The air turned still.
Not the gentle hush before a storm—this was something unnatural. Sacred. Intentional.
Above the rolling emerald hills of Cuijue Slope, the once-azure sky began to rot into a smothered gray. Clouds bled across the heavens like spilled ink, thick and uninvited, blotting out the sun without mercy. Thunder grumbled—not loud enough to startle, but low enough to rattle the bones of the world.
Beyond the slope's jagged ridges, the horizon dimmed.
Trees curled into silhouettes, their edges devoured by a creeping gloom that spread like oil across the land. This wasn't weather. It was will.
A divine hush. A Sovereign's breath drawn slow.
As if something beyond the veil had opened its eye—
And chose to let this place exist a moment longer.
For now.
A chill seeped into the stones, through the grass, through the windless stillness.
And somewhere deep in that suffocating silence—
The land held its breath.
Orion stepped forward, drawn not by curiosity but by gravity.
He slid down the slope's edge, boots crunching against dry soil, his eyes fixed on the formation ahead.
At the center stood the Nine Pillars—tall, unmoving sentinels of a forgotten covenant.
"I don't like this place," he murmured, voice hushed more by reverence than fear.
"Yeah, no kidding. This place gives me the creeps too," Frieda whispered through his lips, her voice slivered and thin, like it didn't belong in this world.
"Looks like Felix isn't here," Orion said, scanning the mist-choked horizon. "Wanna move on to the next spot?"
Frieda answered with a mental hum—but there was hesitation.
Like even she, wild and untamed, didn't want to disturb this sacred rot.
He turned to leave.
And the world… shifted.
A tremor pulsed through the slope—subtle, like the heartbeat of a god.
Then the ground heaved.
Stone groaned. Grass tore.
And with a sound like the shattering of ancient vows, the heart of Cuijue Slope rose.
The land surged upward, a jagged plateau clawing its way out of stillness. Dust exploded outward in a choking plume as the terrain convulsed—not from nature, but from command.
Something below had stirred.
And the land obeyed.
Orion stumbled, barely staying upright as the slope twisted beneath him. His eyes went wide.
"…Okay. This isn't normal."
---
"You, who carries VlastMoroz's essence..."
The voice did not echo.
It reverberated through the marrow of the world—a deep, ancient proclamation that made the stones quiver and the wind go still.
"Are you here to bring her word?"
A pause, vast and expectant.
"Has she finally chosen to stir me from slumber?"
Varnak'Thul, Sovereign of Geo, did not emerge.
He had always been.
A mountain mistaken for silence.
A god mistaken for stone.
Motionless. Eternal. Witnessing.
His form was a cathedral of tectonic flesh—layered rock and glowing fault lines that pulsed like leyline arteries. He was a landmass with sentience, an ancient oath wrapped in sediment and time.
When he moved, the planet wailed.
No wings bore him. He did not fly—he commanded the land to rise in his stead.
And it did, as it always had.
Where others moved with force,
Varnak'Thul moved with finality.
And Orion—barely steady on his feet—stood upon the Sovereign's back, at the very center of Cuijue's lifted heart.
A mortal prince on a god's shoulders.
The living threshold between stillness and wrath.
"Are you the Sovereign of Geo?" Orion gasped, taking a defensive stance as the tremors still rippled through his soles. The air was thick with dust and something else—pressure, ancient and unmoving, like the breath of the world had paused to listen.
"I do not bring any harm," he continued, voice steady even as his heart pounded like a war drum, "nor do I bring any messages from Mother Rosen for you."
His mismatched blue eyes sharpened—focused, unblinking. Like a tiger squaring off against an approaching elephant. Outmatched by scale, but not by will.
"You don't have to fear me," came the reply—not a voice, but a movement of the earth itself.
It rumbled beneath them, a deep tectonic exhale that made the air tremble in Orion's lungs.
And then, with uncanny calm, the great landform began to descend.
The jagged plateau lowered back into Cuijue's embrace, slow and solemn. Dust and gravel slithered down its sides like beads of sweat off a brow. The surrounding terrain adjusted with the patience of continents, settling stone into stone with sacred finality.
"Since my time to come hasn't arrived," said the voice—now deeper, as if it spoke from the bones of the mountain itself—"it is foolish of me to even make a move."
And then he vanished.
Not in some burst of light or dramatic crack—he was simply absorbed.
Stone swallowed stone. Gravity resumed its rule.
The Nine Pillars stood in their old, quiet places. The mist returned, as if nothing had happened.
But Orion knew better.
His pulse still hadn't slowed.
"…What just happened?" Frieda muttered, her tone threading between awe and alarm. "Where did he go again?"
Orion didn't answer right away. His gaze stayed locked downward—on the soil, the stones, the veins of faint golden crystal glowing just beneath the surface.
"He's right here, Frieda," he finally murmured. "We're standing on the Sovereign of Geo's body."
Frieda fell silent. And in that silence, the ley lines beneath their feet throbbed once—just enough for Orion to feel it in his bones, like a second heartbeat.
Then, once more, the earth shivered.
Not violently. Not enough to topple.
But enough to speak.
"You, who carries her essence…"
The voice this time felt older. Weaker. Like it echoed from a dream slipping back into sleep.
"When you return to Rosen, send her my words:
The War will result only in the demise of the Current Sovereigns.
It is not our time… yet."
The words rolled out slowly, like tectonic plates shifting in a language only the land could remember. And then—
Stillness.
No birdsong. No wind. Not even the creak of branches.
Even the mist felt like it had bowed its head.
Orion stood in the center of it all, small yet unmoved. The moment pressed on his shoulders like a mantle, but he held it.
He blinked once. Slowly.
Then nodded, voice soft and solemn, like a vow carved into a gravestone.
"I will tell her your thoughts."
Orion walked away from Cuijue Slope in silence.
Each step felt heavier than the last—not from fatigue, but from the weight of what he carried: Varnak'Thul's warning, etched like fault lines across his thoughts.
He passed through winding paths, shifting forests, and stone bridges wrapped in moss, until the land itself began to change.
Ahead, Jueyun Karst rose like a world drawn from myth—dizzying peaks, draped in whispering mists and clouds that clung to stone like secrets.
The air grew cooler. Crisper.
Even the wind here moved like it knew not to speak too loudly.
This was a sacred place.
The place of the Adepti.
Or at least… so the legends said.
And though few had ever seen them, tracks left in the dew, claw prints in stone, and faint glimmers vanishing into fog had kept the stories alive.
Stories of beings who once walked beside gods.
Of protectors hidden in the folds of the mountains.
And one dragon… who was terrible at hiding.
A distant roar of water echoed through the stone valley.
Carried on the wind—steady, unbothered, and distinctly rhythmic.
Curious, Orion followed the sound, weaving through crooked stairs and bamboo-shadowed ledges until he reached a small clearing carved between cliffs.
A waterfall poured down the face of a towering cliff, its spray catching the sunlight in fractured rainbows.
And there—beneath it—
Sat Felix.
No guard stance. No wings raised.
Just a dragon nestled into a stone basin like a napping cat, head drooped, snout half-submerged in the crystal pool, entire upper body directly under the crashing waterfall.
Sound asleep.
The cascade thudded against his shimmering scales with the persistence of a thousand tiny fists, but he didn't even twitch.
Orion blinked.
"…Is he… meditating?"
Frieda's voice whispered from within, half-laughing, half-stunned.
"No. He's napping. Like a rock. Under a bigger rock."
The dragon let out a sudden snore—loud, wet, and echoing through the basin like thunder slipping on a banana peel.
"Yep," Frieda added. "That's our Felix."