Astarelle fell for it. Unbalanced by his knowledge of her semi-adopted street children living in Ixian Castle, and expecting another ridiculous trick, she moved to catch what might have been a projectile. Pain flared just from spreading her fingers. Her feet shifted, one bracing very close to the edge in spite of herself. She simply had no time to think, and the void seemed to pull at her subconscious with a numbing, comforting song.

The invisible ball came and went, leaving her unharmed and unmoved. She barked a laugh sharply in his direction. In a blink, he was gone. She thought he had hidden behind the shovel-faced brute again, but he was so much closer. Her eyes twitched down just in time to see his obnoxious smirk – boyish yet diabolical, and brimming with dangerous potential. Then, his fist erupted upward into her jaw. She almost blacked out for a moment. Her sand left her, its collected glass tinkling against the floor. Farther down the hall, her gems chips also fell, lifeless. How her Farohtian senses could still work while her physical ones were bludgeoned into uselessness, she didn't know. But, it was those senses that first told her how this battle would end; had ended. The sand and gem chips were moving away, or her from them.

Her eyes cracked open in that direction. The arena lay just beyond her feet, shrinking rapidly. It already looked like a destructed doll house. She could still see into the hall, as apparently even gravity ended at the white threshold, and she had flown upward and horizontally... for all the good directions would do as she drifted away.

“Drift away,” she said numbly, feeling the weight of eternity crush upon her. It was over, and the ending might just last forever. She wanted to scream. Somehow, her jaw did not ache as much as she expected. By all rights, she could have screamed her breath out. However, a tranquillity was seeping into her. She no longer had to worry, it whispered. She no longer had to even breath. It was just so much habit left over from a physical world. The whiteness stole her sight, her pain. It balmed her in silence.

Not yet, she thought meekly. Then, again with greater force to honor twelve-or-so feral children. Not yet! She reached out with senses that the void could not stiffle. She felt her sand, her gems, and the footprints of Zack Blaze. He was the enemy she never wanted, just as she hadn't wished to become caretaker to urchins and a bloody Ixian Knight to boot. Though, if she had to choose, by the depths was it obvious.

Her fingers brushed the pendant that swayed weightless before her. She could barely feel the pain, now. “If you saw the Cell, bastard, you'd know how blasted stubborn I am,” she hissed. With the pendant cupped in her palm, she held it toward the shrinking arena and reached out, embracing the power of her birthright.

In the hall, the grains of sand shivered like a thousand questing hands. And amid them, the gem chips began to tumble.