"Well, to explain the whole situation properly we need to start from the very beginning," Markus said.
We were standing on top of the massive palace in city's north. To the west, a stretch of dark abyss sat on the horizon, still very far but visible even from here. The lenses in my eyes shifted and the distance collapsed into detail. To the north lay something that resembled a forest, except the trees were enormous and the entire thing was wrapped in a swirling mist that made reading it properly difficult. And to the east was a forest on fire. Had been on fire, by the look of it, for some considerable time. The flames were rainbow coloured, burning in every colour at once, much like Dragonfire. Were they burning on divinity?
Markus's voice pulled me back. "As I said before. We were given a rather simple task, kill these gold core demigod leviathans. A task that, no matter how one approached it, seemed genuinely impossible. Made worse by the fact that every single one of these leviathans dwelled inside untouchable domains scattered all around us." He paused to gather the next part. "We didn't know whether it was luck or just how this trial had been designed. After suffering considerable casualties exploring those domains, nearly three years into our stay here, we finally found one. A massive red scaled beast, horrifying to look at even before you factored in what it was, and it was outside its domain. Wounded, too. By what, we had no idea. Likely another leviathan, given what we'd heard about their infighting from the Kovraths we'd managed to catch spying on us. We just hadn't expected to ever actually see evidence of it."
"And you took the opportunity?"
"We took it. The flames to the east were already pressing on us, and if we let this chance go we had no guarantee another would ever come. With whatever we could put together on short notice, we launched everything we had at it. Managed to kill it, though it still cost us, a wounded demigod is still a demigod." He summoned the dark crimson miniature leviathan I'd noticed earlier, turning it over in his hand. "That was how we obtained the first key. The Black Flame Key. And perhaps walked directly into the trap that was waiting for us."
I nodded and told him to continue.
The bigger picture came together piece by piece. Killing that leviathan had shattered whatever fragile arrangement this world had been maintaining. What had previously been Kovrath probing cautiously at the edges, trying to determine what these outsiders even were and what they wanted, had escalated almost immediately into full blown raids with a clear goal of eliminating them entirely. And the tribe of beastkin creatures with burning feathers and plumage, the ones who had apparently built their entire existence around worshipping the Flame Leviathan, had gone feral at its death and thrown themselves ritualistically into the divine pyre burning to the east.
At first nobody had understood what that ritual was accomplishing. Then they'd realized with horror that the divine pyre was expanding. It was still very far off, years away from reaching the city, closer to a decade at that pace, but it was moving. It had a direction and it had momentum and it was not going to stop.
I looked at the burning rainbow flames on the horizon and could just barely make out the encroaching boundary of them where they met the ordinary dark of the landscape. A couple of years still, maybe more. But what happened then?
I could see the trap.
Once the first key was in their hands, the choice had effectively been made for them, find the rest of the keys or wait to be burned alive. There wasn't a third option.
And it wasn't just the fire. The forest to the north had begun expanding slowly the moment they'd obtained the Verdant Key, reaching toward the city at its own unhurried pace. The abyss to the west had started swallowing more and more landmass once the Abyss Key was in hand. And now that the Fog Key had finally entered the picture, the black fog sea to the south would start rising too. Every key they collected accelerated the doom surrounding them on all sides. The more progress they made, the faster everything closed in.
My mind was already drawing the lines between the Leviathans and their respective domains. The Flame Leviathan in the divine pyre to the east. The Fog Leviathan in the black fog sea to the south. The Verdant one somewhere in that mist-wrapped forest to the north. And presumably an Abyss Leviathan sitting in whatever that darkness to the west actually was. I had a great many questions about how they'd managed to obtain the Abyss and Verdant Keys, but a more immediate one pushed to the front first.
"So all these hostile domains are expanding simultaneously," I said. "Shouldn't the denizens of this place be worried about that too? They might manage to adapt to one, but surely they don't believe all four domains crashing into each other produces somewhere anyone can actually live. Shouldn't they be helping you instead of trying to eliminate you?"
"They do believe a collision of the domains would mean certain death for everyone within the trial," Markus said. "But here is the thing, they also firmly believe that if the keys were returned to their respective domains, a new Leviathan would be born in each one. The ecosystem would stabilise again. Once all keys were back where they came from, the end of the world would be stalled."
"That's quite a bet to place on something with no certainty behind it."
"Yes. And even granting them that— even if it were entirely true— what then? What would happen to all of us? Every sacrifice made to get this far, every way this world has pushed and shaped us toward finding these keys. Would this place's denizens simply let us live if we handed everything back? If we turned around now the future looked bleak in every direction we could see it." He paused. "So we kept doing the one thing that had never once misled us. Trusting the Trial. Trusting the System. It had never fed us false information, it was the only fixed point we had. Get the remaining keys. Open the gate to the sky." He looked up, and I followed his gaze.
The sky was choked with grey cloud, but even through that I could see it, everything spiralling slowly toward a single central point, like the whole sky was draining into something that wasn't visible yet. "They say once all the keys are assembled it will open the final trial chamber. What waits beyond that, nobody knows. What we do know is that the denizens of this place fear the sky. Fear it considerably more than they fear the world ending around them." He let that sit for a moment. "Perhaps that should have been our sign to stop. But we are far too deep in for signs."
I hadn't ever looked at the sky here with any real attention before. Now that I was actually looking, something sat wrong about it in a way I couldn't immediately name. Not a threat exactly, more like the discomfort of realising you are being watched and not yet knowing by what or from where. I'd need to take a closer look at some point.
For now, I had a working picture of the situation. That was enough to move on.
The closer they got to their goal, the more the world itself pushed back, and the more chaos that produced. And the denizens of this place weren't wrong, exactly. They weren't simply hostile for the sake of it. From what I'd gleaned through Dorrusk, these people had entire civilizations here— cultures spanning centuries, their own histories, their own struggles that had nothing to do with any of this. They'd had something resembling peace, for a long time, and then strangers had arrived and broken it by killing a demigod, and now the world was slowly ending around everyone.
They had every right to be furious. There was no villain in this story. Just two sets of people ground up against each other by circumstances neither of them had chosen, one side trying to get home and the other trying to keep the home they had.
I had my own riddles sitting underneath all of that. Whether it was truly coincidence that I'd been dropped into this trial specifically, a place and an event that had every indication of being the oldest trial the Colosseum had ever run. What would happen when the sky finally opened. And, sitting somewhere quieter beneath those questions, the realization that I missed my system more than I'd admitted to myself. I hadn't noticed how much I'd been using it as an anchor until it wasn't there. It had grown stranger recently, more animated in how it issued its quests, but it had never once lied to me. Even when whatever it was felt something close to contempt, it was honest about it. That counted for something.
There seemed to be one path forward. But something else was nagging at me first.
"You've told me about four domains and four Leviathans," I said. "What about the rest?"
"I was just getting to that." Markus's expression shifted into something harder to read. "The fifth Leviathan— the Water Leviathan— has been the most elusive of all of them. We don't know where it actually is, but we have encountered it. It is also, by a considerable margin, the most dangerous.
“It dwells in what we've taken to calling the Dream Sea, because nothing else fit. And it was with us from the very beginning." He paused. "It never attacked us directly. We are not entirely certain it's even capable of that. What it did instead was considerably worse. It worked on the Drakkaris, subtly at first. Like sowing doubt. Appearing in their dreams wearing the shape of a massive Phantom Dragon, promising something greater than what we were searching for, murmuring the right things to the right people over a long enough stretch of time. By the time we understood what was happening, it had them. They were fully under its control. They turned on their own brothers." Something moved through his expression. "We lost more of our people to this one Leviathan than to everything else this world had thrown at us combined. We did eventually manage to stabilise, but the betrayal cut deep. And the ones who turned were still alive. They were building temples, performing whatever rituals it demanded of them. Their leader was fully possessed by the Phantom. Could transform into the image of a complete dragon. That's where the name came from. The Tyrant Dragon." He stopped. "We killed him. Killed every other Drakkari that had been taken. They also had the Verdant Key with them."
His eyes weren't quite steady as he said it. Even if they had been, the Observer's Mark was feeding me everything he wasn't showing, the sheer… weight of it, grief and anger mixed with each other.
And now, suddenly, the shape of things made more sense. The way these people looked at Drakkaris. The way they'd looked at me, the blank-eyed priestess.
I found myself wondering briefly whether any of it would have landed differently if I'd been dropped here at the very start rather than the middle of it all. Then I shook my head. There was no version of that thought that was useful right now.
"So this Phantom Dragon— the Water Leviathan— it can only reach Drakkaris? Nobody else?"
"From everything we observed, yes. No other beastkin species appeared to be affected by it at all. For whatever reason, Drakkaris seem to be the only ones it can actually get to." He paused. "Unless the entire pattern was an elaborate performance for its own amusement, in which case we are already beyond saving and this conversation is moot. But the pattern has held so far, which is why the solution became what it became— eliminate them entirely, or keep select ones under monitored conditions where we could watch for signs of influence. As we were planning on doing. We still need to deal with the Water Leviathan, and the Fog Key was the answer to getting anywhere near its domain."
I nodded. But I was counting, and something was still missing.
"You said six Leviathans. That's only five."
"The sixth." He seemed to choose his words more carefully here. "We know very little about that one. What we managed to piece together from records, within the city and outside it, referred to it as the Heavenly Leviathan. The leader of the rest of them, if records are to be believed. It has no fixed domain and wanders. The records describe it as a keeper of everything— past, present, future, a diviner of considerable power. The story goes that if you encounter it, it will answer whatever you ask of it, but it will name its own price." He tilted his head slightly. "We don't know how much of that is exaggeration. But everything we've uncovered about the other Leviathans has had at least a grain of truth buried in it somewhere, enough to tell us something real about their nature. Perhaps there's something in that one too. For now though, we could only hunt for keys."
I narrowed my eyes, but nodded.
For the first time, the whole picture was sitting in front of me at once. Heavenly Leviathan. Interesting.
"So what's the next step? Hunting the Water Leviathan, I'd assume, now that you have the Fog Key?"
"That was indeed the plan, after the Fog Key's arrival, but—" He stopped.
A woman with a veiled face appeared beside him without particular ceremony. "I apologize for interrupting. I have searched everywhere. There are no signs of the priestess anywhere. Are you certain she didn't enter the prison below on her own?"
Markus shook his head. "I would have known immediately if she had. And nobody in their right mind would attempt that voluntarily." He frowned. "Nothing? Not even traces in the shadow dimension?"
Veshka shook her head.
Markus sighed. "Then that leaves one possibility." He pinched the bridge of his nose. "The Kovraths took her. Why would they take her instead of simply killing her? That makes no sense." He looked up. "Are any of the prisoner Drakkaris still alive? Could any of them have escaped in the chaos?"
"No. We hadn't managed to remove the mana circulation blockers before the attack. None of them could defend themselves."
"So our only lead on tracking the Water Leviathan is just… gone."
I stood there and said nothing, which was the appropriate response for someone who had absolutely no involvement in any of this.
I was the priestess, obviously. Had been the entire time. Nobody here knew that, which was the point. I'd specifically arranged for it to look like the Kovraths had taken her— both to give myself a clean excuse to go after them without raising questions, and to have some form of backup available if things went sideways. It also meant not burning through resources these people genuinely needed, which mattered. Overconfident I was not, whatever else anyone might say about me.
Strange how often I had to remind myself of that lately.
"What if the Kovraths knew about the Water Leviathan's weakness? Wouldn't it make perfect sense to take the Drakkaris the moment they saw we had the Fog Key?"
Markus turned that over for a moment. "It would make sense, yes, if they understood how the Water Leviathan actually operates. It works directly on the mind. And you're probably right — they were spies down to their bones. However carefully we managed the information, they must have pieced together enough to have a working picture." He sighed. "Doesn't make it any less of a headache."
I nodded. "Then I'll go and retrieve her. If she's our best hope of finding and killing the Water Leviathan, she's worth going after."
Veshka looked uncertain about that. "I don't doubt your abilities, dear benefactor, not after today. But please consider carefully. Standing against the Kovraths and their elders is a different matter entirely from what you did here. One might honestly have an easier time hunting a Leviathan."
I shrugged and kept the smile warm and easy. "You don't need to worry about me. I won't be facing them, exactly. More of a diplomatic arrangement. I can be remarkably civil when I put my mind to it."
Veshka didn't look fully convinced. Markus, however, nodded and bowed. "Then I'll place this matter entirely in your hands, Miss Venam."
"And don't worry," I added, "I already have a guide."
A small golden-scaled draconoid shape materialized out of absolutely nowhere.
Markus and Veshka went immediately and completely rigid.
The shape took in its surroundings for approximately half a second before its eyes landed on me, and then it screamed.
"MASTER YOU FINALLY SUMMONED ME! PLEASE ORDER WHAT YOU WISH ME TO DO! SHOULD I SKEWER THESE FILTHY VRATHI TO MAINTAIN YOUR SHADY IDENT—"
My fist connected with his head before he could finish the sentence. I felt a vein surface somewhere on my forehead. The warm smile stayed exactly where it was through sheer professional discipline.
"I would strongly prefer," I said pleasantly, "if you closed that mouth."
He rubbed his head. He did, mercifully, go quiet.
I passed a thought sideways through Observer's Suggestion to my clone still running sweeps through the city. 'Hey, Curious— are we certain we didn't accidentally put a slavery clause in his contract somewhere? Or is this some peculiar side effect of the soul magic?'
The response came back neatly.
[No. While the full effects and potential side effects of soul magic remain outside our current understanding, none of the clauses in the contract account for this degree of behavioural change. It sits firmly in the category of unknown for now.]
I could feel his manic devotion radiating through the Observer's Mark I'd left on him like heat off a furnace. Whatever had produced this particular transformation in his personality was, as Curious had correctly identified, a mystery for another day. It was at least useful, if occasionally trying.
Markus and Veshka were staring.
Right. Words. Reassuring ones. Those are expected in situations like this! "Don't worry," I offered. "He's domesticated."
A beat passed.
I looked at their faces.
...Perhaps not the most accurate choice of words.