1. Ascension
Grace Terrace woke up exhausted again.
Her alarm shrieked at 6:47 AM, three full snoozes past when she'd meant to rise. She slapped it silent and lay there, staring at the water stain on her ceiling that looked like a reaching hand. Her body felt like it had run a marathon. Her muscles ached. There was a sharp pain behind her left eye.
But god, what a night.
She'd been Astralight again. She could still feel the echo of it—the way her body had felt weightless and powerful, crackling with cosmic energy. The Void Serpents had breached the Luminous Barrier near Sector Seven, and she'd held them back for three hours alongside Tempest and the Crystalline Guard. Her light-shields had turned their acidic breath. Her radiance had cauterized the tears in reality itself.
Grace smiled at the ceiling, even as her phone buzzed with a text from her manager: Where are you?
She'd been working at the accounting firm for seven years. Today would be the fourth time this month she'd been late.
At the office, her colleague Jennifer asked if she was feeling okay.
“You look terrible,” Jennifer said, not unkindly. “Are you sleeping?”
“Not really,” Grace admitted, logging into her computer. The spreadsheets bloomed across her screen like a field of meaningless numbers. “But it's worth it.”
Jennifer laughed uncertainly. “What's worth it? Netflix?”
Grace almost told her. Almost explained that while Jennifer had been sleeping in her suburban house with her husband and her two kids, Grace had been defending the Sixth Dimension from an incursion of Unreality. That she had saved literally trillions of lives last night. That she was a hero.
Instead, she just smiled and said, “Something like that.”
That night, the moment her head touched the pillow, Grace felt the familiar pull. Like gravity reversing. Like falling upward through the floor of the world.
She opened her eyes to the Celestial Nexus.
Her body—her real body, she was starting to think—materialized in a cascade of starlight. Here, she was taller. Stronger. Her costume shimmered with captured nebulae, and her hair floated around her head in a corona of luminescence. Here, she mattered.
“Astralight!” Tempest swept down from the crystalline towers, his storm-cloud cape billowing. “Thank the Source you're here. The Entropy Cultists have taken hostages in the Median Realm. We need you.”
Grace—Astralight—felt purpose surge through her like electricity.
“Let's go,” she said, and they flew.
2. Slipping
Three weeks later, Grace's mother called.
“You missed Sunday dinner again,” her mom said. There was hurt in her voice, but also worry. “Honey, are you sure you're okay? Dad and I barely hear from you anymore.”
Grace was sitting in her darkening apartment, curtains drawn, trying to stay awake long enough to eat something. But her eyes kept drooping. The pull was starting earlier now—she could feel it even in daylight, like a song only she could hear.
“I'm fine, Mom. Just busy with work.”
A lie. She'd been fired yesterday. Her manager had been apologetic but firm: too many absences, too many mistakes, falling asleep at her desk. Grace had felt nothing. The job had been feeling less real anyway, like a photograph of a life rather than an actual life.
“Grace, please. Come see us this weekend. We're worried about you.”
“I'll try,” Grace said, knowing she wouldn't.
That night, in the Luminous Realm, the High Council of Eternal Stars commended her. She had single-handedly prevented the Collapse of the Amber Dimension. Trillions of beings would continue to exist because of her sacrifice.
“You are the greatest of us, Astralight,” the Voice of the Cosmos told her. “The universe itself bends to your light.”
She felt tears on her cheeks. Finally, finally, she was seen.
When she woke, it was to her phone ringing. Her best friend Kara.
Grace let it go to voicemail.
Time began to blur.
Days in her waking life felt like swimming through syrup. Food tasted like cardboard. Conversations with the few people she still saw—the mailman, the cashier at the convenience store—felt like poorly dubbed foreign films, the words not quite matching the mouths.
But the nights. Oh, the nights.
She was getting stronger. The Council had granted her access to the Inner Light, the primordial force that held back the Dark Between Stars. She could feel it even now, pooled inside her chest like liquid gold, waiting for sleep so it could be released.
Her apartment filled with notebooks. She started documenting everything—the cosmic geography, the hierarchy of threats, the names of her allies. She needed to remember. This was her real life. This was what mattered.
Jennifer came by once, let herself in with the spare key Grace had given her years ago.
“Jesus Christ, Grace.” Jennifer stared at the curtained darkness, the scattered papers, the unwashed dishes. “What happened to you?”
Grace was sitting on the floor, too tired to make it to the couch. She smiled up at her friend—her former friend, really. Jennifer didn't understand. How could she?
“I'm doing important work,” Grace said.
“You're having a breakdown.” Jennifer knelt beside her. “Please. Let me call someone. Your mom, or—or a doctor, or—”
“I'm fine.” Grace's voice was flat. “You should go.”
Jennifer left crying.
That night, Astralight fought beside the Eternal Guard against the emergence of the Void Made Flesh. The battle lasted what felt like days. When it was done, when the last of the darkness was sealed away, the Voice of the Cosmos spoke to her alone.
“You are the only one who can truly stop what is coming,” it whispered in her mind. “But you are stretched too thin, split between two worlds. You must choose, Astralight. You must commit fully to the Light.”
Grace woke up understanding what she had to do.
3. Descent
The research wasn't difficult. Grace had always been good at finding information.
Sedatives. The right combination. Insulin. Cold water immersion. There were ways to induce a coma without killing yourself—you just had to be careful. Methodical.
She wasn't suicidal. She wanted to be very clear about that in her own mind. She didn't want to die. She wanted to live—really live, in the place where she mattered, where her existence had weight and meaning.
The waking world was the dream. She understood that now. This apartment, this body, this half-life of exhaustion and irrelevance—this was the nightmare.
Astralight was real. The Luminous Realm was real.
And there was a war to win.
Her mother came by after a week of unreturned calls. She pounded on the door until Grace answered.
“Oh, honey.” Her mother's face crumpled. “Look at you.”
Grace knew she looked bad. She'd lost weight—food required waking hours she couldn't spare. Her skin was gray. Her eyes had dark circles so deep they looked like bruises.
“Mom, I'm okay,” she said, but her voice came out wrong, distant and dreamy.
“You're not. You're not okay.” Her mother tried to push past her into the apartment, but Grace held the door firm.
“I need you to leave.”
“Grace, please—”
“I'm saving the universe.” Grace heard herself say it. Heard how it sounded. But it was true. “Every night, I save trillions of lives. I hold back the darkness. I'm the only one who can do it. The Voice told me—”
“What voice?” Her mother's eyes were wide, frightened. “Baby, what voice?”
Grace closed the door.
That night, she assembled her materials. The pills she'd been stockpiling. The syringe. She'd done the calculations carefully. Enough to induce a deep coma, but not enough to cause permanent damage. She would need someone to find her eventually—the body would need care—but she'd stopped paying rent anyway. The landlord would come in a month or so.
By then, she'd have won the war.
She lay down on her bed for the last time as Grace Terrace.
But when she closed her eyes, something was different.
The pull came, but it felt wrong. Barbed. Instead of falling upward, she felt yanked, like a fish hooked through the gut.
The Celestial Nexus materialized around her, but the towers were dark. The crystalline spires had gone black and slick, like they were coated in oil.
“Tempest?” she called. Her voice echoed wrong.
No answer.
She walked through the empty streets of the Nexus. Her footsteps splashed. When she looked down, she saw the ground was flooded with something dark and viscous. Not water. Not blood. Something worse.
“Hello, Astralight.”
The Voice of the Cosmos spoke behind her. She turned.
And saw it.
It had never had a form before. But now it did.
It was her.
Not like her. Her. Grace Terrace, but wrong. Stretched. Its limbs were too long, its joints bent the wrong way. Its face was her face, but the skin was translucent, and underneath she could see something writhing and infinite. Its eyes were empty sockets that leaked darkness like tears.
“What—” Grace couldn't breathe. “What are you?”
The thing wearing her face smiled. Its teeth were too sharp, too many.
“I am what feeds on light,” it said in her voice, in the Voice of the Cosmos, in all the voices. “And you, dear Grace, have been such a wonderful meal. So bright. So nourishing. Every night, you give yourself to me. Every night, you let me devour a little more.”
Grace looked down at herself. At Astralight.
Her costume was dimming. The stars in her hair were going out one by one. She could see her hands starting to turn translucent, just like the thing before her.
“The Void Serpents,” she whispered. “The Entropy Cultists. The war—”
“All me.” It laughed, and the sound was like breaking glass. “All me, wearing different faces. I am the enemy you've been fighting, Grace. I am also the world you've been saving. I am the Voice that told you that you mattered.”
It stepped closer. Grace tried to back away, but her feet wouldn't move.
“There is no war,” it whispered, inches from her face. “There never was. There is only you, burning yourself away, feeding yourself to the dark, so eager to believe you were special. So desperate to escape the small, ordinary truth of your small, ordinary life.”
Grace felt tears streaming down her face. “No. No, this is real. I'm real. I'm Astralight. I'm—”
“Disappearing,” it finished. “Look.”
Grace looked down. She could see through herself now. Through her arms, her legs, her chest. She was becoming transparent. Becoming nothing.
She could feel the pull of her body—her real body, lying in her apartment, the chemicals she'd ingested working through her bloodstream. She'd taken enough to sleep for a very long time.
Maybe forever, if no one found her.
The thing that wore her face opened its mouth impossibly wide.
“Thank you, Grace,” it said. “For feeding me so well.”
Epilogue
Grace Terrace's landlord found her three days later when he came to discuss the overdue rent.
She was in a coma. The doctors couldn't explain it—the toxicology reports came back inconclusive, nothing that should have caused this level of unresponsiveness. Brain activity was minimal but present. She was somewhere far away.
Her mother sat by her hospital bed and held her hand and wept.
On the monitors, Grace's heart beat steadily. Her chest rose and fell with the ventilator's rhythm.
And if you looked very closely at her face—though none of the nurses ever mentioned it, because it seemed impossible, because the lighting in hospital rooms can play tricks—you might have seen her becoming ever so slightly more translucent.
Like she was fading.
Like something was eating her light.
In the space behind sleep, in the dark between dreams, Astralight fought on. She fought the Void Serpents and the Entropy Cultists. She fought the Dark Between Stars. She won battle after battle after battle.
The war would never end. That was the point.