The conversation with the Heavenly Leviathan hadn't gone the way Skethis had expected.
He'd heard the stories since he was a child. How she was grandeur itself, how her presence made the sacred energy in a Kovrath's blood sit up and beg. Godlike, they said. A being so far beyond mortal comprehension that standing in her shadow was supposed to feel like being unmade and remade in the same breath.
Standing in her actual presence, Skethis still didn't know how to describe it. She was hundreds of meters of coiled, serpentine dragon, her body covered in fluffy white feathers that shimmered with an iridescent hue, lighting up the chamber in shifting rainbows that didn't seem to come from anywhere. Her two eyes burned with the colours of oil on water, fixed on Serath with an intensity that made Skethis grateful he wasn't the one standing at the front. But it wasn't just her eyes watching. The patterns on her darkened wings shifted independently, some tracking Serath, some tracking him, some fixed on things that probably weren't even in the room. The sense of being observed came from everywhere at once.
She was terrifying and magnificent. And she smelled faintly of burnt honey.
Serath, standing a few paces ahead, had shown no hesitation whatsoever. The First Elder had a tongue sharper than most blades, and he wielded it now without flinching. "There is a Dragon in the Sacred Lands. I wish to know what it means."
The Heavenly Leviathan had snorted.
The sound of something that massive snorting was not something Skethis would ever forget. It hit like a thunderclap, rattling his teeth, and her eyes glittered with something that looked disturbingly like excitement.
"Well, to claim what she left, obviously."
She paused, lifting a claw the size of a siege tower and tapping it against her serpentine jaw. Clink. Clink. Clink. "Well. It was still technically her. Not that she would know that."
Serath's brow furrowed. "What does that—"
"Ah-ah-ah." The claw waggled, and the Leviathan's mouth split into a grin that had entirely too many teeth. "That's the rule, little watcher. One question, one price. And you've already asked your question. So now… you pay."
Skethis had heard about the rule. Everyone had. The Heavenly Leviathan answered questions, but she always demanded something in return. The price. What kind of question could a being like her— who presumably already knew everything— possibly need to ask? That thought alone had always fascinated him. It was the part of the stories that nobody seemed to have details about.
One thing he did know: when you answered, or fulfilled whatever task she gave you, you needed a witness present. Now it made perfect sense why the First Elder had brought him here. The previous leaders must have done the same, dragging some witness along whenever they had a question to ask.
Skethis felt a flutter of excitement despite himself. He was about to witness something only a handful of Kovraths had ever seen.
Then the Leviathan leaned closer to Serath, "Tell me, First Elder. And your muscle-bound seventh here will bear witness, since I can smell he has no idea." Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial purr. "How many times, in the past cycle alone, have you imagined the Third Elder wrapping that sinuous and girthy tail of hers around your butt—"
Serath's scales visibly paled.
"—and I mean specifically while she's wearing the ceremonial oils from the summer rites, you know the ones I'm talking about, the ones that smell like crushed Tarloom —how many times have you imagined her applying them by hand while you recited the Litany of Endurance in reverse?"
Skethis suddenly realized he did not want to be part of this conversation at all. He wanted the floor to open up and swallow him whole. He wanted to be anywhere else in the entire Sacred Lands than standing three paces behind his First Elder while the Heavenly Leviathan asked about the Third Elder's tail and ceremonial oils and— oh Divine Dragon, she was still talking.
"Or perhaps it's not the tail," the Leviathan mused, tapping her chin again. "Perhaps it's the horns. You seem like a horn man. So answer truthfully, Serath: tail, horns, or the full set? With details. I want to feel the imagery."
Serath stood frozen. His jaw worked silently. Skethis saw his claws clench and unclench, saw the faint tremor in his wings that spoke of a dignity desperately trying to survive.
"The tail," Serath said in a strangled rasp. "Four times. And once... the horns."
The Leviathan's grin widened impossibly. "Oh, do elaborate."
"The horns," Serath repeated, deadpan now, "while she was arguing with the supply master about resource allocations. I don't... I don't know why. It was the way she pointed."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Skethis had ever heard.
Then the Leviathan threw her head back and laughed. "Magnificent. Absolutely magnificent. I haven't had an answer that honest in three generations. You've earned your dragon-truth, First Elder. Hold onto it. You'll need it—"
She paused. Her eyes lifted, looking at something far above them that Skethis couldn't see. "—soon enough."
She settled back onto her coils, still chuckling, and waved a claw dismissively. "Now get out. Ahh, something magnificent is about to happen. I know you have more questions, and I’d answer them when the time is right."
--
Skethis had been standing on the highest overlook of the Fold's first layer for what felt like hours now, though time had a way of slipping when his mind kept circling back to that conversation. The Heavenly Leviathan's words, or rather, her refusal to give them clearly, sat lodged in his skull like a splinter he couldn't dig out.
Every time he tried to focus on the present, his thoughts drifted back to her looking upward, her grin fading just slightly, and that casual, terrible soon enough.
Though he now knew more than he had before.
The First Elder had told him afterward that he'd spent every spare moment since then trying to divine what she'd meant. The threads of fate around her had always been slippery, according to him, she existed in too many futures at once for any single path to resolve cleanly. But this time they'd been outright opaque. As if the answer itself was something reality hadn't decided yet.
Another crack split the air, louder this time, and Skethis finally looked up.
The Gates of the Fold loomed before him, a towering wall of dense, living shadow that stretched upward and curved inward until it swallowed the sky. From the outside, the Fold looked like nothing at all, just empty chasm and darkness. But from within, the barrier was a breathing thing, pulsing with sacred energy that had protected his people for millennia. It had weathered Depth Dweller incursions, Abyssal storms, Wraiths outbreaks and the slow erosion of ages without so much as a flicker.
Right now, it was breaking.
Spiderwebbing fractures rippled across its surface in terrible waves. Each impact from outside sent fresh cracks racing through the darkness, golden light bleeding through the gaps where sacred energy struggled to hold its integrity together. The sound was somewhere between shattering glass and splitting stone.
Below him, the Kovrath army was arrayed in full formation. Thousands upon thousands of his kin stood in disciplined ranks that stretched across the Fold's interior grounds in a sea of dark scales. The First Phalanx held the front, their scales darkened with sacred energy until they seemed to drink the light around them, shields locked together in a wall of living shadow. Behind them, the Second and Third Waves waited in staggered columns, claws flexing and tails still, the patient warriors who knew their moment was coming. The ranged corps, spellcasters and energy-weavers, occupied the elevated platforms, their mana already cycling in visible spirals around their forms. The healers and support units clustered near the rear, close to the civilian shelters, ready to receive the wounded.
All in all, it was a formation built to hold and outlast.
But his eyes dropped.
Because it might not be enough.
Serath stood right in front of Skethis, his golden glowing eyes fixed on the barrier intently. His claws twitched in irregular patterns, threading through invisible strings only he could see, plucking futures, reading the way they vibrated, searching for the one path where they all survived. As the Fold's leader, its premier divinator, and the eldest of the Seer-Priests, the First Elder had been sustaining near-constant divination for the past week. The strain showed in the hollows beneath his eyes, the grey pallor clinging to the edges of his scales, the occasional tremor in his voice when he forgot to mask it.
"Seventeen more strikes," Serath said quietly. "The eighteenth will breach the lower quadrant."
All the remaining elders stood beside him in a circle, overlooking everything with grim expressions. Nobody questioned their leader's words. Serath was a Gold Core divinator, a formidable leader by any measure. His class allowed him to borrow the senses of every warrior under his command, thousands of perspectives funneled into a single mind, each one a thread he could tug, whisper through, warn. A leader who could see through the eyes of his soldiers and divine the immediate future was worth more than any weapon. It made the army think with one brain, react with one reflex. A single twitch of his claw could redirect an entire phalanx before the enemy even committed to their charge.
But even Serath had limits.
It was no secret how such an ability would be a gigantic load on anyone's cognition. Thousands of eyes, thousands of ears, thousands of hearts beating in different rhythms, it would shatter a lesser mind. But they had found a way through it. By keeping his focus on the key warriors, the other elders, the leaders of each formation, he distributed the mental strain through them instead of trying to process everything himself. He worked the bigger picture. Each elder, each commander, managed their own slice of the battlefield. It also allowed them to communicate seamlessly between ranks, so the entire army moved like a well-oiled machine, every part knowing what the others were doing without a single word spoken aloud.
A worthy ability for a demigod. Truly. And yet Serath still had enough raw combat experience to go toe-to-toe with the other elders and win, despite not possessing a combat class. The gap between Gold and Red was vast like that, like a chasm that no amount of cleverness or technique could bridge. Or at least, that was what everyone had always believed.
"I think we might be able to sustain it for twenty-one more strikes," Serath continued. "If we use the sacred energy more efficiently on defense. But it's a losing battle regardless. We won't be able to hold for long once it breaches."
Skethis's gaze drifted back to the barrier, past it, to what he knew waited on the other side. The First Elder always shared his senses with the other elders, allowing them to see things that would normally be impossible. The great defensive wall of the Fold was one such thing, it permitted no sharp eyes to pierce it properly, whether from inside or from outside. But Serath had let them see. He had shown them what had happened on the other side before the Depth Dwellers began their assault on the gates.
He had seen her again.
That dragon. That magnificent golden-scaled beast. The one who had one of the subordinates Skethis had taken on when he attacked the vrathis, the one he'd assumed was a casualty. She had been protecting him. Even in the chaos, even while fighting for her life against three demigods, she had kept the Kovrath soldier clutched close, shielding him with her own body.
A young dragon, she was. A high Red Core. Yet she'd forced three Gold Core demigods to coordinate just to contain her. Skethis had watched through Serath's borrowed sight as she fought, moving like lightning, teleporting between heartbeats, unleashing detonations that should have annihilated everything in their radius. He'd seen the Court she deployed, that impossible violet dome that turned the very act of channeling mana into a death sentence.
If someone had told him a Red Core could push three demigods that far, he would have called them a liar. Red Cores didn't challenge Gold Cores. They didn't survive Gold Cores. The gap between realms was supposed to be absolute. It was one of the fundamental laws of power, as certain as order and chaos.
And yet.
She'd made them work for it. Made them bleed for it. Made them reveal tricks and transformations they'd clearly hoped to keep hidden. She'd forced the Nature one to abandon subtlety entirely, his bloated fish-dragon form erupting with those horrible blooming roses. Forced the Metal one into his full warform with jagged scales and gleaming hunting-blades. Forced the Space leader, the one who had seemed so bored, so untouchable, to actually pay attention. His shields had wavered. His smug expression had cracked, just once.
In the end, it hadn't been enough.
Now she was sealed inside that obelisk. A pillar of golden stone that had risen from the ritual's completion, surrounded by the corpses of Depth Dwellers who had slit their own throats to fuel the spell, feeding it their life force in synchronized, willing suicide. The obelisk's surface was inscribed with characters that hurt to look at, the same golden geometry Skethis had glimpsed through the fog before it closed around her. It was still radiating the wrongness of whatever magic the Water Leviathan had poured into it.
She was still alive in there, Serath had confirmed. Trapped in that stone. But still alive.
Serath's fury, though, that was something else. He was angrier that they'd all been forced to watch this happen. Forced to stand behind their barrier while a dragon, possibly connected to their very creator, was overwhelmed right outside their gates. The first day, he'd nearly ordered the army out. His claws had been on the command stone. His wings had been half-spread. And then the ritual had completed, the obelisk had risen, and the moment had passed, leaving only bitter helplessness behind.
Their first encounter with the Dragon had not been good. Skethis didn't know the full details at that time. But from what Serath had learned, and what Skethis had been there to witness with his own ears, the Heavenly Leviathan had clearly said the dragon was here to claim what she left. So, by chance, did they know who she was? It was still cryptic. Further divination had revealed nothing but static. The threads around her were as opaque as the Leviathan's own.
But if she was indeed connected with their creator— the Divine Dragon— how could they just watch her get overwhelmed? Maybe it was some kind of innate reverence stirring in their blood. Skethis couldn't tell. He didn't have the philosophical vocabulary for it. He just wanted to lend a hand. Seeing such an unfortunate matchup, a Red Core pitted against three demigods and a suicidal army performing a ritual, made something in his chest twist with shame.
They should have helped. They should have done something.
But Serath couldn't be reckless. There was a reason they hadn't moved. There was a reason he'd stayed his hand despite what they'd all watched.
Should we intervene?
The threads of fate had screamed back ‘overwhelming danger’ at him. It was certain death if they did. Not just his, but everyone's.
Serath had performed multiple divinations, searching for a different path. He hadn't found it. Every scenario ended the same way, with annihilation.
The Water Leviathan was waiting for exactly that. A chance to crush them in the open, away from their defenses, where her control of the battlefield would be absolute and her three demigods could tear through their ranks without the barrier to slow them down.
So Serath had stayed his hand. And Skethis could tell he hated himself for it. He'd seen that expression on his mentor's face before. Skethis didn't need divination to read it. He just knew. The First Elder was a man who had spent his entire life being able to do something, and now his greatest wisdom was inaction. It was eating him alive.
But it wasn't like they were fully blind.
By this point, after a week of divination attempts, each one careful, incremental, Serath pulling threads one at a time to avoid tripping whatever defenses the Water Leviathan had woven, the elders knew the shape of the threat facing them.
The Water Leviathan wanted inside the Fold. That much was undeniable. She'd sealed the golden dragon inside that obelisk and immediately turned the remaining army against the barrier, hammering at it for seven straight days without rest, without a single demand or attempt at negotiation.
Whatever she wanted in here, she wanted it badly enough to commit everything she had. And they had maybe hours left before she got it.
The Divine Dragon Shrine was the obvious answer. Every Kovrath visited it to replenish their sacred energy, it was what made them formidable, what allowed their warriors to punch above their weight and their healers to mend wounds that should have been fatal. But every tribe within the Sacred Lands had its own shrine. If the Leviathan needed sacred energy, she could simply take the Depth Dwellers' shrine. They were already hers, body and mind. There was no strategic reason to besiege the Fold specifically.
Which left only one possibility.
The Heavenly Leviathan.
Somehow, the Water Leviathan knew she was here. Inside the Fold. Hidden in the fifth layer, where even most elders weren't permitted to venture. A secret passed down only to the current leader of the Kovraths, and to the leader before them, stretching back to the founding. Skethis had only learned of it because Serath had took him.
The First Elder had tried to confirm it through divination. The results had come back sluggish and resistant, like trying to see through oil. But Serath was patient, frighteningly so when he needed to be. Over several days of careful, incremental divinations, pulling at the edges of her presence rather than trying to pierce the center, he'd managed to glean fragments.
She definitely wanted the Heavenly Leviathan.
The question was why. What did the Water Leviathan gain from reaching the one being who theoretically commanded all five of them? Dominion? Absorption? Some kind of ascension that required consuming the others? Something worse that Skethis's imagination was currently too exhausted and too frightened to properly conjure? They didn't have the full picture. But they had enough to know they couldn't let her succeed.
Whatever she was planning, it would be catastrophic.
The barrier cracked again. Deeper this time, a sound like the world's spine snapping. The eighth strike Serath had predicted. Skethis watched the fractures spiderwebbing wider, golden light bleeding through in thick, ugly pulses. They didn't have enough time.
Skethis turned his attention to the army beyond the Fold. The Depth Dwellers had changed too. He'd been fighting them his entire life, they'd always been brutally dangerous. Relentless, suicidally aggressive, capable of overwhelming even disciplined formations through sheer numbers and mindless fury. But they'd also been predictable. Rage had patterns you could exploit. Frenzy had no strategy and no patience. You could bait them, funnel them, break them against prepared ground while they screamed themselves hoarse and threw bodies at your shields until the bodies stopped coming.
This army was different.
They moved in perfect synchronization, every unit responding to threats before they materialized, shifting formations with a fluidity that spoke of a single controlling intelligence. The Water Leviathan had turned them into a hive mind of a kind. A thing of many bodies and one will. Every soldier an extension of her. Every attack coordinated across hundreds of bodies simultaneously.
The old Depth Dwellers would have broken against the barrier by now with their frenzy spent, their dead piled high while the survivors wandered off in search of easier prey. These ones hadn't stopped and slowed. They'd been hammering the same weak points with mechanical precision for seven days straight, and they would keep hammering until the barrier broke or they were all dead.
Skethis's gaze swept across the dark sea of them, stretching into the Abyss as far as he could see. Thousands of them. And this was only a fraction of her forces.
They all knew that now. Serath's divinations had revealed it in fragments over the past week. She was hunting the other tribes too. The Verdant tribes, the remnants of the Divine Flame tribe. Not because they had anything she specifically needed, but because eliminating them now meant fewer variables later. Clean up the board before the real game started.
The Fold had dispatched warriors to warn them. Small squads of the fastest scouts, sent racing through the Abyss to reach the other tribes before the Depth Dwellers did. Serath had also sent envoys to the Verdant tribes and the Divine Flame remnant, banking on the desperate hope that their natural talents for concealment might have kept them hidden from the Leviathan's sight. The Verdant tribes were masters of blending into living terrain. If anyone could disappear, it was them.
The Divine Flame tribe was a longer shot. They'd been decimated a decade ago, when the Flame Leviathan died and most of their people had manically thrown themselves into the burning divine pyre in the west in an act of mass grief that Skethis still couldn't fully comprehend. Now they were reduced to a few scattered bands that survived through paranoia and absolute isolation. If anyone could stay invisible, it was people who'd turned hiding into a religion. But against the Water Leviathan's reach, even paranoia might not be enough.
Serath had tried to divine their fates. The threads had come back sluggish— a sign that whatever protections they'd raised were working, at least partially. The futures around them were murky and unresolved. Which was better than dead.
But Skethis couldn't shake the feeling that they were sending their people out just to die in someone else's territory.
What else could they do, though? Sit here and wait? The Fold was already a cage. At least the scouts had a chance.
More strikes hit in the next hour. Soon it was the twentieth. The barrier groaned, a sound that vibrated through Skethis's bones like the precursor to an earthquake. The twenty-first followed close behind, almost on top of it. The barrier screamed in a high, keening wail of sacred energy under stress, and then a hole tore open in the lower quadrant. Blinding and violent golden light flooded through, as sacred energy hemorrhaged from the wound like blood from an artery.
"Breach," the First Elder said. His voice was eerily calm now. "Lower quadrant. They're coming through."
Skethis's spear was already in his hand. Around the circle, every other elder readied for battle, weapons drawn, mana cycling, wings half-spread. Below them, the First Phalanx braced. Shields locked tighter, overlapping until they formed a single unbroken wall of dark scales and sacred energy. Tails coiled, ready to anchor against the charge. The spellcasters' mana flared bright enough to cast long, dancing shadows across the Fold's interior, painting every Kovrath face in harsh light and deeper darkness.
Through the breach, the first wave of Depth Dwellers began pouring in.
Their eyes were empty and focused all at once. There were no roars or screams. Just the sound of clawed feet hitting stone in perfect, synchronized rhythm.
Skethis spread his wings, muscles tensing, ready to descend toward the line and join the defense—
A jubilant laugh rang out behind him.
Every elder's head snapped toward the sound. Skethis turned so fast his wings nearly tangled.
And there she stood. She looked nothing like her hundreds-of-meters form. This version was small, maybe Skethis's height, though he was rather tall himself, and almost deceptively delicate. Pure white hair cascaded down her back, and three pairs of feathered dark wings folded behind her, each feather shimmering with that same iridescent hue he remembered from the chamber. Golden horns curled from her head, smaller now but no less regal. She wore a fur-like outfit that still seemed rather revealing in places, as if the concept of modesty was something she'd heard about once and dismissed as boring.
"It's starting! IT'S STARTING!" The Heavenly Leviathan bounced up and down on her heels like an excited child, wings fluttering with each hop, utterly oblivious to the breach, the army, the imminent death pouring through their gates. Her rainbow eyes were wide and gleaming, fixed on something far beyond the Fold's walls.
Skethis followed her gaze. Frowned.
She was staring at the golden obelisk.
And was it just him, or was there a crack running down its surface?