Beneath a sky pulsing with shifting hues, where the air hums like a distant melody, the maiden walks barefoot among ruins that crumble like old memories. Around her, colossal sunflowers stretch toward the heavens, their golden faces absorbing the light of the unseen sun. Their stems coil like pillars of an ancient temple, their petals shimmer like molten gold.
She looks down her body is changing. She is vast, towering over the ruins of the forgotten temple, yet still so small beneath the sunflower giants. Gravity shifts around her, a sensation both exhilarating and terrifying. She knows this is a lucid dream, yet she does not control it. She merely flows within it, a ripple in the tide of something greater.
In her hands, she cradles a lotus flower, its petals trembling as if alive, exhaling a soft luminescence. It was not there before. Or was it always there? Time twists in this place, coiling like smoke.
Before her, half-buried in the ruins, stands an ancient mirror, impossibly smooth, its silvered surface shifting like water caught between dimensions. The Mirror of Dreams. A relic of forgotten gods, it is said to reveal not just reflections, but the spiraling echoes of the soul, scattered across time, across reality.
She steps closer. The lotus pulses in her grip, synchronizing with the rhythm of her heartbeat. The mirror swallows her gaze. At first, it is only her face staring back, dark hair, skin inked with forgotten symbols. Then, the edges ripple. Her reflection multiplies, stretching infinitely into the distance.
A thousand versions of herself blink in unison. Some stand in golden light, others dissolve into shadow. Some hold the lotus, others cradle empty hands, fingers dripping with liquid starlight. In one reflection, her eyes are galaxies; in another, her face is missing altogether.
But there is something more—something beyond the mere infinite reflections. A pattern.
The versions of herself, scattered across realities, collapse into a single moment. A fixed point in eternity. The star above them does not move. The cosmic bodies, sun, moon, and distant constellations—remain frozen in their celestial dance, as if bearing witness to something of great importance.
This moment has happened before. It is happening now. It will happen again.
She is every version of herself, merging into one singular awareness, a cosmic thread woven into the fabric of time.
The ruins pulse, the sunflowers bend, the sky fractures into colors she has no names for. The mirror breathes.
"To seek the truth is to dissolve into it," a voice murmurs from nowhere and everywhere.
She exhales. The lotus in her hands begins to bloom, its petals peeling back to reveal an eye at its center, wide and watching.
Her reflection smiles.
She does not.
She is no longer certain which side of the mirror she stands on
