So. They ran away?
I genuinely had no idea what to make of that.
In those last few minutes I'll admit I was feeling the pressure a bit. The Kovrath had started adjusting to my predictions— which, in hindsight, was the entirely predictable outcome I had somehow not predicted. Creatures born naturally attuned to the shadow dimension, given enough time and enough of their own people dying in patterned ways, were going to sit down and think about it eventually. I just hadn't expected them to get there quite so fast.
Looking back at how their patterns had shifted, there was clearly some kind of communication happening between them. Shared perception, maybe. Which also meant they'd have caught on to the crossbow of doom sooner or later too.
Heh. Crossbow of doom.
That was a good name actually. That was the name.
The attacks had stopped nearly half an hour ago and the city was still holding its breath. The formation around the tower hadn't loosened much, for a good portion of them, this was clearly reading as some kind of ploy. Let the defenders exhale, lower the guard, then hit them with whatever they'd been saving. A reasonable fear, all things considered.
But I looked up at the sky and the fireballs had stopped the exact moment the Kovrath pulled back, which told me something. I was fairly certain they'd had some control over where those landed, but the timing and the uninterrupted pattern of them suggested something that ran on its own during an invasion rather than requiring constant direction. Something worth confirming with Dorrusk later.
Gradually, though, the conclusion filtered through the crowd. The Kovrath had actually retreated. Wild as it seemed. Better safe than sorry, so nobody was celebrating exactly, but the math was becoming hard to argue with.
The first to go was Alexei, which was honestly the most predictable thing that had happened all day. The man had poured a truly unreasonable number of mana potions into himself and mana poisoning was simply the logical destination of that journey. The apparition of the Fog Leviathan around him dissolved the moment he lost consciousness, nothing left to anchor it, and shrank down into a small silver bracelet that settled around his wrist.
I caught him with a tendril of violet mana and pulled him in, jumped down from the tower, and carried him in the manner that seemed most practical given the circumstances. People moved out of the way. I caught the texture of the crowd as I passed through it— surprise, relief mixed awkwardly with suspicion, and underneath both of those, a very satisfying undercurrent of fear. Which was fair. A random girl had appeared from nowhere and saved them, and nobody knew what to do with that yet.
Nobody except Markus, who was watching me with the expression of a man running calculations he hadn't finished yet.
Right. Show was over, then. For now.
I needed to handle him carefully, and soon, because I still had my main reason for being here at all, which was to sit Dorrusk down and get a straight answer out of him about where exactly his people had been getting access to Divinity.
***
Alexei was awake and talking, which was good, and talking about me, which was something I had complicated feelings about. He was walking Markus through everything, what I'd done, how he'd come to have the key, the version of myself I'd carefully fed him. It painted a rather flattering picture, I had to admit. I added a few finishing details from where I stood, because if a portrait was being painted I might as well hold the brush for a moment.
A Waryn healer was seeing to him at the same time. I was relieved to hear the damage to his mana veins was minimal, he'd recover within a few days provided he actually let them rest, which meant no spellcasting until further notice. He didn't look thrilled about that. We were gathered in a building that had all the hallmarks of a healer's ward and all the proportions of somewhere designed for people roughly three times the size of the people currently using it. Markus had been waiting here when Alexei came around, and I had planted myself nearby with my expression set exactly where I'd had it since the beginning— warm, open, the kind of smile that was supposed to put people at ease. It kept doing the opposite for reasons I was choosing not to examine.
"I apologize for not telling you sooner," Alexei was saying, his eyes drifting to me and then back to Markus. "I wasn't certain of my own ownership of the artefact at the time, and I didn't yet understand the full scope of what I'd agreed to. If anything I was more afraid of the future where we'd all end up paying collectively for my own foolishness." He paused. "She and I were still in the middle of that conversation when the Kovrath hit, so it rather got left in the dirt."
Markus nodded along with a thoughtful air. "I apologize as well. My first instinct was to leap to certain shadowy conclusions without accounting for the full circumstances." He let that sit, then added, "Rest for now."
Then he looked at me.
I had given him essentially the same story I'd given Alexei, which was mostly true in the way that a building facade is mostly a building. How I'd found myself here. How I came from a faraway land, one where everything Alexei had described outside this trial sounded foreign to me.
Markus had taken it at face value, which was easier than I'd expected— though it made more sense once I understood that the Vraal'Kor had apparently been cut off from the rest of the continent for a considerable stretch of time by a range of darkness-choked mountains Alexei had called the God's Maw. No expedition they'd sent toward Lithrindel or Aurelia had ever come back with anything. So the story of a stranger who knew nothing of them was, conveniently, a story they had no means of checking.
I'd also tried digging through my own knowledge of the history and come away with very little. My current frame of reference only stretched back roughly six hundred years, and most of that was still patchy.
So I filled in the gaps myself. I told Markus I came from a kingdom called Lithrindel, where my species— the form I was currently wearing, anyway— tended to dwell. I explained I was an elf.
Which was technically true. I just didn't have to enjoy it. Using these knife-eared fucks as my cover was a particular flavour of indignity I was still processing.
His eyes lit up at the mention of elves regardless, which was interesting. Even as cut off as the Vraal'Kor was, something of a shared history had apparently survived the separation.
"I haven't had the opportunity to say this properly," Markus began, his tone careful, "but what you did today— what you did for this city— I am not certain we have the vocabulary for it."
He bowed.
I went completely blank.
That was not the direction I had expected this to go. I had been bracing for more suspicion, more careful questions, more of that calculating look he'd had back when in the crowd.
So I didn't do anything, and he straightened up with his hand extended. In it sat the Fog Key, the bracelet, a silver leviathan coiled around itself in a loop. "This rightfully belongs to you. You were the one to slay the Fog Leviathan, which in itself feels like something that shouldn't be possible without the right tools. It makes it rather difficult to believe you haven't even reached gold core yet."
I looked at the key. Part of me did want to take it, genuinely, but something about the timing sat wrong. I turned it over in my head for a moment and decided against it. These people knew this place far better than I did, and I'd already heard enough muttering about Depth Dwellers coming for everyone on the surface to know I didn't fully understand what I was walking into yet. The key might do more work staying with them for now than sitting on my wrist.
"The time might not be right just yet," I said, keeping the tone I'd been maintaining, which was measured, just a touch enigmatic, voice that implied I knew more than I was sharing whether or not that was true. "Please, hold onto it a little longer."
Markus looked at the key for a quiet moment, then bowed again and thanked me for it, which I still wasn't entirely sure how to receive gracefully.
"What I need most right now is to understand this place," I continued. "I know well enough how much these keys matter to you, and they may well be my path out of here too when the time comes. So don't worry on that count, I'll help you find the rest of them." That much felt right, and genuinely meant. Then something in the way he'd phrased it earlier caught up with me. "What did you mean though, the ‘right tools’ to slay the Fog Leviathan?"
Markus paused before answering, turning the thought over first. "It is something we have come to understand about this trial," he said. "It felt unfair at the start, as I imagine it would. But once we started actually looking around, we realized the tools we needed were likely already somewhere among us. It was just a question of finding them before the land finished killing us, because one wrong assumption here tends to produce fatalities in bulk." He folded his hands. "As for the sacred keys specifically, we noticed something rather interesting. Each key we obtained seemed to serve a particular purpose, something that made the next key obtainable. For the Fog Sea, where the Fog Leviathan dwells, we needed the Verdant Key to bless our fighters, to protect them against the stasis of the fog and the Leviathan's ice both. Even with that it was never going to be a fair fight against something sitting at the level of a gold core demigod. But they are... simple creatures, in their way. They move in patterns that can be read. Fast, certainly, very fast in thought, but they struggle to catch deception that is rooted in themselves."
I turned it over in my head for a moment. The Colosseum was cruel, but always fair in its trials, that had been the shape of my own experience and it seemed to be holding true here too. Didn't make it any gentler. It punished mistakes with the kind of thoroughness that felt almost personal.
Markus kept talking, and I let him, because he was giving me more than he realized. The Observer's Mark I'd quietly placed on him was feeding me a steady picture of what was actually going on underneath the composed exterior. He was still cautious, genuinely suspicious, and working very hard to make sure neither of those things showed on his face. Hearing from Alexei that I'd gone into the Fog Leviathan's own territory and hunted it there had rattled him down to his foundations, even if the mask had held up reasonably well on the surface. Through the mark it was crystal clear.
He'd landed on a strategy: my comfort first, my favour above everything else, don't do anything that might upset the terrifying elf woman who apparently hunts demigods recreationally. Which was, for once in my life, a dynamic I had absolutely no complaints about. Let them tiptoe for a change. It made a pleasant difference from the usual arrangement.
He excused himself soon after to go inform the crowd outside. I told him I had my own business to see to. He was curious, visibly, but didn't push even a little. Just nodded and left. What he did with his people from here was his concern, not mine.
I turned to Alexei and told him I'd be back to check on him shortly. His face went immediately crimson, which felt like fever from the mana poisoning rather than anything else. Poor man.
I phased, let the wings form at my back, and dropped straight through the shadowy floor of the building. Heading down toward the underground cathedral.
The overall picture was finally assembling itself into something coherent. Between everything Alexei had told me earlier and what Markus had just filled in, the shape of it was clear enough— collecting these sacred keys was the path forward, and the keys came from killing Leviathans.
Markus had two. A third was now with him courtesy of me. The green key he'd mentioned earlier had apparently been the Verdant Key, the one that was the bare minimum requirement for getting anywhere near the Fog Key, and that particular key was somewhere with this Tyrant Dragon and was unaccounted for right now. I found myself wondering whether they had any divinators who could locate it, then set the thought aside.
The other thing nagging at me was the seven other candidates who'd entered this trial alongside me. None of them had made themselves apparent yet. I'd even let my form shift— kept it close to my Drakkari appearance, minus the horns and tail, which should have been recognizable enough to anyone who'd seen me before and had a functioning set of eyes.
But I saw no glint of recognition in anyone's eyes below, and nobody had dared approach me either. Which raised the uncomfortable question of whether anyone else from the trial was even here at all, and if not here, then where in the absolute hells were they?
I was still turning that over when my network of lizards flagged a new presence near the underground cathedral. My eyes narrowed. Someone had come to check on the priestess.
I pushed a mental command through the Observer's Suggestion I'd left on Dorrusk— hide, get out of sight— and watched through the network as he slipped immediately into the shadow dimension. Good man.
The suggestion spell itself had no real business being used this way, if anyone was being technical about it. It was designed for insidious whispers, subtle nudges and influence that ideally went unnoticed. A blunt instruction barked across a distance should have snapped it entirely. Except I'd been using this particular spell with my clones as a long distance communication tool for long enough that I'd essentially broken it into a different shape through sheer repetition. The trick, as it turned out, was that the receiving end needed to know the mark was there. As long as they were aware of it, aware that the strange voice in their head didn't belong to them and was meant to be answered rather than alarmed at, the spell stopped being an instrument of subtle manipulation and started being something considerably more useful. Dorrusk knew. So it worked.
As for me, I didn't hurry.
I had a much better plan for the priestess persona than simply showing up. One that would let me knock out two problems with a single well-placed hit, and I was rather pleased with it.