With a twitch, beneath a city that was waiting for the sun to sleep, the time that was stopped began to move again. The senses that were once frozen within the huge crystal prison started to return.
In a pose that's as if she was to eternally stay ascending, clad in her plain white dress, the young lady with long dark red hair tried to move her fingers but it was to no avail. Freezing ice restricted every movement. But, with every painstaking struggle, longer and bigger cracks started to appear one after the other.
Then, as if it was punishment for stealing a millennium, with the opening of her eyes, the ice prison shattered! Splinters of different sizes flooded the dark nothingness.
The young girl laid motionless for a moment. The splinters of the prison that once held her hostage retained their glowing blue hue and served as dim light for the fair maiden.
She held her head up and then tried to look around. She was in a big room with a high ceiling. There were misshapen ornate decorations that have been eroded by time everywhere. When she looked more closely, there were probably large towering pillars once but now, most of them are either in pieces that are to be forever mistaken for boulders or were now slowly being eaten by the expanding walls and creeping gigantic roots coming from above.
She was weak but still managed to stand up. In all honesty, it took all of her strength to do so. She let out a deep sigh as if taking in life that was deprived of her for so long and flexed her fingers.
She staggered towards the nearest root, placed her ear on it and then whispered, "Show me the sun."
With her words, ripples started to appear on the surface where she was touching. Within moments, she started to plunge inside the ripple as if it was water. With the flick of the tip of her proud red hair, she vanished.
The roots were from a gigantic tree up in the city of Ark. It's located within the busiest marketplace in the city. The huge tree was lush and had a rich canopy with bright green leaves. No one knew how such a tree could have grown so big in the dry deserts of Luen kingdom. Many attempted to dig as deep as they could but they could never reach the ends of its roots. More amazing was that they found out that all the other trees of the same kind throughout the whole city, including this gigantic tree, were nothing but stems from one colossal tree far beneath the city whose origin and ends could not be traced. Some scholars that studied the tree speculated that it might be millions of years old!
From one of the stems faceting as a tree, in the middle of a crowded street, the red haired lady emerged. It was hot and everyone was busy with their own businesses. The lady hit a passing pedestrian carrying three sacks that looked heavier than his skinny body. The sudden appearance of another person squeezing in the crowd to get through was nothing new. The man just irked in annoyance and carried on his way through the multitude of people.
The young lady felt strange. She looked people in the eyes and then myriads of thoughts flooded her mind. She saw a lot of different places and writings, and heard different languages but none of them made any sense to her. She can't find anything that's familiar.
Her heart beat faster. She was palpitating. A sudden feeling of nausea came over her. She unconsciously grabbed the arm of the next person walking beside her. "Where am I?! What is this place?"
The lady she asked, who was wrapped around a dress and veil with only her face, hands and feet exposed gave a puzzled look in return. "What are you saying?"
The red haired lady moved a step back and shook her head in hesitation as if trying to reject a truth she already knew.
"Are you a foreigner?"
She shook her head harder, turned around and began sprinting. The stranger she approached tried to call for her, "Wait! Let me help you," but she was gone. The lady with bright red hair vanished into the crowd.
Sprinting as fast as she could, she searched for a place where she could get a good perspective of the whole city. She then found an empty park that had a large balcony that overlooked a huge portion of the city from the upper districts.
She couldn't believe what she saw. She was in a huge walled city in the middle of an empty desert.
"Everything's... different."
The wind blew in her direction. All she could do was stand there and wait for things to sink in; like a white candle blazed with elegant dancing crimson.