"You absolute lobotomized cumstain! You stuck-up, bitch-ass, cock-gobbling moron! What did I tell you? WHAT THE FUCK DID I TELL YOU, YOU SCALY FUCKNUGGET?"
Nal-Serath was furious today. Genuinely and thoroughly furious, and he had an excellent reason sitting right in front of him for it. Nal-Skethis was on his knees on the obsidian floor, which was at least the appropriate posture for the occasion.
The usual pride was gone from his face, replaced by a pallor that Serath found deeply satisfying. Understandable too, all things considered— the boy had picked a fight with a Dragon and walked away from it. And to his credit, even Serath hadn't known such a being was present in that place. He could have eventually reasoned his way there, the absence of fate's threads around a person wasn't subtle if you knew what you were looking at, and whatever that girl was, she was clearly not a common vrathi, but eventually was doing a lot of work in that sentence, and eventually hadn't been fast enough.
For now he kept his attention on the one currently kneeling in front of him.
Skethis had always been a hotheaded little prick. Youth did that, and fast power did it worse, and Skethis had managed to choke down both in quantity like a pig at a trough. Serath had known him since he was barely large enough to be an annoying little piece of shit, had watched him grow into a considerably larger, more insufferable annoyance, and had developed over those years a precise and detailed understanding of exactly how frequently this particular cocksucker liked to reach out and poke fate in its goddamn eye.
Which made a strange kind of sense, actually, when you understood what Serath saw when he looked at him. His sight showed him the threads of fate attached to a person, a knotted tangle of them, always different colours, each meaning something specific. The grey of neutrality. Red for danger. White for comfort. Black for death hovering close. And gold— golden threads for golden opportunity, for the specific flavour of luck that meant the universe had taken an interest in someone. Skethis had more golden threads than anyone Serath had ever laid eyes on in his one hundred and forty-three years. Genuinely more than should have been reasonable. Which explained, at least partially, why he'd managed to walk away from a Dragon with his hide still attached.
Serath himself was no combatant. Never had been, never particularly wanted to be. What he was, was the only Kovrath to have reached gold core as a Diviner, which was its own kind of formidable. Being a powerful Diviner, Serath had known for some time that the sacred grounds, their home existed within something much larger. A wider world, stretching beyond anything their current borders could account for. Whether he was curious to see it?
Not especially. He probably never would be.
Seeking the unknown and forbidden had a historical track record that he found thoroughly unpersuasive. The Divnek were the clearest argument for that position, and they didn't exist anymore to argue back.
The Divnek hadn't been a species, more of a calling. Knowledge seekers, followers of the Abyss Leviathan, drawn from different tribes and united by a shared conviction that the truth hiding at the bottom of things was worth finding regardless of what finding it cost. They hadn't been affiliated with any particular region. They'd planted themselves in the center of all four domains and looked outward from there, which in hindsight should have told everyone something. They'd discovered that a wider world existed beyond the sacred space their creator had shaped for them. They'd gone looking for it.
They must have found something.
Nobody knew what. They were simply gone.
What had they discovered? Had they genuinely found a way out? What had become of them afterward? Despite being the most capable diviner among all Kovrath, there was a ceiling to what even Serath could do, and the Divnek had apparently found whatever was on the other side of it and taken the knowledge with them permanently.
He set the thought aside and looked back at Skethis' threads.
His eyes narrowed.
They hadn't changed much from what he remembered, but if anything the golden threads had increased. More of them than before, which meant fate had not only forgiven this idiot for poking a Dragon, but had apparently decided to reward him for it. The black threads, though, hadn't meaningfully grown, which meant the Dragon wasn't genuinely antagonized. Serath filed that away as the one piece of good news available to him today and allowed himself a small private moment of relief before returning to being furious.
But what did the increase in golden threads mean? And what in the name of everything sacred was a Dragon doing here?
That was the question gnawing at him. Ever since the discovery of a fateless individual Serath had been in the archives, pulling every record that might explain how such a thing was possible. Then Skethis had returned looking like he'd seen the underside of his own tombstone, and recounted everything, the attack, the Vrathi obtaining another Key, the Dragon. The Key alone had been a shock. His divinations had put them at least a year out from the Fog Key, and that was contingent on them first recovering the Verdant Key, which the Water Leviathan had stolen from under everyone's noses. That the Fog Key was already in Vrathi hands should not have been possible by any threading he'd run.
And then the Dragon sitting on top of all of that.
He'd worked out the why of it, at least. Divinity had a shape, every divine beast was born swimming in it, and for Dragons specifically it manifested as something close to a burning flame that scorched the fate threads in its immediate vicinity. Not destroyed them. The threads were still there. But they stopped at the boundary of the Dragon's divinity rather than making contact the way they did with everyone else, and it was that contact, that absolute connection, that Serath needed to read anything with real precision. Without it he was working in the dark, which was not a position he had occupied in a very long time and liked considerably less than he'd expected.
It also meant the Dragon wasn't truly fateless. Just young enough that the divinity hadn't fully settled, which in turn explained why Skethis was still alive to kneel on his floor looking miserable. A young hatchling. Not yet at gold core, if what Skethis had described was accurate.
Which was, marginally, less catastrophic than the alternative. Marginally.
Every Kovrath knew what the presence of a Dragon meant. It was the knowledge that didn't need to be written down because it had been baked into them from the beginning— thousands of years ago, the Divine Dragon had created the Kovrath on what appeared to be a whim, for reasons that had never been explained and probably never would be. Nobody questioned it. Out of that origin had grown a sacred reverence toward the species of their creator that had simply arranged itself into rules without anyone needing to formally legislate them. Rules about devotion. Rules about where that devotion was owed and to whom.
And now a young Dragon had wandered into these sacred lands.
Was this the creator's doing? Had it been planned? Under normal circumstances Serath could wring the truth out of fate itself if he pressed hard enough— that was the nature of what he was and what he could do. But the moment the question turned toward a Dragon, he had never in one hundred and forty-three years felt so thoroughly, humiliatingly blind.
He shook his head. There was only one thing left to do, and it wasn't standing here enjoying the view of Skethis on his knees, satisfying as that was.
Skethis was still kneeling, braced for another round of venom. Serath just sighed at him. "Get your arse up off my archive floor, you useless cocksucker. You made one good decision at the end, at least, and you're not currently on your way to death like some less fortunate-threaded bastard might be in your sorry position. Congratulations." He smacked him behind the head anyway, because some things were simply owed. "Follow me."
He stepped out of the Archive.
The Archive sat in a hidden layer of the Fold, which was where the Kovrath lived, had lived for as long as anyone currently alive could remember, and intended to keep living for the foreseeable future. The Fold itself was a private dimension tucked inside the Abyssal region of the sacred lands, and reaching it required passing through the Abyss first. Not true abyss, technically, just a region so thoroughly saturated with dark mana that the border of the Shadow Dimension had thinned to something barely there, making the whole stretch functionally uninhabitable for anyone who didn't have an intimate relationship with darkness baked into their nature.
Only Kovrath had that. Which made the Fold about as closed off as a place could get without actually being locked, and considerably more effective than a lock would have been, because a lock could theoretically be picked.
The other three domains had their own versions of the same arrangement. Four species, four territories, each one sealed by whatever its domain was made of. The Svaraks— avian draconoids — in the Divine Flame domain to the east. The Korvhen in the Eternal Forest to the north, vital and overgrown and deeply unwelcoming to outsiders. The fierce Navoshi in the Black Sea to the south. And the Kovrath here, in the Abyss, which suited them fine.
The Divnek had been the exception to all of that— the ones who'd chosen no domain and claimed no territory, knowledge seekers who answered to nothing but their own curiosity. They'd made their home in the city the Vrathi were now occupying.
The Archive itself looked like someone had built a cathedral entirely out of black stone, it had a stone bridge leading out to a swirling portal in the middle distance. Serath walked through it without slowing down or looking back. Skethis followed, because he wasn't stupid enough not to.
The Archive was a privileged space. Elders only, and even elders had needed to earn that at some point. Everyone else had to demonstrate they were worth the knowledge it held before the door would consider them. Outside the portal they stood in an archway framed by four pillars, each one pulsing with a slow dark light.
The Fold spread out beyond that in five distinct regions, stacked by access from top to bottom— the uppermost open to any Kovrath of standing, the deepest accessible to exactly one person. That person being Serath, who had held that particular distinction for the better part of half a century now.
He invoked his authority, tapping his golden staff on the ground— it had materialized out of the air approximately one second before he needed it. The shadows on the floor came alive at the tap, rose up, and swallowed them both without any particular ceremony.
Skethis had clearly recognized what was happening. Serath could tell by the way he went still.
They were heading for the deepest section of the Fold.
The place Skethis had never seen. That nobody below Serath had seen, in fact, for longer than most of them had been alive.
The shadows peeled back.
Skethis looked around with his eyes very wide and said nothing, which was perhaps the first genuinely wise thing he'd done all day.
"This... is the fifth layer?"
The surface was like a perfectly still lake with tranquil black water, and two Kovrath standing on top of it reflected back with unsettling clarity. Serath understood the curiosity well enough. The fifth layer was the exclusive territory of whoever led the Kovrath at any given time, and each leader tended to hold that position for at least a century before the question of succession became relevant.
Which meant the number of people who had ever stood here and looked around like Skethis was doing right now was, historically, very small.
Every Kovrath leader had shared two things in common. They were always a Diviner, and they were always a Light pathwalker— which struck most people as contradictory, given how thoroughly their species was wrapped up in dark mana, but the Kovrath had always been meritocratic about these things. The tribe leader's trial simply happened to require strong divination and an affinity for light to pass, and nobody had ever successfully argued with the trial about it.
He didn't get to keep that thought for long.
A pressure dropped over both of them like something enormous had just decided to sit down directly above their heads. It was just suddenly there and impossible to ignore.
Skethis hit his knees on the water's surface.
Serath stayed standing. It cost him something to do it, but he stayed standing.
He looked out into the dark ahead of them as it parted to reveal a tree. White and enormous. It went up as far as Serath's eyes could track and continued beyond that. As wide at the trunk as the entire Fold combined, which should have been architecturally impossible and clearly wasn’t.
Draped through one of its lower branches, a creature was looking down at them with rainbow hued eyes. Hundreds of meters of it, serpentine and draconic in equal measure, the way all the Leviathans were. Each of them carried a sense of being something the world had organised itself around rather than something that simply lived in it, and this one had that quality to a degree that made the others’ presence feel… pedestrian.
Where every other Leviathan was scaled, this one was covered entirely in soft white fur. Between the fur, subtle hues ran in slow pulses, like something breathing underneath the surface of it.
It laughed. Not a small sound.
[KNEW YOU'D FIND YOUR WAY BACK TO ME EVENTUALLY.]
It began to climb down from the tree with an unhurried ease.
"Did you predict my coming?" Serath asked.
[IS THAT YOUR QUESTION?]
There was something in its eyes when it said it. Serath would have called it an evil glint if the word evil didn't feel slightly insufficient for what was sitting in front of him. He refused, and the Leviathan's expression shifted into something that might have been amusement.
The creature in front of him was the Heavenly Leviathan. If Serath sat at gold core as a diviner, then whatever colour came above gold was where this thing operated, assuming such a colour existed, which he had no way to confirm and a strong suspicion the Leviathan would find funny if he asked.
It knew everything. Whatever you wanted to know, it had already known before you thought to ask. This was not an exaggeration or a figure of speech, it was simply what the Heavenly Leviathan was, and the final layer of the Fold was where it rested when it felt like resting.
The Kovrath appeared, to anyone looking from the outside, to be followers of the Abyss Leviathan. Their domain, their dark mana, their whole aesthetic as a people pointed in that direction and kept pointing there. The reality was that this had never been true. From the very beginning, the Leviathan the Kovrath had always followed was this one, and that was a secret kept in exactly one place— the fifth layer, discovered by each new leader the moment they completed the ceremony and stepped through to find a very large creature waiting for them with rainbow eyes and an expression suggesting it had known this moment was coming for quite some time.
Only those the leader personally permitted could be brought into that secret. The Heavenly Leviathan seemed to prefer the arrangement this way. The whole structure of it, from what Serath had pieced together through his predecessor's accounts and his own fifty years of careful observation, had been built on the Leviathan's preferences from the start. He had learned quite early not to question that particular aspect of things.
The rules were simple and had no exits. Ask a question, get an answer— but in return you had to answer the Leviathan's question, or complete whatever task it set you. Fail to do either, and it would curse you with what it called Great Misfortune, which the archive's compiled records on the subject described in enough creative detail. The entire section dedicated to the Leviathan's behaviour in the archive existed primarily as a monument to every leader who had tried to find a loophole in the rules and what had happened to them as a result. Several entries read more as cautionary tales than research. A few read as both.
There were no loopholes. The archive just kept hoping.
"But I am here today for a different kind of question."
The Leviathan's eyes glinted. It already knew, of course. It always already knew. The questions it set in return and the tasks it assigned scaled with the weight of what was being asked of it— a small question bought a small price, and what Serath was carrying today was not a small question. But he had come prepared for that. Every leader of the Kovrath before him had stood in this layer at least once and paid whatever the Leviathan asked in service of the same thing— the continued existence of their people. Serath had no intention of being the first to flinch at his turn.
He looked up at the rainbow eyes looking down at him and said it plainly.
"There is a Dragon in the Sacred Lands. I wish to know what it means."
***
Avena was scared.
More scared than she had ever been in her life, which was a bar she hadn't expected to clear quite this quickly or thoroughly. She was sitting on what appeared to be a shore— soft sand under her feet, an island behind her, and in front of her a sea that stretched out further than she could follow with her eyes.
Except it wasn't a normal island. And it wasn't a normal sea.
Through the grains of sand beneath her palms she could see images— memories, surfacing the moment she made the mistake of focusing on them, crashing in like the waves that rolled onto the shore carrying reflections of her own past in the water. Some of the reflections weren't hers. She was fairly certain of that and fairly certain she didn't want to look at those ones more closely. Her head hurt worse the harder she tried to make sense of any of it.
And beneath the waves, something large and monstrous was waiting.
Avena had her eyes shut. She was shaking. She didn't know where she was or how she'd gotten here or how long she'd been sitting on this sand, and the not knowing was doing nothing good for any of the above.
The last thing she remembered clearly was settling into the new housing the blond drakkari had assigned them. He'd been walking them through the rules of their stay— monitoring, oversight… something. Report any voice you hear in your head, no matter how reasonable it sounds. No matter how harmless it seems. You'll know it when it happens, and the consequences of staying quiet about it would not be worth whatever the voice was offering.
Then the person she was supposed to share the space with had been stabbed and torn apart from behind before anyone had time to register what was happening. Even the blond drakkari had gone still for a half second. A serpentine phantom had materialized out of nothing and shredded the attacker before it could so much as turn around, which was the only mercy the next few minutes contained.
After that it was chaos. Pure, undiluted, wall-to-wall chaos. Blood everywhere, fighting she couldn't fully track, and her sight, the particular sight she'd never quite managed to turn off, showing her things in the middle of it all that she hadn't wanted to see and couldn't unsee. Her head was ringing so loudly she could barely hear anything else.
That was when she heard the voice.
Exactly the kind of voice the blond drakkari had told her about. She'd known it immediately, the moment it spoke, there was no mistaking it for her own thoughts, it didn't feel like her own thoughts, it came from somewhere else entirely.
But she had been terrified. And the voice had been calm. And it had helped her, guided her step by step through the chaos in a way that had felt, in the moment, like the only solid thing available to hold onto.
Before she'd fully understood what she was agreeing to, she was here.
She sat on the sand and thought about what she'd done, and the thinking did not make her feel better. She'd heard the voice of the Phantom Dragon and she had, with full awareness of the warning she'd received not an hour before, followed it willingly.
The one thing she absolutely was not supposed to do.
***
"So this Fold is somewhere inside that abyssal region?"
"Yes, mistress. It is not easy to find unless you know precisely where to look."
Hmm.
I couldn't help the thread of suspicion running underneath all of this, even with the Observer's Mark feeding me a steady read of his honesty. Dorrusk was being cooperative to a degree that sat slightly outside what I'd expected, and I kept turning that over even as the information itself was genuinely useful. The power structure of the Kovrath was becoming clearer, and parts of it were giving me something to chew on that I didn't entirely enjoy. Most of the Kovrath elders sat at high red core, which was manageable. The First Elder and their leader, however, was low gold.
That complicated things.
A gold core diviner, specifically. Which raised the question of whether he was the reason the Kovrath had retreated so suddenly earlier. The retreat had been abrupt enough to be strange. I still didn't have enough information to know exactly why. Had they somehow worked out that I was a dragon? I hadn't shown my full form and had no plans to anytime in the foreseeable future, so it couldn't have been direct observation. A diviner looking into the past, maybe?
I shelved it. The gold core diviner was a problem for slightly later me to deal with. Right now I needed to see this shrine, and more importantly, I needed to understand how the Kovrath were getting their hands on divinity.
My last direct exposure to divinity had been through Dragonfire, and that had mutated my fire gland, which in turn had broken my system— or rather, had started a process that felt distinctly unfinished. A chain reaction that had stalled partway through. What if exposure to more divinity continued that process? Pushed it through to whatever it was supposed to become? What if that was how my system got fixed— not repair exactly, more like a forced completion of whatever had been interrupted. A pseudo evolution, of sorts.
I'd find out soon enough either way.
The space beside me rippled and Curious stepped out of it.
"I have completed my investigation of the deceased prisoners, main body."
"And?"
"The hunch was correct. Cross-referencing physical remains against the total headcount recorded prior to the Kovrath assault, I identified a discrepancy of one individual. The absence is clean as there's no residual mana signature, no biological trace material, nothing that would suggest death at the site. Given that the mana circulation blockers were still active on all prisoners at the time of the attack and none of them were in any condition to mount meaningful resistance, the absence of struggle evidence is consistent with extraction rather than escape. I measured the body mass unaccounted for against the spatial dimensions of the site, checked for drag patterns in the floor material and any disturbance in the shadow dimension layer running beneath it, and found nothing pointing toward a conventional exit. The conclusion with the highest probability is that the Water Leviathan has already begun moving, and has been doing so since before we were looking for it.
"The missing individual is the girl Avena. The one who perceived through your stealth without any apparent backlash or cognitive cost, which in hindsight may have been the relevant detail we failed to weight appropriately."
Well.
That was going to be a headache for the people here. The Water Leviathan had already been described as cunning in a way that set it apart from the other Leviathans, a superior sapient intelligence operating through patience rather than raw power. And with the Depth Dwellers sitting somewhere on the horizon, terrifying everyone into a cold sweat including apparently the Kovrath, who had a home that was by all accounts nearly impossible for outsiders to reach— I could only begin to guess at what manner of thing could make even them nervous.
Everything was escalating at a pace that wasn't giving me a single moment to think, and once again I found myself with no room to breathe.
I shook my head. Who needed rest anyway. Rest was for people with manageable problems.
Right. First, inform Markus and the others about Avena. They deserved to know she'd been compromised, even if the news was going to land badly. She'd been interesting too— that sight of hers was something I'd wanted to understand better, and now I probably wouldn't get the chance. Shame.
After that I'd head for the Fold. I had a hunch about it that I couldn't fully articulate, that whatever was waiting there might be relevant to the problems currently sitting on my plate.
But before any of that, there was something I hadn't managed since entering this trial and had been quietly owed for considerably longer than was reasonable.
Sleep. And a conversation with Lotte, who was almost certainly bored out of her mind by now and absolutely needed me to come and tell her everything that had happened. For her sake, obviously. She needed the update. I was doing her a favour.
Hmm hmm.
Nap time.