She steels herself. She has a way to verify, she thinks. It just- could make all of this not work. Reveal that it's fake.

And it would be so embarrassing if she was wrong.

She looks to the east. Is the sky beginning to lighten?

Light is beginning to touch the forest to the east, gathering over the trees in the distance and starting to peek over the horizon.

Crin looks towards the sun, a distant wistfulness in her gaze. 

She takes another deep breath. Takes in the wistful look on Crin's face.

She needs to do this. It's the right thing to do. Even if it's hard.

"Crin. I."

She pauses for a moment.

"The smartest thing to do, if we maybe don't have that much time, is to learn as quickly as I can if I can trust you, and move forward from there. That comet- it may mean something very bad. It may also have been for me. There is something I can do that will- only work if you're someone I should trust. Something impossible. Something that should let you know that I'm- not like anything else. I don't think that's enough to fully trust me but- it should show that I'm something new."

Crin's eyebrows rise sharply. "If there is something you can do to — test my intentions — that would give you the safety to share whatever your situation is — then yes, do it. I don't know what magic you might have if you're not of this world, but if there is some truth magic greater than Hysh available to you, I will gladly allow it to be used, assuming it will not compel my speech."  

"It's- not quite like that. Not truth magic. A form of cursebreaking that works on- well. A particular subset of people I can trust. And it works inviolably."

Some people might have a True Love they couldn't trust. She's not one of them. And- Crin looks so, so much like someone she could love. If she's even mostly been portraying herself accurately, she's a True Love if anyone is. It's not hard to see, when she's not reflexively looking away.

"I don't fully know what it would leave behind, of your vampirism. The strength. The talents. The grace. All of that, yes, but I don't know everything. But- I do know something it would remove."

"Would you like to be able to see the sun again?"

Crin blinks, then looks down at her hands. 

"... Yes," she says. Her voice quivers just slightly. "Yes, I would like that very much."

And Alethia gets down on one knee in front of Crin, like a knight kneeling in front of her liege. She holds up a hand to her.

"Your hand, please."

Crin bows her head, and offers it. 

It seems clear to her, from what Alethia has said, that this is a magic of Rhya, or someone like her. Someone who cares deeply about the meaning of one person to another. 

She should treat this moment with the solemnity it deserves. 

And Alethia takes her hand and kisses the back of it gently.

Something shifts. Warmth creeps back into Crin's body, not physical but something more.

Her heart beats. 

The sun crests a hill in the distance. The clouds part. A single ray of sunlight reaches out across the world to alight on Crin.

It's warm.

Crin flushes a little, as it suddenly becomes very clear just what relationship this is founded on.

Then she registers that she's standing in the sunlight, and is not burnt. 

The clouds have parted.

She looks up, and sees the sun. 

"Oh," she says quietly. 

Then her other hand comes in and gently rests in Alethia's hair. 

"You may rise," she says, her mouth working on autopilot. "You have done me... a great service." 

Then she breaks down and laughs, bright and silvery and wild, like she'd never thought she'd be free. 

"I - I don't have words. Explain, please. Explain everything." 

Alethia beams. She can trust her. It's going to be okay. This, at least, is going to be okay.

It's real. 

Up she gets.

"It's a bit hard, but- I'll try. I- huh, I might actually need to either give you an hour of specifics or else do a bunch of- translating concepts so I don't need to do that. The advantage of the second is you get more of the- actionable information faster."

"I want the real explanation, with the least distortion possible. Take your time. "

"Okay, this is going to- take a bit. First- I'm not from this world. I think you guessed that already. I'm from- somewhere farther than the Draenei. Somewhere you couldn't reach no matter how far you flew, no matter what magic you used. It's- not possible with what can be done anywhere that can be reached from here by any entity in this universe. Except probably me, eventually. That world was very different from this one. It had no magic at all, as far as anyone could tell. It simply wasn't a thing. We were- you know the differences in the Empire over the last few thousand years? The bows to crossbows to cannons to handguns? The slow increase in prosperity? We were- farther along. A lot farther along. We had handguns that could fire multiple bullets each second. We had cities built of great towers of steel and glass hundreds of feet tall. I don't know everything that let my world build that, but I know some of it, and I brought books along explaining as much of the rest as I could manage."

Crin listens intently. "I see... I suppose the lack of Dhar would make that world much more stable, in some ways... The Runinous Powers presumably would also not exist, being formed wholly of magic... That in itself could be massive." 

"Indeed. People are- well, still terrible, at times. Remarkably so. But there aren't those- dangling opportunities to achieve power in exchange for losing part of yourself."

She looks off at the sunrise. It really is quite beautiful.

"The world was also only inhabited by humans. And old. This planet- if I recall correctly, has had rather a lot of geological change in just the past short while due to magic. My world didn't have that, so we could- look at old fossils and track the slow development of life. We didn't even have gods, as far as anyone could tell, instead very simple life had spontaneously generated a very long way in the past and- that is a bit beside the point, actually. How species develop in a world without magic is something I can tell you about some other time."

"Spontaneously generated? From nothing? That seems remarkable. Were there precursors of some form? - but I digress, please continue." 

"Not from nothing but from- nonliving matter happening to collide exactly the right way. The basic thing is that it turns out the smallest, least-sophisticated life can be surprisingly simple compared to things big enough to be seen with the naked eye and it only needs to happen once. And when you have billions of years and billions of billions of planets the chance it happens once starts to get appreciable. I am doing it again. Okay, actually moving on this time."

"I think the next immediate thing is- well, all of this is sufficiently absurd that I'm not actually going to go in chronological order, you're going to get some conclusions before I mention the things that caused me to eventually draw them in a detailed way, but you'll still be getting them."

She takes a deep breath.

"So, first. That illusion of a completely magicless world was incredibly thorough. Thousands of years of history and not one single credible miracle or example of a person doing anything magical. And that illusion suddenly broke for me a day before I found myself on this world. A thing that is to gods what gods are to mortals reached down into my apparently-magicless universe to- empower me. Not even in exchange for anything, simply because a person like me being empowered was something that was- in accordance with her desires. The thing-above-gods isn't- well, if she were benevolent in the same way I am she wouldn't be scanning through universes to find people she liked and dumping a bit of power on them, she would be using her might to make paradises and squish things like the Chaos Gods like flies. But I don't particularly feel inclined to judge her, on account of the way she gifted me a frankly absurd amount of power and told me to head off and have fun. And- I think she may in fact work in a way where empowering people who are- shaped in a particular way- is how she can do such large things and reach so far."

"It is, of course, theoretically possible that what actually happened is that the deceptive one of the four reached across the heavens to perform a trick on me in a world otherwise absent magic, perhaps the one the Old Ones got humanity from originally, and is at this moment exerting truly absurd amounts of power to allow me to do impossible things. I don't think that would be possible outside of the Realm of Chaos or maybe the Chaos Wastes and even then it would be- prohibitively costly and not actually- within his standard method of operation- but I could be wrong about that. I'm acknowledging that first because if I wasn't that would be incredibly suspicious and second because if I'm wrong about some aspect of that it's very important to learn so quickly."