(3rd Person POV)
Arthur could see that the woman was beautiful. Extraordinarily so — near Firfel's level, maybe, which was no small thing to admit. Not that it moved him. He loved Firfel, and whatever this place laid in front of him, he would never cheat.
What held him instead was the rest of her. A slender tail curled loose against the stone at the hem of her robe, and a pair of dark wings lay folded beneath her shoulders, the membrane thin enough that the altar's faint glow bled through them. 'A vampire. Or something that shares the family tree.'
"She looks like Sleeping Beauty," he murmured, mostly to himself.
His eyes dropped to the altar and the engravings cut into its rim — dense, looping symbols packed edge to edge, and not one of them meant a thing to him.
"Can't read a word of this." He crouched and dragged a finger along one groove. "And it's a mess. Way more tangled than the setup they had Keanu chained up in. Whoever locked her down here really didn't want her getting out."
He bound the guardian where the boy lay slumped, wrapping him tight in divine power, then pressed a marker into the chamber's stone so he could drop back into it the moment he needed to.
The Nether World wasn't supposed to allow any of this. The Three Known Deities had sealed the whole realm against teleportation ages ago, a restriction they'd woven together out of their combined authority — no way in, no way out, not by space alone. But Arthur hadn't come away empty-handed. He'd walked out with a real grasp of the Temporal Laws now, and Space bent easy alongside them once you understood how the two braided together. Slipping the Space Element through the old seal was nothing to him anymore.
He stepped out into the mortal world, tracked down Keanu and Kaiser, and hauled the pair of them back down to the altar. Weaker than him by a wide margin, both of them — but between the two, they carried knowledge he didn't have.
The instant they laid eyes on the woman, both of them sucked in a sharp breath.
Kaiser got there first, voice gone thin. "That's— Arthur, that's the Queen of the Nether Realm. From before. Before the Three Known Deities ever took the mortal world." He swallowed. "Mephista. Aides's wife."
Arthur's brows climbed. 'The Queen of the Nether Realm. Wife of Aides.'
The demon race were meant to descend from Aides, King of the Underworld — which made the woman on this altar, in some crooked way, his own ancestor too. Through the demon blood, at least.
"Mephista," he said, testing the name, looking her over again. "So she's the one who runs this whole place. As its Queen."
"She does." Kaiser didn't take his eyes off her.
"Figures." Arthur's mouth tugged sideways. "Whole realm's crawling with monsters, every tier you could name. Easy enough to swat them like ants — problem is there's about as many of them as there are ants."
"Yes." Kaiser nodded, distracted. "And don't let the sleeping face fool you. Her Authority sits at the same height as her husband's. Level with Aides himself."
Keanu picked the thread up. "The two of them built this realm together — her and Lord Aides. Hand in hand. It runs larger than the whole mortal world, top to bottom." He tipped his head at the black expanse yawning past the chamber mouth. "They could've gone up to the Divine World and carved their territory out there with the rest of the gods. They didn't. They chose to root it here instead, anchored straight to the mortal plane."
"Why down here?" Arthur asked.
"Size." Keanu spread a hand at the dark. "Down here it grew into this. Up there? A fraction of it. Smaller, probably, than your own Kingdom."
"I see." Arthur nodded slowly.
So that was the trade behind it. A deity who didn't care to abandon their home world could tie their high realm to it instead of the Divine World, and the raw weight of a high god's domain would swell the thing several times past the mortal world's size. Take that exact same realm up to the Divine World, and it'd shrink down to a scrap of what it was.
"Well." Arthur straightened and nodded at the altar. "These engravings are past me. But if you two can read them, we decode this, and we wake her up."
Keanu and Kaiser bent over the symbols together. They could read them — enough to pass the meaning straight into Arthur's head — and with his power behind it, cracking the seal and waking Mephista would be nothing.
Kaiser was the one who straightened first, though. "You're sure about this, Arthur?" He kept his voice down, like she might hear it. "We've got no idea how she takes to you. None. There's no promise the thing that opens its eyes on that slab wakes up grateful."
Keanu turned on him. "The thing? You're talking about Lady Mephista."
"I'm talking about a god we've never met who's been drained on an altar for who-knows-how-long," Kaiser fired back. "Excuse me for wanting to know what walks out of that."
"You're doubting her—"
"I'm being careful, which one of us ought to be—"
"Enough." Arthur slid a hand up between them before it went anywhere. "Both of you. Focus." He shook his head. "We take every ally we can get right now. Every single one. We just flipped the whole world on its head, and for the moment most of it answers to me — but the second Solarus turns up, there's no telling how much of that holds. So. We wake her, and we ask nicely."
The two of them backed off, grumbling.
"...Fine. You're right." Kaiser blew out a breath, then his frown deepened, catching on something. "Speaking of loose ends — one of my subordinates died a few weeks back. While we were off-world. Weak little thing, and he'd already crawled into bed with the Three Known Deities, so no great loss to me. But I don't know who put him down, and the way it was done? Clean. That's a high-level deity's work—"
"That was me," Arthur said.
Kaiser blinked at him. "...what?" The three of them had been in another world entirely for that whole stretch. He was sure of it. He'd counted the days.
"How?" Even Keanu had lost the thread.
"Long story." The corner of Arthur's mouth twitched. "Short version — I can move through time now. Weeks back, weeks ahead. Wherever I feel like standing."
Their mouths dropped open in the same beat.
"You're—" Keanu's head visibly spun. "You're serious. You're serious right now."
"Time. On top of everything else." Kaiser dragged a hand down his whole face. "Are you the God of Time now? Is that— what are you, at this point?" His voice cracked up an octave. "How in the hells are you moving this fast? It isn't decent!"
Arthur just laughed. "So that's why you can stop fretting over her. Worst case — she wakes up swinging, I don't like it, I go back and make sure none of this ever happened."
Behind them, the guardian stirred against the stone.
They all felt it. None of them bothered to turn; the boy was wrapped tight in their divine power, going nowhere.
"You—" The boy's voice came out strained, and under it ran a low, rolling growl, like something enormous grinding the words out through a child's throat. "What do you think you're doing to my Lady?"
"Easy, loyal one." Arthur glanced back over his shoulder. "We're here to wake her, not hurt her."
The boy wasn't a boy at all, Arthur realized. A dragon, wearing a human shape.
"Wake her? Impossible." He hauled uselessly at the bindings. "No one wakes her but Lord Aides himself, and you are not—" Then his glare landed on the other two, and the growl guttered right out of him. "...You brats. You're here. You're actually here."
Keanu dipped his head, formal. "It's been a long while, Sir Vermillion."
"Enyalius." Vermillion breathed the name like a stone he'd carried a long time.
"You can trust us, Sir Vermillion." Keanu didn't so much as blink. "Boss Arthur's power stands level with Lord Aides. Higher, if I'm honest with you."
Vermillion's eyes cut to Arthur, raw disbelief all over them. "Him. That one."
"Him." Keanu held it. "And it's Keanu Reeves now, Sir Vermillion. I don't answer to Enyalius anymore. Haven't in a long time."
Vermillion went quiet, reading his face. A renaming meant another god had laid claim to him and set the name in place — meant there was a master standing behind it, and behind Keanu, that master was Arthur. He worked it through. "...I see," he said at last, and something in the old dragon settled.
Arthur turned back to the altar and got to work. He reached for the meaning Keanu and Kaiser had poured into him, chanting low under his breath, feeding his Divine Power into the seal one careful thread at a time.
The engravings held. He could feel exactly how much it would cost to break them — far, far more than he'd bargained for. Enough to notice.
'What if I used Om instead?'
He flipped the flow. Divine power out. Om in.
The instant the Om so much as brushed the stone, the engravings splintered. No push. No strain. No effort at all, like the seal had simply agreed to stop existing.
Keanu, Kaiser, and Vermillion stared, wide-eyed and silent. Whatever Arthur had just run through his hands, none of them had a name for it — it sat somewhere above them, above anything they could reach, so far past their level it didn't register as the same kind of power at all.
The seal came apart. Slowly at first, then all at once. Mephista's eyes drifted open.
She looked around the chamber. At the four of them gathered in front of her.
And then her gaze slid clean past all of them, snagging on something in the empty air. "This power..." Her breath pulled inward as the Om drifted her way, and hunger bloomed across her face — deep, sudden, almost drunk with it.