The sanctum's gloom seemed to swallow Amara as she entered, shadows draping over her like a heavy mourning shawl. Her eyes slowly adjusted, making out the vague silhouettes of robed priestesses swaying in the penumbra cast by guttering braziers. Their cowls tilted in eerie synchronicity, shawled forms undulating like marionettes bound to some unseen cosmic cadence.
At their coordinated center hulked the sanctum's obsidian effigy - a triadic basalt idol with three warped, malformed visages frozen in rictus torment. The firelight played across its twisting features, casting them in a sickly, pulsating glow that mirrored the roiling unease in Amara's stomach.
She steeled herself, projecting her voice to ring clear through the sanctum's vaulted silence. "I seek the Oracles' counsel. The discomfort of the lower level dwellers has become...troubling. It seems there may be something darker roiling behind the scenes."
Her words hung heavily, only broken by the braziers' fitful hiss and crackle. Then, another sound - the whisper of robes against the clouded floor, seeming to emanate from the very stones.
"Then so it shall be."
The new voice carried a tone of commanding, unquestionable authority. Amara turned to find the unmistakable figure of Cethea, high lorekeeper, emerging from the vestry. Her shawled gait made not even a ripple across the floor, as if her feet skirted the mortal plane entirely.
With one delicate finger, she gestured towards the obsidian effigy - or more precisely, the concentric gemstone rings pulsing with eldritch luminescence radiating from its base. Their alien runes shimmered in that baleful radiance, arcane symbolism writhing as if being etched into Amara's very psyche.
"With each revelation, your mind will draw nearer to the precipice of shattering," the priestess intoned, her words carrying the solemnity of a holy invocation. "Few possess the fortitude to withstand such a magnitude of onslaught through cosmic enlightenment."
Amara felt her stomach clench as she gazed upon the glyphed circumferences inscribed in those hypnotic rings. A familiar sense of vertigo gripped her - the same existential dizziness that so often accompanied her waking dreams of vastness and ruin.
She drew a steadying breath, squaring her shoulders. "Then I will accept these visions. And weather whatever revelations lurk in that cosmic vastness..."
At her declaration, the sanctum itself seemed to shudder in protest. Reverberating harmonics built in a swelling crescendo, levitating the burning rune-rings with scouring intensity. Amara's breath escaped in a strangled gasp as unseen forces lashed at her essence, peeling away at her frail corporeal housing layer by horrific layer.
The veiled priestess looked on impassively, utterly unmoved. "Let this corporeal husk slough its mortal delusions, initiate. Only then can your spiritual essence drink full from the universe's unalloyed truth..."
Fighting against the unravelling onslaught, Amara surrendered to it piece by tortured piece. Her senses distended into the blazing infinities as her transcendent metamorphosis took agonizing hold. Subjective realities calcified and fractured away into rapid shard-storms of hypercompressed perception, scattering her very consciousness across planes of existence.
Through those whirling, synaesthetic vortices, horrific epiphanies stirred from the deeps and took on formless, half-nascent shape. Amara's unshackled psyche hurtled across cosmic vista after cosmic vista of impossible scale and intensity as raw, unfiltered thoughts battered her being.
Radiant tendrils of exotic energy sheared past at relativistic speeds, coalescing into a blur of stellar matter and dark void before changing to pulsing sequences of innumerable transfigurations. The visions blurred reality and dream, the rational and irrational, into a singular delirious fugue of oscillating extremes.
Somewhere amid that blistering, untempered truth, Amara sensed...presences. Vast sentinels of sentient force welled against the outer borders of her expanded perceptions like cosmic walls closing in. Though she could scarcely attribute personality or coherent thoughts to those formless intelligences, their scrutiny lasered through her being with invasive purpose.
They felt nothing like the incorporeal acolyte spirits that traditionally guided such metamorphoses. These were something altogether more primordial – ineffable, godlike entities methodically cataloging and quantifying her psyche's basest components down to the subatomic syntax of her soul's codified pattern.
**Exotic Spatial Harmonic Encryption Detected. Disassembling Rhetorical Quantifiers...**
*Ethnographic Identity Matrices Unspooled: Indige Cethean "demi-human" Anthro-Proto-Harmonic Acknowledged... Seed Pattern (Amara Ilagra) Recognized... Commencing Revelatory Uplink....*
In that instant, Amara's mindscape hemorrhaged into vivid raptures of searing revelation. She tumbled into the cosmic deeps cowering with existential dread as every fragile concept structuring her subjective realties atomized in the face of such unfathomable truth.
Coherent dreamscapes of anguished apocalypse crystallized from the roiling abyss in waves of delirium:
The pristine viridian expanse of Arcadia, Cethea's sole lush biosphere, shimmered under assault. Its transperisteel canopy shuddered as pure celestial explosions and otherworldly ordnance detonated in blinding detonations across the hundred-miles of hardened alloy. Like ghostly fingers raking wounds across both it and the planet's curvature, the blasts sundered through Arcadia's armored lithosphere in seismic upheavals of epic scale.
Each devastating volley unleashed tsunamic peals of planet-shaking force, laying waste to entire platoons of heavily armored DOG juggernauts as they returned fire amidst the strafing runs. Cloaked in halos of incandescent aurora, the war machines unleashed waves of laser focused munitions and arcane energies across a terrifying spectrum – ion beams, cascading thermobaric blast waves, antimatter grenades, and other celestial ordinances hell-bent on eradicating any trace of Arcadia's utopian splendor.
Amara felt her senses inexorably drawn towards the apocalyptic nexus. There – dominating that hellish panorama like a vengeful stellar monarch – loomed the unmistakable silhouette of Victoria's juggernaut flagship.
Its fell underside bristled with blaster and ordnance towers of inestimable scale. All choreographed in lethal cadence to unleash titanic, searing emerald beams capable of atomizing all in their path. Each ravening beam's impact leaving ephemeral aftershocks.
Yet even as devastation was wrought on a cataclysmic scale, Amara's synapses fired in transcendent overload. For at the vortex's perfect center – the abyssal singularity from which this entire meta-sonic upheaval radiated – she finally perceived...HER.
Victoria's obsidian silhouette flayed against the curvatures of space-time like a sentient singularity.
Then behind her, a heterochromatic, all-seeing plurality of red and gold – an archonic gestalt computing whole civilizational demises across infinite transfinite fractals. All-Consuming and All-Devouring simultaneously as mastermind that had orchestrated Cethea's terminal undoing.
"...ORBIT SCOURED.... NEXUS IMMINENT.....all Children of Cethea cleansed in THE REBIRTHING." Without warning the heterochromatic gaze of red and gold now locked onto Amara with curiosity. "You do not belong here!"
The voice effortlessly forced her expanded psyche out of the shimmering void.