Metaworld Chronicles

Bright Reef.

The whale song of the Leviathans began with a melodic note, long and delicate, like the mewing laughter of adorable toddlers not yet capable of speech.

High up in his crystal spire, the Warlock Nin-Pak paused his council meeting when the first notes struck, sending a visible shiver from the chandelier of his peerless palace to wobble his plates of delectable, bubbled jellies.

It was unusual to hear a Leviathan sing, for they were solitary creatures whose breeding cycles could lay dormant for centuries. But then again, Nin-Pak reasoned, there was a young Leviathan now in the same sea, and an orphaned juvenile may not understand that its seniors possessed no energy or desire to mate for the next century or so.

His interest lay with the Human female on the outskirts, one whose uncertain ambitions were stirring up strange troubles in his gleaming city.

When the second chorus arrived, longer and deeper this time, Nin-Pak’s thoughts on the invasive Draconic Vessel controlling the third Shoal acquired the same locomotion as the violently quivering caviar.

By the time he summoned the guards to summon the Sea Witches responsible for Zityupdul, the Leviathan that housed his armies, his delicate coral spire was reeling like reeds amid an elemental maelstrom.

After briefly warning his panicked ministers, the Warlock commanded the currents to take him outside his palatial spire.

Unfortunately, the spire's exterior offered no solace, for below his jewel-encrusted fins, he saw a city being consumed by debris and stirring sediments.

“SIRE—!” His guards also likewise abandoned the rapidly deconstructing shelter of the Shimmering Spire. “Bright Reef is—“

Nin-Pak could hear nothing, for the Leviathan song vibrating through the water had reached a level he had never experienced in the two hundred Vel-cycles of his life as the city’s ruler. All forms of communication grew insensible as ripples, visible to the naked eye, tore across Bright Reef, tearing up the shell cobbles of the palace districts and collapsing the fragile growths of young coral just woven into place.

Even his spire, the highest structure in Bright Reef, was rapidly shedding its shells.

In the distance, he could see that Zityupdul was on the move.

Forcing his bulging eyes back into their sockets, Nin-Pak calmed himself and his guards with a deft manipulation of Elemental Water, transmuting his voice across liquids with the consistency of sludge.

“Gather the Shoal!” he said, his voice croaking. "Make for Zityupdul! It’s headed to Whabpuz Gyli!”

Bright Reef.

Sarkonnian, daughter of the Mother of Mantas who Swallowed the Seas of the World, half-rolled from her enormous chaise when her dearest Qiuh-bwuzi, the very Leviathan whose womb served as her spawning pool, suddenly spoke for the first time in a century.

The shockwave from its sudden vociferation, both internal and external, was enough to loosen Sarkonnian’s century-old war trophies from the gut wall to free-float through the interior of the palace.

Swearing upon her ancestors, she clambered back onto her jewel-encrusted chaise. Her impeccable presence was restored within a breath. However, for a being as regal as Sarkonnian, she felt a deep sense of shame and loathing for showing her subjects a genuine display of confusion and panic.

“Qiuh-shallha?” she sent out psychic ripples of thought through her innate connection with her Leviathan, the literal seat of her power in the Fifth Vel. “What has upset you?”

The answer that came was so sharp and resonant that Sarkonnian’s attendant Mermaids had to brace their Cores and circulate their mana lest their mana conduits spontaneously erupted from the vibrations of the Leviathan’s sound organs.

“An ancient one…?” Sarkonnian could barely distinguish the meaning behind her living fortress’s impressionistic shrieks and whistles, combined with a bone-cracking series of clicks. Compared to the evocative expressions of the common Mer, a Leviathan’s thoughts and speech were more primordial, with its foundations in impressions and sensory expression rather than abstract thought. “… defilers…? Despoiling the reef?”

A second later, realisation struck, sending a mote of terror through Sarkonnian’s spine. For the noble Mer, it was a level of trepidation she had not experienced since their territorial battle with the Sea Dragons of the Third Vel.

In Bright Reef, the Ancient was a secret that only a dozen of her closest Mer nobles truly fathomed.

She and Nin-Pak had stumbled upon the carcass some twenty Vels ago, and it was only in the recent Vel cycles that their Sea Witch scholars truly uncovered the depth of the riches that could be excavated from the body. Through a tacit agreement, the Warlock and herself had designated the region where the carcass lay as a Crystal Mine inhabited by dark and strange creatures. It also served as a cell block for undesirables, who vanish more often than not into its depth.

Through their mutual discretion, Whabpuz Gyli had enriched their Shoals equally while taking the refuse of Bright Reef without complaint. It was a perfect place, one that operated without complication or complaint.

Who could have exposed the secret then? Who could have even recognised it for what it was? Her suspicion lay with the Draconic Vessel—but even such a discovery should not have catalysed her Qiuh-bwuzi into a tectonic passion. Even in the heat of battle, even when her Leviathan had lost half its limbs and leagues and leagues of its rope-like intestines were strewn over the sea floor, Qiuh had found the injury little more than an irksome annoyance.

Likewise, Leviathans did not possess so much sentimentality that they would turn against their spirit-bound mistresses merely because they offended a tradition of the Elemental Plane of Water. Indeed, in the First Vel, every Leviathan Fall was a boon to be tapped for a hundred hundred Vel cycles, and seldom did the master of a Vel allow outsiders to benefit.

For her living fortress to wish to uproot itself—and act independent of Sarkonnian’s will—was a first in all the centuries she had served as its mistress.

Sarkonnian expanded her fleshy mantles to control the water, balancing herself as the room continued to crumble. She reached out and clutched a dozen pearls, only to have the rest slip through her fingers. To defile, there must be a defiler, of that there was no doubt.

But the Defilers were half an Elemental Plane away, hidden in that blighted seascape to the north. Their obscene Human magic was potent but much diminished in the water, more so in the deep Vel. Likewise, the reports of Mer-kin being transformed by some Necromantic phage had never appeared in or near the Fifth Vel.

Was this a ploy by Nin-Pak, then? Sarkonnian found her hypothesis difficult to believe.

Or could this be the Human’s doing after all? Her returning thought was of their newcomer, whose “priests” had been stirring amusing trouble in Bright Reef. Yet, she did not believe that a Draconic Vessel brimming with vitality could be an accomplice to the marauders of un-life, an alliance as unlikely as Pengs and Dragons.

Her next thought was that perhaps Nin-Pak and the Human had reached an accord, which made the most sense.

Her throne room lurched, signalling that her Leviathan was on the move.

Whatever was buried in the depth, the choice was taken from her now. Much like the pearlescent sanctum now falling to pieces around her, whatever plans she had put in place to cox the Pale Vessel were now displaced by the seismic movements of their cities, each eager to unearth those who would defile a sacred garden of life.

The Regent of Shalkar, Pale Priestess to her people, extricated herself from the gooey aperture of her Leviathan’s Heart Chamber to catch her breath in the chaos of the upturned throne room.

At last, she was fully capable of comprehending why the Mer’s eclectic structures seemed so jury-rigged, for the twin’s best efforts at decor were disintegrating before her eyes, compelled by undeniable Dwarven lore called momentum.

While her council braced themselves with their extra appendages, the shimmering screens connected to the Leviathan’s optical senses showed the rapidly dwindling visage of the Fifth Vel behind them, joined by two bioluminescent landscapes, one the form of a manta and the other more cylindrical and elongated.

“We’re rapidly approaching Whabpuz Gyli, Pale Priestess,” Lei-bup, her late-season Riker, spoke as he brandished his Shoggoth appendages. “When the Leviathans are on the move, distance tends to compress.”

Willing her Witch Core to expel the viscous slime weighing her elfin kelp dress, Gwen stumbled onto the throne to make their warp travel more thematically relevant. To her right, the hunched Lim-duk manned his station, assuring the panicking citizens that Aristotle’s traverse was temporary and that they would return to the kelp fields. Her comms officers were the twins Pelahwi and Velahi, whose nubile visage suited their sleek elegance as they wove the magics of the Mer with their ivory digits. Nin-Ka acted as her Worf, whose deep voice ensured Gwen that her Wave Riders managed the chaos of Aristotle’s outer reef while her scarlet-shelled crustacean officers were out and about, keeping order in the Leviathan’s interior.

Once a report had been delivered from each of her living appendages connecting her to her Shoal, Gwen retreated once more into the immaterial space of her Astral Body to reconnect with her Void Familiar.

With the synaesthesia of whispering gossamer, her body fell through the throne, past the rigid coral and the floor beneath where Aristotle’s Core Chamber pulsed. When she opened her eyes again, she once more inhabited the strange, alien world of VR Caliban’s hunger vision (™), her brain tethered to the abstraction of echolocation, vitality detection, and an incomprehensible psychic hunger.

Deep within Whabpuz Gyli, it was business as usual.

Her faithful, who had infiltrated the mines, remained on the outskirts, chiselling away at the impossible task of removing fossilised Leviathan bone to expose the crystallised marrow used by the Sea Witches to craft potent charms and armour.

The clueless guards patrolled their routes as always, oblivious to the approaching calamities.

With the moment soon upon them, Gwen once more guided Caliban toward the zenith of the Core Chamber.

While the destruction of Whabpuz Gyli and the “rescue” of the Edenic carcass was high on her list of priorities, her land-bound duties included gathering evidence that, against the common sense of Spellcraft and Faith Magic, the followers of Juche had found a way to evolve Necromancy beyond the realm of terrestrial beings.

Now, if her Cali could invite the Sinneslukare Lich to come to Cambridge for tea and coffee with a kind, coaxing conversation… that would surely bring great joy to her colleagues in Tryfan.

Bright Reef.

While the city's triumvirate involuntarily travelled on an expedition into the outer Vel, the citizens of Fifth happened upon an unusual opportunity.

For the first time since the Pale Priestess’ prophets of the Grand Purpose had entered the city and filtered through its layered stratum of accumulated misery, they could not see the ever-present Wave Riders patrolling the city’s spires.

A part of the obfuscation was the cataclysm of choking sediments.

When the Leviathans left, the great songs they had sung had collapsed a portion of the reef and stirred up countless layers of deposited refuse, transforming the city into a murky pool of swirling brine. The hungry, the destitute, and the forgotten had all been forced from their collapsed hovels into the streets, escaping into the upper levels of the spired reef city to avoid suffocation or a crushing death.

Of course, the Prole-Mer-iat and their attempt to live for the moment was not appreciated by the nobler Mer, whose homes were in the Spires and who were already irked by their losses. Their private guards, not attached to the Greater Shoal of either Nin-Pak or Sarkonnian, emerged in schools with tridents and scimitars to drive the drivel back into the murk, where they belonged.

Then, as history would have foretold, feathers fell, and camels complained.

This time, a mother Mer and a brood of her fry had refused to swim into the suffocating churn and were speared by the gleeful barracuda-faced guards of a noble.

As the cloud of blood and guts slowly erupted, inviting the ever-present scavengers of the sea, an olive-garbed Priest of Purpose, multi-armed and sheltering the surviving fries, threw himself upon the cavalry Captain and clamped the man’s neck with a pincer.

“What else have we to lose?!” he called out to the dusty bodies of ten thousand refugees below him as the Sea Horsed whined and bucked. “What else could they take from you?”

The upset Sea Horse tore a limb from the howling Priest, and the Captain deftly recovered his sidearm, piercing the body of his assailant.

Yet, the red-shelled crab seemed fuelled by a supernatural vitality as he ignored the maiming, moving instead with vigour to raise a copy of the Door and the Key in its blood-red glory in his off-claw.

With a thud—he smashed it into the barracuda’s face.

Again and again, the spectacle played out, the book falling apart as it hammered the Wave Rider Captain, deforming his skull even as the Priest’s inner cartilage spilt into the bloody water.

The crowd watched in contemplative silence as a captive audience to a gladiatorial spectacle. When finally the Priest fell limp, and his body slid from the furious Sea Horse, the barracuda Captain howled to intimidate the common folk… only to be faced with an unusual reception.

For once, the Prole-Mer-iat did not flee, cower, or beg for their lives.

Instead, they were furious—and that fury had read enough from a little red book to assume a purpose and a goal.

Whabpuz Gyli.

The mines, usually tranquil with the sound of dying labourers, erupted like a pierced ball of sardines.

First came the looming silhouette of what could only be a Leviathan, and then came the armed forces of a Shoal that was not attached to either of their masters.

The school of guards that ventured forth to greet the incoming tide was immediately perforated by a swarm of malevolent Wave Riders with enormously twisted bodies, riding upon Sea Horses that looked like they had fed upon the lesser riders of Bright Reef’s Shoals.

Then, within minutes, innumerable crab-Mer descended, captained by gigantic specimens wielding the strength of dozens. These tore apart the gates to the hovels where the mine’s unhappy employees were housed, all the while howling slogans denoting the rise of the Prole-Mer-iat.

The prison’s Warden, a noble Mer assigned by the ruler of the Fifth Vel himself, ventured forth to confront the threat, only to be crushed wholesale by a tentacle from the Leviathan that shot from the firmament like a pink-purple Roman column.

Once the guard stations were crushed, the Wave Riders turned their attention rearward, for a second Leviathan had arrived above the first. The surviving guards thought that salvation had finally presented itself—only to witness the Leviathan drifting beside the first to lay its thousands of tendrils into the scarred landscape of the mine below.

Their only solace was that the emerging Mer were the ones they knew.

In the space between them, a great clash began, with living phalanxes of prawn-Mer on the smaller Leviathan lobbing great volleys toward their neighbours while schools of Sea Witch acolytes from the larger Leviathan conjured water sprouts of jagged coral to try and dislodge the archers.

The chaos grew gradually beyond comprehension, for the Leviathan themselves seemed without foe other than the mine itself—while a grand, impromptu battle of the Shoals seemed to break out in every other sphere of space, be it in the water, on the sea floor, or on the moving landscapes of their mutual living cities.

Then—even as World War Leviathan rose to a crescendo, a third Leviathan, larger than the rest, slid into its port of call.

While observers on both sides had fully anticipated the forces of Sarkonnian to either watch or remain at a distance to pick off the victor, the Leviathan under her control ignored all logic and joined its siblings.

Ergo, chaos and anarchy were joined by mutiny as three tectonic plates, forming something like a great undersea petal, began to jostle for space around the buried carcass.

The Mermen that had newly arrived were soon sucked into the vortex of violence as their own city threw them overboard or forced them to choose between entering the open-sea melee or being crushed between two clashing cities.

The Shoals’ rulers, safe in the carapace of their floundering palace temples, could only watch as great clods of dust overwhelmed every living space below their gargantuan allies. Likewise, rocks the size of small hills flew like pebbles in every direction, making avoiding the fray impossible.

And so, the medley of violence rose like a noontide, joined by the eerie orison of Mythics in mourning.

Gwen observed the Sinneslukare Lich observing a projection of the chaos outside its Core Chamber domain.

There was no way of reading its facial expression, for the creature no longer had a face that could be passed as humanoid. On a living Sinneslukare, it was at least possible to observe the eyes and the hairless brow-ridges, which took on the likeness of its once-victim.

What was even the process here? Did a Lich give itself to a Sinneslukare? Gwen felt her scalp crawl as she mused over the possibilities. Or did a Sinneslukare take over a living Lich candidate?

The Lich looked up.

Gwen remained as docile and subtle as humanely possible while riding the mind of a Void worm.

The eyes, which usually had pupils like goats', were featureless and milk-white, while the skin was sticky with cloudy mucus. Even the tentacles appeared lifeless and limp, expressing only the slightest locomotion as the third Leviathan landed, shaking the foundations of the carcass.

She understood that it would take some time, even for three Leviathans, to dig past the upper crust of its brethren to finally reach the Heart Chamber.

Impending doom, however, did not appear to disturb the Sinneslukare-Lich.

It stood, with no change in posture, as if contemplating some great universal truth. Each time its deathless gaze swept over the crevice where Caliban hid, she felt as though its finger-like digits were fondling the soft tissues of her brain.

Thankfully, the sanctum was now a chamber of utter chaos.

Piece by piece, the ceiling of the cathedral cavern was falling into the excavation below, blinding even the calamari-Lich to the finer details of her hidden menace.

Following the avalanche, a large block of calcified bone, half a storey tall, glanced off the shell of an invisible Force Barrier around the Lich, making her glad that she had not commanded Caliban to attack haphazardly.

The chamber's shaking took on a renewed vigour.

Slowly, as if having reached a conclusion, the Lich raised a desiccated claw.

The etched Glyphs upon the Leviathan’s Core began to glow an ominous ochre-orange. The Undead Mermen closest to the Core seemed suddenly invigorated as new commands filtered into their ruptured consciousness. The lobster titans guarding the entrance grew alive as they tore themselves from the walls, opening the orifice to some terrible chamber below.

For any other scholar of the Mageocracy’s highest institutions, they would have cried Foul Magic! and readied themselves for an onslaught.

For the Pale Priestess, she could only mouth Holy Fuck in silence as she recognised Henry’s Soul Tap, in all its original Necromantic glory, being used as its progenitors had intended—to infuse the Undead with corpse power extracted from a deceased Mythic.

Gwen returned to her body, shunting so hard into her physical form that her muscles reflexively jerked her forward and away from the throne.

“LEI-BUP!” She called out to her number one. “Get Aristotle and the others back from the Core Chamber!”

Her warning had bought plenty of time, and between the twins and the Mer-turtle, they were delivered promptly and succinctly.

Nonetheless, in the chaotic mass-melee of three Shoals who could barely tell one another apart, an orderly retreat from the tuna ball of destruction was as likely as her request for the Leviathans to make sudden, reactive movements.

With agony, Gwen watched the glacial movements of her troops, compounded by the real-life lag attributed to Aristotle’s nervous systems travelling literal kilometres down its tentacle limbs and pedal fins.

Like a cracking egg in a broiler, the casing that formed the ceiling of the Lich room cracked open, releasing a pressurised jet of Necrotic energy with enough viscosity to resemble squid ink. In an instant, it spilt from the mines.

“What the hell is that?” Gwen demanded of her Sea Witches. “Is it a spell?”

“No… this isn’t magic…” Lei-bup’s glossy eyes were glued to the geyser, polluting the space between the three Leviathan, forcing them to shift back out of instinct. “That’s an actual material substance.”

“It looks like oil,” Gwen drew closer to the screen now that she was back on her feet. The obsidian plumes reminded her of something in the past—like the scene of underwater cameras capturing the spill from the BP oil disaster.

Then, an alarming recognition derived from Spectre’s greatest hits in the year she had fought the Undead Mer conjured itself into being. “Unholy Nazarene…” she blasphemed freely, for it was an apt event for such expressions. “Is all that Necrophage?”

The three-way war ceased momentarily when a third of their number suddenly perished to an ink-jet geyser of filth that consumed all it touched.

The immediate victims were obliterated, their living tissue instantly drained or shrivelled by the spores of the necromantic ink surging into the surrounding sea. The very same jet found little trouble in shrivelling the appendages of the Leviathans, some as thick as the trunk of Gwen’s juvenile World Tree, and seemed to take in the consumed vitality into itself to empower a violent and explosive replication.

The next victims were those caught in the explosive clouds of the rapidly advancing phage, which moved without impediment in the water. Mermen who had inhaled the substance or had open wounds suffered the most catastrophic of system collapses, becoming instantly engulfed in boils that tore their scales and bloated their bellies—before erupting as pus-filled cysts.

Thankfully, those who died did not return to “life”—though Gwen suspected they absolutely would if the Lich had intended to join the fray.

The rest of the troops were wise enough to pull back—though many carried the phage back to their hosts, and worst of all, each of the Leviathans groaned in agony as the very same necrophage began to eat away at their open mouths and vents, simultaneously travelling through their bloodstreams into their interior.

With all three forces blooded and stunned, the fervour of total war lost its momentum, leaving only pockets of Mermen to fight out their paths of retreat.

In a less complicated incident, the Leviathan’s handlers would have taken a breather to regroup and control the pollutants tainting their citizens.

Unfortunately, only one of the three Shoals gathered was mentally prepared for the secondary eruption of Undead, each a bloated, glimmering pustule of disease hungry for healthy flesh.

Like a mindless swarm of bruised tadpoles, the rotten Mer came on, some as large as Gwen’s soldiers, with others petite as a fingerling. As they approached, the plagued minions of the Sinneslukare Lich did not fight. Instead, they embraced a second death by throwing themselves upon tridents and spears, swords and arrows, then catalysed their liquidised organs to engulf their foe with corrosive phage juice.

Within minutes, the Merman barriers set by the forces surrounding Nin-Pak and Sarkonnian’s Leviathan were penetrated worse than a tangled trawler net.

Comparatively, Gwen’s forces possessed at the least the benefit of having fought Undead Mer at Tianjin and the foresight provided by the Pale Priestess to force-close Aristotle’s forward-facing orifices.

Over and over, the tide of filth came on as a ceaseless onslaught, its duration dilated by the sheer horror of the mewling Mermen caught in the wake of its putrid passing. Both Nin-Pak and Sarkonnian’s forces were forced into a disorderly retreat, sheltering their stricken Leviathans with the disposable bodies of the less fortunate.

Only the Great Shoal Forward, its members marked with the secret Glyphs of its mistress, emerged from the umbral vortex intact, their scales and fins tinged with the pale nimbus of Golden Nectar. Drawing upon the inconceivable vitality of the Her Pale Priestess’ Leviathan Aristotle, they weathered the necrophage tempest and pushed toward the open slit of the Heart Chamber, howling the name of their Pale Priestess.

Within the throne room of HPPS Aristotle, the living ship’s mistress reeled from an unending high.

As promised by its designers, the Essence-Linked Glyphs had replaced the burden on her Astral Body as a conduit for vitality.

However, the same magic did not reduce the torrential vitality surging into her body from the Axis Mundi via her World Tree, a boon doubly compounded with strands of Almudj’s blessed Essence.

The result was a euphoric elevation of every sense she possessed, where even the whispery touch of her Elf-made dress sent shuddering sparks to traverse her limbs. Where she had dispensed the Golden Mead to her followers and watched them quiver, Gwen was now immersed in an unending torrent of her greatest gift, fighting to keep her mind lucid for a future calamity.

Thankfully, the Pale Priestess was well-versed in overstimulation.

“Caliban—” she commanded her creature to counterbalance the overabundance threatening to drown her judgment. “Take down that squid!”

“SHAA—!” Her creature moved before her verbal command even concluded. Drawing upon the excess of its mistress’ energies, its body instantly ballooned into a waking horror of legend, transforming into a form that was not only immune to the Necromantic energies of Undeath but fed upon them.

As historians had recorded, the Night Walker was the final frontier of siegecraft utilised by the Necromancers in the final phases of the Great War. As an engine of Spellcraft, the stitched flesh of the Night Walker was more accurately transcribed as a network of organs that worked to absorb, combine, and reproduce necrotic matter, which was then moulded into the desired shape by its master.

For Caliban, whose physiology always preferred the most efficient form designed for vitality intake, his Night Walker likeness was that of a mass of faceless mouths, each a tumour attached to the body of an elongated eel.

As siphons, its appendage-maws created vortexes that drew inwards into its innards the delicious phage-soup produced from the decomposing bodies of the Undead harvested for the grim mausoleum.

From within its Force shell, the Sinneslukare Lich raised a desiccated claw.

Gwen felt a shard of black ice slice into the membranes of her frontal lobe as what she presumed to be either a Power Word or a Finger of Death struck Caliban. The monster’s arcanistry instantly wilted a portion of her Void Familiar’s body, even though a Night Walker existed to absorb necrotic energy.

She swore, though her pain was dulled by the scene behind the muddy pane, where the tentacled mouth twirled in cruel dissatisfaction.

Undeterred by what should have been certain extinction, her Caliban latched onto the snow-globe exterior of the Sinneslukare Lich’s protective barrier. As it had done so before, its body rapidly expanded into the likeness of an enormous wyrm, ready to swallow the orb, the ground, and whatever could be dislodged from the Leviathan Core wholesale.

Unfortunately, Gwen knew that the act was futile. The first time she had performed the trick, it was entirely a surprise that no Necromancer safe in their bone fortress could conceive. Now, with three Leviathans blundering into the Heart Chamber, there was no possibility that the Sinneslukare Lich was trapped here or would fight to its True Death a futile battle.

And even if it did—she had absolute confidence its phylactery was “safe” in its motherland.

Sure enough, her Caliban registered a series of quicksilver flashes from within itself—after which the Force bubble rapidly collapsed.

“Search the surroundings for Human Spellcraft signatures,” she commanded the twins from the throne room. “We’re looking for a supreme defiler, a Lich with the face of a sun-dried calamari.”

Her comms team did not question her questionable description but did their best for the generalised anarchy outside Aristotle’s domain. If she were in her own Tower and had a crew of Cambridge Magisters from the School of Divination, Gwen felt she should have been able to lock onto the mana signature of the Sinneslukare Lich—but such an outcome was unlikely thanks to the analogue methods utilised by the Mermen.

With Caliban draining the necrotic soup from within and the Lich escaping to the Nazarene’s knows where… the remaining Undead grew less fervent.

Slowly, with great care, the Leviathans returned to their previous position. With more wariness now, they distended their surviving tendrils and pried apart the shell of their lost ancestor, slowly inching their way back onto the Heart Chamber to expose the truth of Whabpuz Gyli.

“Mistress,” one of the twins transmuted a Message directly into her ear. “Lord Sarkonnian would like to commune with you. Regarding the matter below, she says that he who should be responsible must pay for their trespass.”

He, Gwen noted. There was only one male member among the triumvirate.

“Lei-bup,” Gwen queried her High Priest. “Do you believe Nin-Pak is responsible for the state of the Leviathan mine? He did attack us unannounced earlier. That’s a guilty confession if there ever was one.”

“Without a doubt, both Sarkonnian and Nin-Pak knew of this.” Lei-bup pulled on his lip tendrils in thought. “However, I do not believe the fault matters. After all, if we possess the goodwill of the Leviathans present, and if both yourself and Sarkonnian accuse Nin-Pak, who is he to deny otherwise? If anything, his forces are diminished by the Necromancer, while our strongest militants remain empowered…”

Gwen pressed down her dishevelled hair and attire as her immediate plans settled. Even without Lei-bup, she knew what she had to do, but it was nice to have someone board the same train of thought and affirm its destination.

“Patch her through.” She gestured to Velahi, who wove the necessary magics into place.

Larger than life, the visage of Sarkonnian, heir to the First Vel, made herself known in Gwen’s throne room.

“Pale Priestess.” The dishevelled Sarkonnian, her jewels askew, appeared a little comical against Gwen’s recollection of the walking museum display. “I do not believe there is a need to confirm the crime of our brother Nin-Pak, for his actions speak for themselves. Whabpuz Gyli was his domain, and the defiler could only be present by his consent. What say you?”

“Dear sister of the Vel.” Gwen felt queasy hearing the hypocritical words from her lips. “I had not meant to make this discovery, but that is no longer relevant to us. Indeed, the despoiling of such a sacred temple is a sin that must be punished by all Mer, lest the anger of the Leviathans leave us without shelter.”

The Manta-woman appeared greatly pleased by her agreeable demeanour. “We are agreed, then. Let us impose upon Nin-Pak the forfeiture of his undeserved Zityupdul and his command over the Fifth Vel.”

Behind the watery screen, Lei-bup furiously gestured for her to force the manta scion into a verbal contract. Unlike the contractual obligations of Human law, the Mermen felt an obligation to adhere to the power of words.

“And in the aftermath, how shall we part with the spoils?” Gwen read her High Priests’ tentacles and delivered the Merman’s desire accordingly.

“She who relinquishes Nin-Pak of his crown will have the first say.” Sarkonnian’s smile was full of needle-sharp teeth. “It will be a fair competition for the greatest compensation, as is tradition.”

“Fair.” Gwen did not believe her forces were inferior to the sheer numbers Sarkonnian could field from her larger Leviathan. That and she possessed means that the Merman monarch could not begin to comprehend. “Good luck, your royal Manta-ness.”

The second the water screen faded, her staff were at full attention.

“Your Wave Riders are rallied, Mistress!” Nin-Ka, her ageing General, was organising the troops before she had even finished hammering out her agreement. Young Kha-guk shall be your spearhead to breach the Zityupdul’s carapace!”

“The Sea Witches will be your support,” the older twin, Pelahwi, offered herself as her aide in boarding a hostile Leviathan. “You have our staves, Mistress.”

“And our claws!” shouted the squat, but an enormous member of the crustacean corps had just returned to the chamber. Dwi was the creature’s name, the First Claw among her clan of infused Crab-kin.

“Sarkonnian should be breaching the Zityupdul from its rear.” Lei-bup, who was not a combatant, asked Velahi to create a sand map of Nin-Pak’s Leviathan. “They will have an easier path to the throne room than we, who must breach it from the lower forequarter.”

“Will Nin-Pak’s Leviathan remain docile?” Gwen asked. She disliked having Aristotle bump shells with a larger foe, especially considering they would be at the bottom while Sarkonnian’s creature was at the top of the Leviathan sandwich.

“Leviathans rarely, if ever, engage in these inter-Shoal conflicts,” Lei-bup assured her. “Besides, the three are now busy attempting to uncover how much their ancestor’s body has been polluted. By instinct, they will cleanse what they can and restore the body to its original purpose.”

“Which is what?” Gwen pondered for a naive moment if three young Leviathans could breathe life back into an older one. Watching the mass of tentacles going in and out, she was fondly reminded of the Ohmu creatures from Miyazaki’s fictional classic.

“The creation of a living reef,” Lei-bup said with reverence. “It’s the way of life in the Elemental Plane of Water. It is this instinct that makes the Leviathans sacred, much like the Elves and their World Trees, or yourself, now that you possess a World Tree in Shalkar.”

Yeah-nah. Good analogy, though… Gwen understood her High Priest’s implications but kept the details to herself. The Axis Mundi formed by the World Trees as a mechanism of the Prime Material and, as such, could not be compared to the recycling mechanisms of a singular Plane of Water.

She readied herself for the expedition by giving her High Priest an affirming pat on his oiling shoulders. Immediately after, she rubbed the offending oil back onto his smock with a grimace.

“Mistress, Sarkonnian has launched her assault,” Velahi informed them by updating the sand map. “Sixteen schools of her best Wave Riders are en route, followed by seven Siege Mantas. Her chattel troops are trailing behind, meaning they will engage once the core forces have breached the outer shell.”

Gwen watched the shifting shades of the flowing map.

The game was on, but did she really have to play?

“Lei-bup.” She felt a dark desire flush her pale face. “I am thinking…”

Lei-bup walked a slow perimeter around the map. “Thinking of allowing Lord Shoggoth to feed, Mistress?”

Gwen felt her fingers tingle with static.

In the months she had spent here on Aristotle, she had internalised that the Mer were, in many ways, very similar to those she would not hesitate to call people. Like that old Maya Angelou poem, it was true that their physiologies were different and that their habits were incompatible.

And sometimes, the upper class ate the middle class.

And the middle class, the lower class.

And the lower class, the underclass.

And occasionally, they ate the rich…

But all the same, Man and Mer both cried in times of tragedy and laughed in periods of plenty. Both loved and lived and wept and moaned, all warmed by the sun and the currents, chilled by the cold and the deep.

And having captained Aristotle, she knew a Leviathan was not an aircraft carrier. It was a living island, a cosmopolitan city that happened to be a sheltering fortress against the dark and hungry things lurking in the deep.

If, in one fell swoop… a Shoggoth should descend upon the entwined bodies of two Leviathans and the creatures innocent and naive that called these noble beasts their home…

Was it even plausible that she should wield the power of an Old Testament Goddess?

Would signing the death warrant of two entire worlds warrant a victory?

Would such a victory put her in a golden cavalcade to be rained upon by a ticker-tape parade?

The Mageocracy absolutely would, and that terrified Gwen more than anything—

More than the deified descent of sentient hunger—

More than the extinction of two billion units of seafood clambering for life.

Whabpuz Gyli.

The Great Shoal Forward broke through Nin-Pak’s defences like a Japanese research vessel through a pod of inquisitive whales.

Their icebreaker was none other than Caliban, now sleek like a Sperm Whale, only larger and more dangerous as its faceless head rammed through the surviving Wave Riders, ignoring the spears and tridents dotting every other inch of its forehead.

Behind the wake of disorientated Mermen drunk on the vertigo induced by Caliban’s wake, Kha-guk and Gwen’s Wave Riders, riding their red-finned Sea Horses, cut open a path for their mistress and her entourage of Crab-kin, whose bodies formed a spiky barrier around her and the Sea Witches.

With a soundless displacement of water and debris, Caliban slammed into the lower flank of Zityupdul, then transformed itself again to bore a direct route through the kelp, slush, shell grit and finally, the exoskeleton almost a dozen meters underneath.

There was no error in her creature’s trajectory, for the Pale Priestess steered her worm through an accompanying device, a foretelling orb of Draconic sorcery that would take its mistress to her heart’s desire, which, for the moment, was a panicked Warlock pacing the shattered circumference of his throne room.

As the landing party connected with the tail end of Caliban’s penetrative efforts, the denizens of Zityupdul’s outer defensive ring closed upon the Pale Priestess’ beachhead, only to be repelled by a circular phalanx of golden crustaceans who tore through scales like kelp. Her Wave Riders, hazy with a strange red mist, simultaneously swirled through the palace guards, dashing the defenders into ribbons of sashimi.

Without impediments, the Pale Priestess ascended through the stratum. Her Sea Witches layered upon her the sea’s blessings of fortification, healing, alacrity, and additional barriers that wreathed her humanoid body. She herself, as well, put into place the spells she had paid in favours to Slylth, knowing that an Elemental Prince from the deep would be poorly versed in the combat techniques of bleeding-edge Spellcraft.

On their journey to the centre of the Leviathan, they broke through thrice into large chambers used by the fortress’ internal staff. The first was the coral forest of a Sea Witch who swam close enough to be seen before deciding that her Coral Trees weren’t so precious after all.

The second encounter was a half-emptied barrack, a region that quickly became a second forward operating base as swarms of her Crab-kin skittered into place to block the entrances with their hulking bodies.

Unfortunately, the final penetration was an actual functional, living organ Zityupdul was still using. Together, the ichor and the blood dampened their momentum more than any defence the Leviathan’s interior could put up, especially as they traversed the creature in a path of their own making.

Finally, after an untold number of layers, her Omni Orb intimated they were within minutes of breaking through.

Gwen quickly murmured the final syllables to her Conjure Elemental Swarm, bringing a dozen Hydras in the visage of faceless lampreys to support their assault.

“Brace for combat,” she informed her Mermen entourage as her Divination senses expanded to encompass her Familiar. “Cali will lead with the Hydras. Dwi and his men will follow. We enter last, and Kwi’s troops will hold the exit.”

“Yes, Priestess—!” Her men and women answered with faith and purpose.

With a powerful, coiled thrust, Caliban punched into the air and freed its bulbous head, letting loose a violent spray of corrosive Void slime.

Instantly, it was met with a powerful jet of water that swung Caliban’s enormous body back into the shattered palace floor, powdering the coral and piercing its exterior shell.

At the same time, her slippery Hydras tore free, squeezing past Caliban’s still-slithering body to enter the enormous chamber above, their vitality-sensing organs directing them toward the most delicious delicacies.

More Mermen spells erupted, tearing her Hydras apart with unerring accuracy.

Her Crab-kin piled inward.

Panicked cries and shouts of alarm joined the chorus of Spell Songs sung by the Sea Witches from the Clan of Nin as Gwen’s crustacean troops barged past the orifice made by Caliban to land as armoured bulldozers among the hollering Mermen.

As she herself readied to enter the fray, she saw Dwi unfurl himself like a rolled-up tea leaf in hot water, swinging six crystalline armaments in a wide arc, drawing forth a sudden haze of blue-purple ichor.

A dozen tridents instantly answered her General, affixing themselves to the side of his foreclaws and striking true into the soft regions of his underbelly.

With a roar that made the room shake, Dwi grew not only in size but ferocity as well, channelling a privileged volume of Aristotle’s vitality not only into himself but his troops as well.

One.. two… a dozen… two dozen…

Like endless roe spilling from a slit autumn salmon, her Crab-kin shock troops frothed forth from the open flooring into the chaotic fray above, pushing back the waves of purple-armoured guards while weathering a tempest of deadly spells from the Sea Witch cabal.

Not to be bested by her followers, Gwen willed a renewed vitality into her Hydras, generating a new creature from each drifting piece of carcass large enough to retain the spell’s Conjuration magic. From the original dozen, a hundred and more Hydras flooded into the ranks of the Sea Witches, sending the phalanx into disarray.

“Shaa—! SHAA—!” Caliban revitalised itself as well from the mortal injury it had suffered. Once un-stunned, it transformed into the likeness of an enormous catfish whose whiskers were dozens of grasping lamprey tendrils meandering into the melee below to seek out victims.

At the same time, Gwen manifested the full extent of her Aura of Desolation, emanating from Caliban’s nightmarish body waves of psychological dread that spoke without prejudice to the primordial brains of the deep Mer that extinction would be the only fate awaiting them.

Within minutes, the tide of battle changed. Layer by layer, the water barriers erected by the Sea Witches collapsed. While the Palace Guards of Nin-Pak left their bodies underfoot of Gwen’s troops or were being snatched into the air, her troops soldiered on, their blood haze turning the water a reddish-pink.

“PALE VESSEL—!” The vengeful voice of her victim, the Warlock Nin-Pak, Master of the Fifth Vel, spoke from the crumbling dais of his askew throne. “WHAT MANNER OF A CREATURE ARE YOU?!”

To answer the man responsible for the Sinneslukare Lich, she rose above her troops, parrying the dozen or so pressure spears awaiting her ascent with a modified Cube of Force.

As she rose for all to witness, the Pale Priestess was pale in complexion and garb, with seven shards of pale nimbus forming the halo of her Crown of Thorns.

“Betrayer! Confess to me of Spectre,” she announced with a Clarion Call that she hoped was filtered through her translation Ioun. “Dislclose what barters you have made with those despoilers of the world, and I shall entertain the possibility of letting you live.”

“You think too highly of yourself!” The Warlock spat from behind the layered veils of his final few protectors, his face a little more than snarl and spite. “You will gain nothing from my death! Sarkonnian will eat you alive!”

Sure, then a certain Shoggoth would eat her alive… Gwen fought to keep her retort private. “It is not your place to lecture me on the actions of our sister Sarkonnian,” she kept her voice mocking and controlled. “I offer you a final choice, Prince—submit to me—or consign yourself and your kin to the deep dark.”

As her final warning rang out, the battle din dulled.

There were still more palace guards elsewhere, the total of which outnumbered her shock troops. Yet, the mounds of Nin-Pak’s men that now served as flooring for her still-breathing troops spoke starkly of the inevitable outcome. This was not to mention that the backing track to her parley was the screaming of Sea Witches still in the grasp of her Caliban, swinging its victims to and fro to maximise the amount of music it could extract before delivering them to its circular, cold-press vitality juicer.

Slowly, the remaining Sea Witches parted their barriers, revealing the once-resplendent form of the Elemental Prince of the Fifth Vel.

“We… I would not have been bested if we were still in my city.” Nin-Pak’s face appeared twisted by regret, though Gwen doubted his regret extended to the act of putting Spectre into the Heart Chamber of the Leviathan carcass. “Your ploy to draw Zityupdul from Bright Reef was a cheap trick, Priestess.”

“And I can see that remorse is beyond you, Nin-Pak.” Gwen drew closer to the Elemental Prince.

With each step from her alien, land-wrought appendage, Nin-Pak's fin flaps flared upright in alarm. His troops also seemed to draw back as she approached, their eyes not daring to meet the presence of a Demi-deity that had proven itself a greater being.

With each step, she could feel a slight tremor building underfoot, coming closer just as she approached her fellow monarch.

“Final offer,” she spoke while calling her prepared spells into being. “Death by Caliban is not a pleasant thing, your Highness. Your Essence will be consumed, and nothing will be left of you to return to the Elemental Plane of Water. It will be an ignoble extinction, a death that would hold no possibility of salvation.”

Nin-Pak’s clenched jaws remained steadfast as he raised a webbed fist in defiance.

CLANG—CLANG—!

On the far side of the throne room, a pair of pearly gates opened, miming the panes of an enormous clam. The newly opened space then revealed the enormous and bejewelled visage of Sarkonnian, the scion of the First Vel.

“It would seem that I have miscalculated…” the Mer-Manta slid into the throne room, followed by the orderly march of her armoured troops. Very quickly, these prawn-bodied soldiers established a perimeter against Gwen’s battered Crab-kin. “But do enlighten me, Priestess, why is it that Nin-Pak still lives…?”

“We need to know his relationship with the defilers,” Gwen patiently explained. “to that end, we—“

“SARKONNIAN—!” Nin-Pak let loose an explosive cry as his lips curled with cruel mockery. “I CHOOSE TO SUBMIT TO A SISTER OF THE VEL OVER THIS—“

The exposition of the Elemental Prince beside her never finished, for a jet-black Morden’s Blade had pierced its lower abdomen, travelled the length of the Warlock’s oesophagus, and was now protruding from his forehead like an obscene unicorn horn.

For several seconds, all stared at the wondrous spectacle of an Elemental Prince shish kabob until Nin-Pak’s body gave up its last mote of vitality and gave itself to the swirling currents of watery magic still surrounding the throne room.

Gwen recalled her blade. Unfortunately, her inexperienced Transmutation further reduced Nin-Pak to uneven pieces of bloody flotsam.

Walking through Nin-Pak’s jigsaw body until she reached the throne Nin-Pak once occupied, she sat upon an immense chaise that lifted her off her feet and laid both hands on the rests before directly facing the Princess of the First Vel.

“So, Sister Sarkonnian,” she spoke without being touched by the thrill of a rare kill that would have her name etched into Mageocracy history. “A fair competition for the greatest compensation… are we still good? Or shall we find a new settlement here and now?”