Still as night, the shadow entered her dreams.

The inside of her mind was a dark, barren landscape, brittle, bleached grey grass reaching up to a starless sky. Twisted black trees dotted the plain,  finger bone branches clacking together as a hot wind swept past. Her single black braid flicked back and forth like a serpent. "Where are you?" The sound sped away, getting quieter and quieter but never quite fading till it was just the ghost of a sentence. The buzzing of a thousand such phrases was only noise in this dead world.

 A burning building appeared on the horizon, the same building as always, and with nary a sigh of regret she began her march through the pale fields. 

Every step crackled under her feet as the dry grass snapped and fell to dust. Each footstep left a little hole in the floor of the world. The dry remnant of fear she still had curled in on itself, but the rest of her kept moving.

A dark form flashed in the the corner of her vision, flying to the burning house with a cry of digust. She walked on.

For a few moments she entertained the thought of running. It was a foolish thought. How could you escape from your own mind? Still, she was tempted to try. She spun around, long thin braid whipping her face as it whirled with her, and looked at the crumbling horizon of the dreamscape. 

There was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The world seemed to fade away until it just ended in grey. No, white. Black. A color somewhere in between all of those and yet infinitely impossible to define. If she ran that way she'd . . . evaporate, likely. Just fade into that void and never awake.

It sounded more than half-tempting sometimes.

The emperor demands your presence. The voice shivered through the world, sending fragments of earth spiraling down into the emptiness below. She felt her body forcibly turned back to the burning building, but this time did not resist the summons.

Heat hit her like a flock of dying phoenixes, burning her eyebrows and cooking her pale skin. The building was right there. Close enough to fall into.  Bracing her mind she stepped into the pits of hell.

She could not hear. She could not breathe. All she could do was walk forward and feel. It was always the same here. Always the same. Finally she felt a wash of coolness and opened her eyes.

"Is this better?" He sat on the overstuffed armchair like it was a throne, long, thin legs stretched out lazily. "I've never understood why you have to walk through that hellscape before our meetings." His voice, like deep shadow over a mountain lake, chilled her. It always did, though it was a voice she remembered from a time before memory.

"You put me there. You or your torivor."

He smiled grimly, pale lips twisting in a farce of humanity. "Oh no, my dear. That world is a concoction of you own insantity, not mine. I'd thought you at least realized that."

Her broken, foolish, human mind tried to deny it. The other part - the only part that mattered - tucked that morsel of knowledge away like the precious gift it was. Maybe one day she could use it to repair the hellscape she'd created.

The hope rose up, silent and still as a hunting wildcat, trying to catch her unaware. She culled it swiftly and sent it limping back into the darker parts of her mind. Well . . . darker in the way that jet was darker than obsidian or midnight darker than a cave. As dark as a place can be without a sliver of light for comparison.

She forced herself to focus on the room she was 'in' and the walls stopped wavering. The Emperor watched with avid curiosity.

As she sat down on the splintery stool across from him he asked, "The mission went according to plan, I assume?"

She nodded once, the barest dip of her chin. "There won't be rebellion from them for a while."

"Good." It was as close to praise as he ever came, though she rarely let it bother her. What was praise to a ghost? "Let me see them."

She made the seeds appear in the dream and tossed them over. His thin fingers snatched them out of the air and he raised one to his eye, examining it closely. "Very good. Now destroy them."

"But-" She stopped and sank her claw-like nails into the soft core of the seed. The waste was disgusting but . . . She flinched as the seed split open with a sickening squeak. The Emperor's will was law.

He was nodding slowly, a slow smile on his borrowed face. It wasn't his, but he wore it for each meeting. Part of her imagined it was how the Torivor would look without its shadows.

The Emperor furrowed his brow and muttered a quick phrase in Edomic. It fled her mind as quick as she heard it, the near-holy words slipping past her like oil over water. The seed in her hand gave a jolt as he finished and began to grow, expanding into the form of a man.

He was Amar Kabal but not, with long hair but ghost white skin and shadowed, dead eyes. Darkness clung like a second skin, slightly out of sync as he bowed to the Emperor. The shadow followed a second behind, its motions jerky like a cheap puppet.

"Send me the rest of the seeds when you wake," the Emperor said. He rose from the armchair and stretched. The shadow man vanished with a snap of his fingers. "I want to try this in the waking world."

As she faded from the hellscape she asked, "And what is this?"

A wide, cruel smile. "The birth of a new race: the Amar Shayah."

She shivered. Even commoners knew the old words for evil. The words rang hauntingly as she woke from the dream.

Amar Shayah.

Shayah.

Death.