Reflection's Last Glimpse of Sky

Reflection’s fingers spasmed, a faint downward tremor rippling through her. Zero’s psychic tendrils were a suffocating blanket, each attempt to grasp a fragment of herself rewarded with a void where memories used to be. She felt the pull, not the familiar upward tug that defined existence, but a faint whisper of its opposite, a ghost of 'down.'

The downward resonance was a fleeting echo of her power, a desperate, failing rebellion against the overwhelming ascent. She tried to focus on the crack in the Sky's End Anchor, the subtle vibrations that spoke of Zero’s absolute dominion, but the thought itself felt distant, already unmoored.

"It's gone," she mumbled, not sure if she spoke aloud or if it was just another ghost in Zero’s chorus. The anchor chain that tethered the city, her very being, felt like a tightening noose. She remembered a child, a small hand reaching, a desperate surge of power, and then… nothing. The sky, the endless, hungry upward abyss, had taken it all.

The weight of all she had forgotten pressed down, a suffocating counterpoint to the perpetual upward Pull.

The last sliver of a memory, a child's laughter, caught on the upward current and vanished forever.