the chin with an unintended headbutt as she woke up herself, seconds later. The collision left the two girls' ears ringing up a storm, along with their heads feeling like they were splitting from the ensuing pain.

  "Fuuuu...." Lizu stifled her outburst from polluting Enetha's ears or G.Galore/Morilore's personality reference/knowledge material. Had it been anyone other fourteen-year-old, Lizu was sure the pain wouldn't have been so severe. But, in defiance of Enetha's small everything, the little princess's headbutt packed one mean wallop to the dragolyte's chin, leaving a numbing buzz permeating through Lizu's jaw, so Lizu bit her bottom lip to push back any involuntary slips of the tongue that she could potentially foresee. "Inkaro...."

  "Yes, the fridge and cabinet are full," Inkaro retorted as he flicked an SSS:AW ring over his shoulder, zipping over Enetha's slumped head and bouncing against the wall flush vertically-sliding door, which side down to reveal mini pocket storage space lined to the brim with every kind of sweet tooth-tickling delicacy imaginable.

  "Yippie," Lizu mumbled weakly as she reached to the fridge for snacks and pulled out a jumbo-sized muffin with a tray containing blue, yellow, and red strawberries that were grown exclusively to be used as muffin toppings. As Lizu started putting the toppings on the muffin, Inkaro's mana ring, turned spatial type, slowly pulled out different food out of the storage space and proceeded to teleport them individually to the others in the cargo bed, before closing the sliding door and finally bursting into shattered syntax.

  Barely keeping it together, Paruneha had managed to pull themselves back from the clutches of slumber, aided in most part by the lime, sapphire, and pink coloured crystal-candy heart on a stick being hovered in front of their face by Morilore.

  "You know, I haven't had to make that kind of food with that combo of flavours in quite some time," Inkaro remarked to a drowsy Paruneha as he had Morilore handle holding the crystal-looking snack for the sleepy stigmai. "You know, it's almost ironic, given where we're going."

  With her horns sparking and crackling up, Lizu darted her head right at Inkaro's reflection in the rearview mirror, eyes filled with utter anticipation, while being enthralled at the very notion she could get her fangs on some Inkaro lore. The of his personal food tester didn't go unnoticed by Inkaro as he lightly exhaled. With eyes trained directly on him, Lizu enthatically uttered, "Go on."