Interlude 3.35 [Lysska]

[oooh, an extra chappy?!? I was actually supposed to post this one alongside the previous chapter, but somehow both POVs ended up being beefy enough to stand on their own, so they became separate chapters instead. (I’m also not posting them on the usual schedule because I value my life, so you’re getting them together. Next chapter is back to Jade.)

Also, below is a sketch of the Heavenly Leviathan.

(She’s smug because she knows your deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secret.)

]

A spider knows every strand of her web. Every anchor point, every tension line, every place where the silk goes taut with the weight of something struggling. That's the whole point of being a spider. You build a home that is also a trap, and you learn it so thoroughly that when a single thread vibrates wrong, you know exactly what died and where. It's supposed to be simple. Comforting, even, if you're the kind of creature that finds comfort in knowing exactly how fucked everything around you is.

Lysska used to think of the Lower Warrens that way. Her web. Her little trap. Her tiny kingdom of desperation, where every rat had a price and every shadow owed her a favour. She'd known every bolt-hole, every crooked deal, every throat that needed cutting and every throat that needed keeping. The Warrens were a cesspit, but they were her cesspit. She'd spun that web with her own claws, and for years, nothing moved in it without her feeling the pull.

Then the web got bigger. Not in a way a clever spider could adapt to. One day she was running a gang. The next she met this… dragon. And the small world she'd been living in kept expanding, gradually at first, then all at once, until she was a spider caught in turbulent winds with no web at all. Just the memory of one, flapping uselessly behind her. It was kind of scary when she paused to think about it. She'd been conscripted into the personal service of a dragon, and suddenly her web was the whole city. Then it was Vor'Akh, the organization she'd once been part of, the one she was still technically on the run from. Then it was whatever the fuck was happening with the city and the elves. Then it was a trial where said dragon was fighting Gold Core demigods while literal elders of a ruling clan plotted something devious in the background.

And the spider— that would be her— had always known she wasn't the biggest thing in the world. She'd gazed beyond her web long enough to be terrified by what stared back. She knew she'd only ever been the biggest thing in one tiny corner of it, and the rest of the web was already spoken for by things that had been spinning long before she hatched.

She would never have taken the jump on her own. She'd been happy where she was. Or… had she? Now that she had the answer to that question, it should have made her cautious. It mostly just made her pissed off.

Lysska shook her head.

"Third junction confirms spatial warping. Again." She kept her voice low, even though there was nobody around to hear her except the rats, and they weren't exactly filing reports. Still, you could never be certain. "Same pattern as the last two. The tunnel bends left for approximately twelve metres, then the bend stops existing for about three seconds, then it's back but the angle's changed by maybe five degrees. Consistent enough to map. Inconsistent enough to be completely fucking useless."

Lord Veyan's voice bloomed in the back of her skull, measured as always. "Noted. The Matriarch will want the full cartography. But Lady Lysska—" and his voice softened, "Master insists that your safety outweighs the investigation. If the spatial phenomena escalate, you are to withdraw immediately. She was quite unambiguous on this point."

"I'll keep that in mind," Lysska lied. There was no way she was coming back without getting to the bottom of this.

"I mean it. She said— and I quote— 'if Jade's fox gets herself killed playing hero in my sewers, I will drag her soul back and make her fill out paperwork for eternity.'"

That, at least, got a twitch out of one of her tails. "Tell her I'm touched. Truly. The warmth of her concern is like a blazing hearth."

"Was that sarcasm, Lady Lysska? It does fit the criteria, but I am rather uncertain. I am quite bad at this stuff."

Lysska opened her mouth to say something, then decided against it. "Don't worry about me, Lord Veyan. I'll be fine. Focus on your task. I'm certain tailing a Gold Core without being noticed is a significant enough headache without me taking up your headspace."

The connection fizzled. Not because they were done, but because the ambient mana in this part of the tunnels did something unpleasant to long-range communication magic, whatever spell Lord Veyan was using to reach her, the walls here chewed it up and spat out static. She was alone again.

Well. Alone except for the pain.

Lysska pressed a hand to her chest, where that familiar ache was doing its slow, rhythmic squeeze around her heart. That core-deep throb of mana so densely packed it was starting to push against the boundaries of what a Red Core could contain. She'd been sitting at the peak for years now, long enough that she'd almost forgotten what it felt like to not be overloaded. The ascension was close, and it was getting closer every day.

The pangs were supposed to be a good sign, something she'd learned from Lord Veyan, the youngest man to ascend to Gold Core in the history of the continent, and he'd been very reassuring about it in his usual calm way. "When the path becomes clear," he'd said, "when you understand what you wish to be, you'll know. The pain is simply your core asking you to make a choice."

Right now, her core was asking her to make a choice, and the only answer she had was not yet, not here, not while everything is actively going to shit. The last thing anyone needed was her triggering a Gold Core ascension in the middle of whatever the fuck was unfolding.

Because that was the thing about ascending to Gold. It was supposed to be a spectacle, a personal apocalypse that announced to the world you'd stopped being a mortal and taken your first step into something more.

The way elves ascended now didn't seem to trigger the usual phenomena, which was suspicious in its own right, but from everything she'd gathered, a normal ascension involved breaking your own core with accumulated mana and praying you came out the other side as something that still had a pulse. Veyan had given her what guidance he could, which wasn't much, because apparently the whole process was aggressively personal. You'll know when you're ready. You'll know what you want to become. The path makes itself clear. Fancy way of saying "trust your gut."

Her gut was currently telling her the timing would be catastrophic. The moment she finally triggered ascension would probably be the exact moment everything else went up in flames. That was just how her luck worked.

For now, she kept moving.

Lysska had already compared notes with Alice, through Jade, through whatever bond those two shared that Alice didn't seem keen to elaborate on and she knew better than to ask about. Some dragon secrets weren't meant for fox ears, and she'd made her peace with that a while ago. What mattered was that she had a picture of what was happening inside the trial too, while the rest of Varkaigrad was stuck watching a Colosseum feed that had apparently decided to go artsy and abstract instead of broadcasting anything useful. With no theatrical narration or dramatic close-ups. Just silence and the occasional glimpse of chaos that raised more questions than it answered.

The whole city was gnawing on rumours, and Lysska was one of maybe four people who actually knew how bad it was.

The trial was a hellscape. Worse than she'd imagined, and she'd imagined plenty. Jade had already fought and won against a Gold Core, which should have been impossible by every metric Lysska understood, and she was apparently about to face multiple more. The other participants were unaccounted for. The whole thing was a pressure cooker with the lid welded shut, and Lysska was down here mapping sewer pipes.

She cared. That was the stupid part. She genuinely cared whether Jade made it out alive, which was an uncomfortable emotion for someone who'd spent most of her adult life not giving a shit about anyone outside her immediate chain of command.

But caring and being useful were two different things, and right now there was exactly nothing she could do for Jade. Jade was fighting her own war. Lysska had to trust she could win it. She'd pulled off impossible things before, and there was something about her— something beyond the dragon part, something Lysska couldn't explain and maybe shouldn't try to— that made her think Jade was uniquely equipped for the nightmare the trial had become.

So Lysska did her job. She surveyed. And she let Kraven do what Kraven did best.

Hundreds of tiny crow fragments scattered through the tunnels ahead of her, each one a borrowed set of eyes feeding back to her own senses. It was a surveillance net that should have covered every twist and turn, every dead end, every hidden alcove. Instead, it was a mess.

Fragments kept vanishing. Some got caught in spatial loops, reappearing three junctions away with no memory of how they'd gotten there. Some hit pockets where time seemed to stutter and came back with timestamps that didn't match reality. A few simply stopped existing, and she couldn't even tell what had killed them. No mana signature and no trap mechanism. Just a fragment there one moment, gone the next, like the tunnel had closed its mouth and swallowed.

The whole thing was bizarre like a puzzle made of broken space and hungry architecture, and Lysska was starting to get the distinct impression that these parts of the sewers weren't malfunctioning at all. They were probably operating exactly as designed.

This close to the potent Ley Lines, phenomena like this were expected. It was kind of the reason these sections had been sealed off in the first place, shut behind wards and forgotten by everyone except the people who'd put them there. Now the Matriarch had opened them again, and Lysska, well, she happened to be particularly gifted at figuring out what the hell was going on, what with her many eyes and her talent for being places she wasn't supposed to be.

When Lord Veyan told her the city's ruler wanted a personal audience, Lysska's first instinct was to run. Her second instinct was to laugh, because running from the Flameclaw Matriarch was like trying to outrun winter, theoretically possible if you had wings and a death wish, but practically speaking, you were just buying time until the cold found your bones. Her third instinct was a cold, creeping dread that settled into her marrow and refused to leave.

She'd been a gang leader in the Lower Warrens for years, and that position came with a record that was less "distinguished" and more "extensively redacted." She'd done things. Ordered things. Personally enacted things that would make a magistrate's eyebrows catch fire. She was not, by any reasonable definition, one of the good ones. She was efficient. She was loyal to her own. And when the most powerful Gold Core in the region summons you, you don't assume it's to offer you a commendation. You assume it's to close a ledger that's been open too long.

She'd been skeptical, but she went anyway. If she'd been summoned before the whole Jade fiasco, she might have assumed she was walking to her execution with polite pretense. But a lot had changed since then. Enough that despite the nerves coiling in her stomach, she was hopeful this probably wasn't anything bad.

And it wasn't. Snezana had offered her a job.

The Matriarch was not what Lysska had expected. The Matriarch of the Flameclaws, the Hell Demoness of Varkaigrad, the titles conjured images of fangs and fire, of barely leashed brutality wrapped in a matronly mask. The reality was simpler. Snezana had the kind of eyes that saw through everything, and the kind of smile that made you forget whether you were being threatened or complimented until hours later when you were lying awake trying to parse the conversation.

Within five minutes of meeting her, Lysska understood two things: first, that Snezana was exactly as dangerous as the stories said, and second, that the stories had undersold her by a considerable margin.

The city's ruler was, as expected, just as paranoid as Lysska herself. She knew something was about to go down.

"The architects of Varkaigrad were alchemists," she'd said, settling back in her chair. "Veyan told me about your discoveries. While it's true they built this city over ley lines that should have made construction impossible, they shaped the sewers, the foundations, the very streets into something that could contain that power. So the city falling to something built by the city's own alchemists… does make sense, in retrospect."

So Lord Veyan had already briefed her. That tracked. The massive quantities of poisons and ritual compounds they'd recovered from the elven operation in the Lower District pointed toward something large-scale and sacrificial.

"We arrested the elves," Lysska had said, because she'd been there, she'd done the arresting, she'd personally ensured several of them would need significant recovery time before any interrogations could proceed. "The compounds are secured. The ritual should be—"

"Safe?" Snezana had shaken her head, and the smile she'd given was almost pitying, though Lysska couldn't tell if the pity was for her naivety or for the situation in general. "Lysska, I have spent decades learning the paths that magic takes when it bleeds. I know rituals. I know hexes. I know the ways that power can be shaped and fed and hidden. And I know that if someone goes to the trouble of building a sacrificial ritual with a city's name on it, they don't stop just because one cell gets arrested. They have redundancies. They have contingencies. The elves you captured might have been the ritualists, or they might have been a distraction. The compounds might have been the fuel, or they might have been a decoy. I'm not ruling out anything until I am certain we are indeed 'safe.'"

She'd explained how architecture itself could be symbolic in ways that mattered, streets laid out like ritual circles, foundations poured over buried sigils, entire districts aligned to channel power toward a single point over centuries while nobody noticed. She already had a powerful Gold Core familiar set up to scour a proper map of every single street in the sprawling mess that was Varkaigrad. She couldn't go herself. She had a front to maintain, especially with the other Flameclaw elders, the foolish ones, keeping tabs on her constantly. Even this meeting was temporary; she'd had to leave a decoy in her place, and she estimated they'd realize the switch soon. She had to return before they did.

Lord Veyan had been tasked with identifying powerful individuals, using his keen spatial senses to track them without being noticed. He'd already detected several Gold Core elves present in the Colosseum, and he was tailing them now with his spatial powers. Moryana, Snezana's Gold Core demon familiar, was scouring the surface, mapping every street, every alley, every architectural anomaly that might form part of a larger pattern. The Matriarch was deploying her pieces with precision.

And as for Lysska herself…

She was to enter the sealed sections of the sewers. The parts that had been walled off for generations, where the Ley Lines ran so thick and chaotic that even Gold Core magic fizzled out if you got too close. Her particular talent— her bond with Kraven and the hundreds of fragment-eyes he could scatter— would be uniquely useful in mapping it.

Standard magic failed near the Ley Lines. Communication spells dissolved. Detection wards sparked and died. But the bond she shared with her familiar didn't rely on external mana structures. It was older and deeper than that, woven into the connection between beast and master in a way that the ambient chaos couldn't easily unravel.

It still didn't change the fact that Kraven's fragments would die. The Ley Lines chewed through them like a cat through songbirds. But as long as Lysska had mana, she could produce more. Map it out bit by painful bit. Avoid the obvious traps, the kill zones, the spatial anomalies that swallowed whatever wandered into them. She was equipped with multiple vials of the highest-grade mana potions, the kind with significantly reduced risk of mana poisoning from overconsumption, something the Matriarch had provided personally, without fanfare, as casually as handing over a cup of tea.

Now Lysska was using her eyes to their maximum extent, and she had no idea how much time had passed since she'd started. Hours? Longer? The tunnels didn't exactly have windows, and the Ley Lines did something funny to her internal clock, stretching minutes into what felt like days and compressing hours into blinks. In front of her sat a blank paper with a pen in her hand. She'd been relentlessly channeling mana, creating new Kraven fragments every five seconds, sending them out, pulling them back, adjusting, redirecting. Each fragment that died told her something— not that way, not that tunnel, that space is hungry, that bend doesn't exist when you're looking at it from the wrong angle. She was painting a map in negatives, defining the shape of the unknown by everything that failed to return from it.

But the progress was there.

A shape was taking form on the paper beneath her pen.

A glance at her handwatch told her a whole day had passed outside since she'd been given this task. That couldn't be right. She double-checked. It was. The cognitive load was starting to pile up behind her eyes, a dull, thrumming pressure that made her skull feel two sizes too small. She couldn't remember the last time she'd pushed herself this hard, maybe never, actually. But a pounding head was a fair price if she managed to uncover something good. Something they could use.

That was when she felt space bend behind her.

Lysska's instincts screamed before her brain caught up. She was on her feet, weapon half-drawn, heart slamming against her ribs, because nothing had interrupted her since she'd entered these tunnels and anything that could find her here was either very powerful or very lost and neither option was comforting—

Then she saw the face. Goat-like head. Demon horns. Butler's uniform with creases. Monocle gleaming over one slitted eye.

Moryana. Snezana's familiar.

Lysska exhaled and let the tension drain out of her shoulders. "A little warning next time."

Moryana gave a small, apologetic incline of her horned head. "Lady Lysska. Do pardon the intrusion. Locating you in this labyrinth took rather longer than anticipated. The whole place is a damn mess." The demon's voice was gravelly and proper all at once. I would receive quite the earful if Master learned I permitted you to work yourself to death. Which you are dangerously close to doing, if you hadn't already… noticed…"

The words slowed down. Lysska watched Moryana's gaze drift past her, toward the paper she'd been hunched over for the past day, and suddenly the exhaustion in her bones was replaced by something else. The map. The shape she'd been so focused on drawing that she hadn't stepped back to look at what it actually was.

She had a very bad feeling.

"Please don't tell me that means something," Lysska said, and she meant it. She wanted Moryana to laugh, to wave a hoof and tell her it was just squiggles, that she'd been staring at walls too long and her brain was making patterns out of noise.

Moryana picked up the map. She chuckled, but Lysska had spent enough years reading people, to catch the strain underneath it. "However dearly I might wish to oblige…" The demon's voice shifted, the humour evaporating, replaced by something ancient. "It seems Master was once again right on the money."

Moryana looked up from the paper, past Lysska, into the dark of the tunnel ahead.

"This… is a summoning circle. A rather gigantic one at that."