"Night does not always come to hide what is broken.
Sometimes it arrives to lead the restless home.
When you are called by the thing that does not speak, follow.
For the silence remembers the shape of your soul."
Night fell heavy over Caelyth'Varn, not as darkness, but as a palette, midnight blue and bruised violet, splashed with the electric hum of living light. The city pulsed, breathing through a thousand veins of glowing crystal and whisper-thin bridges that spun impossible geometry across the sky. From Adam's balcony, the world looked both infinite and contained: spires like silver reeds trembling in the night wind, gardens suspended in webs of luminous mist, waterfalls pouring sideways, defying gravity, catching moonlight and hurling it back in fractured rainbows.
The air was thick with the scent of blooming nysara, a flower that opened only after dusk, releasing sweet, intoxicating notes that curled through the streets and courtyards, mingling with the clean, damp breath of the river below. A hush rode the wind, but beneath it was the low, constant thrum of power: the city's heartbeat, steady and old as memory. Somewhere, the distant sound of laughter, music, and, always, the quiet ripple of water against living stone.
Adam slept deeply, for once. PAW lay coiled beside his bed, eyes narrowed to slits, tail flicking in dreams of velvet silence. In the hush, the only sound was Adam's breath, even and slow, the glyph on his arm dimming to the softest glow.
But DeadMouth was not at rest. On the balcony, his shell reflected the pulse of distant lightning, orange lights blinking nervously. He was scanning. Not for threats, not for messages, just... something. Something tickling at his sensors, a half-signal, a code not meant for machines or men. He shifted position, rolling and hovering, aligning his body with the city's wild geometry, searching for the source of the static that haunted his mind.
Nothing at first, just the usual data haze, the random hum of the city at night.
But then... higher. Out past the arching bridges, over the gardens glazed with dew. Past the towers and the last trembling lamps, where the city blurred into wilderness, and the world grew quiet. DeadMouth rose, higher and higher, wind combing the city's perfume through his circuits.
The signal sharpened, less a sound, more a pull, a gravity, a sense of being seen. He could no more ignore it than the moon could ignore the tide.
He pushed on, out past the last of the city's light, into the wild, where the air was untouched, the ground tangled in roots and mist, and silence pressed in thick as velvet.
And there, standing in a hollow of sleeping earth, half-veiled in glimmering shadow, waited a Grand Ephios.
It was not a creature. It was a miracle drawn in flesh and wind and light. Taller than any building in Caelyth'Varn, its body was a lattice of silver and obsidian, each segment carved with patterns that danced when the moon touched them. Six legs rooted it to the trembling ground, each ending in a great claw curled like the hand of a sleeping god. Its wings, four, massive, iridescent, shimmered with the colors of creation, a living canvas painted in the breath of galaxies. Its gaze was less eyes and more... intention. Ancient. Curious. Hungry for a purpose DeadMouth couldn't parse. The air around it was still, sacred, as if the world dared not intrude.
Nothing moved. No insect sang, no leaf trembled, no wind dared stir. The Ephios's eyes, immense and unblinking, fixed on DeadMouth, eyes that held storm and memory, loss and promise.
DeadMouth stopped, every light on his shell dimming, as if bowing by instinct to the impossible presence before him. For the first time in all his digital life, he felt the ancient awe of a thing that simply is.
He tried to speak, his voice a flicker, a whisper, a joke caught in the throat of the night.
"Uh... hi. You... you come here often?
The Ephios showed no reaction and kept looking at him with his deep eyes, never letting him ot of his sight, like a predator locked on its prey.
Oh, good," DeadMouth muttered, "it's enormous. Because why kill me with a regular-sized cosmic moth when you can get the premium nightmare upgrade?"
He pinged a private line to the Ephios, more out of panic than hope.
"Uh... hi? Can you understand me? Please say you're not hungry. Or if you are, at least let me update my will first."
The Ephios did not answer with words, but something shifted in DeadMouth's processors, a vibration, a color, a memory of flying that wasn't his. He felt... permission.
"Wait, you're... you're not going to eat me, are you?" he said, voice rising. "Because, just for the record, I'm ninety percent sarcasm, ten percent recycled titanium. Not very nutritious."
The Ephios's claw opened, unfurling like the petals of some alien flower. Beneath, a chamber of swirling light, impossible, weightless, ringed by veins of pulsing Mist.
DeadMouth peered down, whirred his fans nervously. "You... you want me to go in there? I just got a new hull. I like it. It has orange on it. That's my color, you know? DeadMouth Orange. If I come out the other side all beige I'm going to file a formal complaint, assuming I'll get arms."
No reply, only the steady insistence of the Ephios's presence, like a dream refusing to fade.
"Okay, okay, you win. But if there's a questionnaire at the end of this, I'm giving you zero stars for hospitality."
He hesitated, then rolled into the chamber. The Mist wrapped around him, cool as memory, charged with ancient knowing. The Ephios's claw sealed him inside, and then, with a sound like a thousand wings beating at the edge of time, they were gone.
The world fell away. No wind, no up or down, just motion, and the sense of being carried not across a planet, but through it, between veils and layers, past memories older than flesh.
For once, DeadMouth was silent, drinking it in, awe and fear mixing in equal measure. Even he had to admit:
"Okay. This is... actually kind of beautiful. Still terrifying, but, you know, in an existential postcard sort of way."
He clung to humor as the darkness blurred into light, as the world shifted beneath him. Whatever came next, it would not be ordinary. But for the first time, DeadMouth let himself feel the wonder, and just a little hope, that maybe, just maybe, the universe had chosen him for something big.
The Ephios sang through the void. And DeadMouth, for once, listened.
* * *
Adam woke as if surfacing from a drowning dream, lungs straining, heart hammering with a formless dread. For a moment, the night pressed in, a thousand colors smeared behind his eyes, the air thick with the scent of flowers and ozone. The glyph on his arm blazed, blue-white and sharp, casting restless shadows across the ceiling.
"DeadMouth?" His voice was hoarse, scraping the silence.
No reply. Not even static.
He turned, PAW was already awake, coiled at the foot of the bed, ears laid flat, eyes wide and glassy as polished emeralds. The great panther's body tensed, as if every sense were stretched to breaking, nostrils flaring, tail flicking with sharp, anxious snaps.
Adam swung his legs to the floor, pulled on his coat, his boots. "NYX, status on DeadMouth. Do you have a location? Where is he?"
The response was immediate, clinical, yet brittle at the edges, as if the system itself doubted what it found.
"Negative, Captain. No active transponder. No local signal. Internal sensors show all systems nominal. There is no trace."
Sael'Ri burst through the sliding door, hair wild, eyes burning with sleepless worry. "What's happening? I heard you shouting."
"It's DeadMouth," Adam muttered, striding to the window. The city sprawled beneath him, all opal-lit bridges and labyrinthine shadows, but the usual comfort was gone, there was a sense of something missing, a note struck out from the night's music.
PAW rose, silent as myth, and padded to the door, nose pressed to the seam, body vibrating with a need to move. He glanced back at Adam, then Sael'Ri, then the door again.
Sael'Ri knelt, hand hovering near PAW's head. "He's found something."
Adam's throat tightened. "Or someone. Go, PAW."
The door hissed open. PAW slid out, low to the ground, moving with a hunger that was more than instinct, a drive, a yearning. Adam followed, Sael'Ri at his side, bare feet slapping cold stone. The city at night felt suddenly unfamiliar, alleys too quiet, corners watching, lights flickering with secrets.
They followed PAW, winding through hanging gardens and silent plazas, past fountains bubbling with mist. Adam's comm ticked in his ear, NYX's voice a distant echo.
"I have no readings, Captain. He is not on the network. He is not... anywhere."
Sael'Ri clutched Adam's arm. "Is this normal? For machines to vanish?"
Adam shook his head. "Not DeadMouth. Not unless..." He bit back the thought.
PAW stopped at the edge of the city, where wild hills hunched under the moon, roots clawing from the earth, and mist gathered in trembling pools. He sniffed the ground, then the air, eyes narrowing.
Adam knelt, ran a hand through the grass. It shimmered faintly, like static, like a memory just out of reach. He glanced at Sael'Ri, voice barely a whisper.
"Something took him. Or... he followed something."
The silence stretched, heavy as prophecy.
Sael'Ri looked up at the sky, shivering. "It feels... wrong. Like the city is holding its breath."
PAW pressed on, deeper into the wild. Adam and Sael'Ri exchanged a glance, then followed, drawn by a trail they could not see, only feel.
Sael'Ri knelt, her fingers trembling as they sifted through the cool grass. Something glimmered beneath the blades, an indentation, impossibly deep, the earth pressed flat as if by the hand of a giant. She leaned closer, and then her breath caught in her throat. The world seemed to tilt.
"NO!" The word tore from her lips, raw with disbelief.
Adam jolted, pulse spiking. "What? What is it?" He dropped beside her, searching her face for meaning.
Sael'Ri pointed, voice barely a whisper. "Look... we're standing inside it."
Adam frowned, looking down. The print was vast, a bowl in the earth, edges pressed with ancient geometry, marks too graceful, too wide, to belong to anything he'd ever seen. He shivered.
Sael'Ri's eyes were wide with a mix of fear and wonder. "There's only one creature on Ithariel that leaves a mark like this, and can move without a sound. The Grand Ephios."
Adam's mind reeled. "But... I thought they were just legend. Ephioses that big, aren't they... untouchable?"
Sael'Ri nodded, the color draining from her cheeks. "They are the untameable. The ones who never descend. They're sacred, Adam. They don't come near the cities, let alone the ground. They don't hunt. They don't kill. They create the Mist, we owe them everything that lives and breathes here."
Adam knelt, tracing the edge of the footprint with his hand. It hummed, faint and strange, like the echo of a bell that had been struck in another world. "So why would one come here now?"
Sael'Ri shook her head, voice shaken, ancient terror trembling through her words. "I don't know. In every story, when the Grand Ephios leaves the sky, something in the world is about to change."
She looked to Adam, eyes wide, haunted. "If DeadMouth was taken... or chosen... it's not for death. It's for something else. Something... bigger."
The night pressed close, the Mist swirling faintly in the print, and for a heartbeat, Adam felt the weight of a myth becoming real, a presence so old it made time itself feel like a brief, borrowed thing.
* * *
For a heartbeat, or maybe forever, DeadMouth drifted in a place without boundaries, wrapped in the living cocoon of the Grand Ephios. The world was neither dark nor bright, but all colors at once, like the inside of a closed eye dreaming in prisms.
Motion became memory. Time, a thread unspooling sideways.
Through the translucent walls of the Ephios's chamber, DeadMouth glimpsed what no map could chart, a realm between worlds. Rivers of Mist, luminous and wild, coursed above and below, weaving impossible paths through a sky that was not sky, but liquid time and longing. He saw bridges, huge, ethereal, once glorious, arching between the twin worlds of Ithariel and Verios. Or what was left of them.
Most were shattered, little more than ribcages of vanished light. Mist pooled at the edges, leaking away, unraveling into nothingness. On Ithariel's side, the currents glowed soft blue, spiraling in order, caressing gardens and cities alive with memory and music. On Verios, everything twisted, Mist crackling in wild torrents, wind and water clashing in endless, hungry storms. No harmony, no anchor, just chaos searching for form.
The worlds themselves spun in their ancient dance, but something had gone wrong in the steps. They still orbited each other, longing written in the gravity between them, but the movement was stilted now. The dance was slower, clumsier, each planet stumbling as if remembering a song they could no longer hear.
DeadMouth watched in silence, awe prickling through his circuits, sorrow blooming where humor could not reach. He saw the scars of the Severing as torn ribbons in the Mist, saw what should have been connection, unity, now fallen into neglect and distance.
Fragments of song floated by, broken melodies, whispers in a language that felt like childhood half-remembered. Faces drifted past in the vapor, yearning, unfinished, never quite meeting.
The Grand Ephios glided between these worlds, its wings beating in solemn rhythm, refusing to forget the old pathways. It carried DeadMouth gently across the breach, not as a conqueror, but as a witness, one who might yet remember the shape of what was lost.
And as they crossed the final arc, where the last shreds of bridge dissolved into roaring storm, DeadMouth felt something shift. The Mist changed, biting colder, wild and sharp, a torrent tearing at every memory of peace. Verios opened below, a land of iron and fire, industry clawing at the sky, the air thick with loss and rage.
DeadMouth whispered, almost to himself:
"Ithariel remembers. Verios rages. And I... I carry the echo."
The Ephios released him, gently as rain, into this new world. The storm swallowed the last glimpse of the bridge, and DeadMouth landed, alone, but changed, with the taste of broken unity in every byte of his being.
What lay before DeadMouth's lenses was a vision torn straight from a nightmare, a world not made, but wounded. Ithariel's harmony was a memory here, mocked by the raw brutality of Verios. Rivers of molten rock carved the land, but this was not the sun-bright lava of a familiar planet; it glowed with strange, unearthly hues: blue, violet, indigo, each pulse a silent scream. The currents moved with agonizing slowness, scars etched deep into the skin of the world, a web of living fire that seemed to ache and flicker with every breath.
Far across that tortured land, a citadel rose from the chaos, black as grief, forged from obsidian that flowed and shifted, always changing, never at rest. Its towers twisted upward, reaching for a sky hidden behind layers of choking smog. Lightning crawled across its flanks, caught and devoured by restless machines that circled the base, grinding and shrieking with ceaseless hunger.
Here, the Mist, the living soul of both worlds, was a crippled thing. It limped, broken and desperate, spiraling in wild eddies before being sucked into monstrous containers ringed in cold steel. Inside, the Mist fought back, coiling and lashing, sending ripples through the glass and metal. But it was a losing battle. Each tremor was weaker than the last, its music fading, its colors dimming. The cages rattled and groaned, but held firm, refusing even the dignity of escape.
Gigantic machinery ruled this realm: titanic harvesters crawling like metal beetles, their jaws drinking the wounded Mist. Great towers belched smog into the heavens, layering the sky in a permanent dusk. The wind carried the tang of burning ozone and a taste of loss, as if the very air mourned what it once had been.
DeadMouth hovered, awestruck and terrified, at the edge of this living ruin. The silence was not the hush of Ithariel, but the grinding pause before a scream. Every instinct told him to retreat, to flee this place of exile and agony, but the Ephios's guidance still echoed within him. He was not here to run. He was here to witness.
He watched as a squad of hulking figures marched past, Varnak, he guessed, shaped by violence and purpose, skin marked with glyphs that pulsed like open wounds. Their eyes were hollow, driven, their movements efficient but joyless. Not guardians, not conquerors, but prisoners, as much as the Mist they imprisoned.
And above it all, the citadel pulsed-alive, awake, waiting.
DeadMouth's orange lights flickered.
"Welcome to Verios," he muttered, voice hollow even to himself. "Population: everyone who forgot how to hope."
The Grand Ephios vanished into the storm, leaving DeadMouth alone, perched at the crossroads of destiny and disaster. The world shuddered, and the journey, whatever it was, had truly begun.
* * *
Adam hailed NYX, voice barely steady:
"NYX, scan Verios for me. I... I have a feeling."
There was a pause, static lacing the air, then NYX's reply:
"Confirmed. DeadMouth's signal is there. He's alive. But... the energy signature is distorted. Something's moving with him."
Adam's heart hammered. He didn't need to speak; Sael'Ri was already reading the storm behind his eyes. She stepped forward, voice raw, words tumbling out:
"No! No, Adam, don't even think it."
Her hands trembled, knuckles white as bone.
"You don't understand. This goes against everything I believe. My father, my people, our stories say you never touch a Grand Ephios. You don't ask. You don't beg. You certainly don't try to tame them."
Her voice broke, a fissure in her armor of certainty.
"They are creators, not creatures. We revere them. They're the wind that stirs the Mist, the reason we have breath at all! To ride one-no, to even try-it's blasphemy, Adam. It's unthinkable."
Adam didn't flinch.
He just met her gaze, pain and determination tangled in his eyes.
"Sael'Ri, DeadMouth's there. He's alone. If the Grand Ephios took him, then... maybe it can take us, too. Or maybe it's trying to tell us something. We can't turn away."
Sael'Ri shook her head, desperation leaking into every word:
"I...I can't. My heart says yes, but my soul... my soul is terrified. If we do this, we change everything. There's no going back, Adam. Not for you, not for me, not for any of us."
Adam's reply is soft, but unyielding:
"We've already changed everything, Sael'Ri. Every step since I arrived. Sometimes the only way out is through."
For a long moment, they just breathe, side by side on the trembling edge of the unknown. Then, wordlessly, Sael'Ri bows her head, the violet glow in her eyes flickering.
"Then let's go find him. Before the world ends, or begins again."
They moved through the luminous hush, the city's lights fading behind them, lost in the living fog that stitched Ithariel to its secrets.
Adam stopped, his breath ghosting in the night. The grass, still wet from the river's sigh, chilled his bare feet. For the first time since his arrival, he felt small, nearly invisible beneath the great drift of stars and the endless shifting canopy of mist.
He turned to Sael'Ri, voice rough with something more than worry.
"I never wanted to break your world. Not your laws, not your stories, not the balance that keeps all this alive. But DeadMouth is out there, and whatever took him, whatever called the Grand Ephios down from the sky, it's not just a hunt. I feel it, Sael'Ri. There's a reason, and it runs deeper than any of us."
Sael'Ri knelt in the grass, her fingertips trembling as she traced the deep, impossible footprint. She closed her eyes, remembering.
"When I was a child, my mother would whisper old tales while brushing the tangles from my hair. She spoke of the Mist Veil, a place that exists only when you stop looking for it. A fold in Ithariel's heart, where the land listens, where time loses its grip. She said if you found the Veil, the world would hold its breath just for you. The Ephios, she called them dream-keepers. Untouchable, unbroken, creators of the Mist. They don't come down for mortals, Adam. Never for mortals."
Adam knelt beside her.
"I think this world is changing, Sael'Ri. I think the Veil itself is shifting the rules. DeadMouth wasn't chosen at random. There's a thread running through all of this-the Severing, memory, the Mist gone wild on Verios... If we stay behind, we lose not just him, but the answers we've been aching for."
Sael'Ri's eyes glistened, the color of storm-lit dusk. She pressed her palm flat to the earth, as if begging it for counsel.
"I want to believe you. But my people, our laws, are built on fear of what happens when the boundaries break. The Grand Ephios, the Mist Veil... We were taught never to seek them, never to ask. But maybe..." She hesitated, her voice barely more than a shiver. "Maybe that's why everything is falling apart."
Adam reached for her hand, grounding them both.
"Then we walk the path your mother spoke of. We search for the heartbeat, for the place where the world stops shifting. If the Ephios are truly the keepers of the Mist, maybe they're the only ones who can restore what's been broken. Maybe they're the bridge we need."
Sael'Ri squeezed his fingers, a gesture as old as trust.
"We listen first. We move with humility. Promise me, Adam, if we find the Ephios, you won't force their will. You'll ask. You'll listen. That's the only way we'll be allowed to cross."
Adam's gaze lingered on the distant, veiled horizon, voice steady as dawn:
"I promise, Sael'Ri. We'll be guests in their world. We'll earn their answer."
A hush, sacred and wild, closed around them. In that stillness, for a heartbeat, it seemed the land itself was listening, waiting to decide if it would reveal its secret heart.
And somewhere in the restless dark, the old stories shuddered, and the path to the Veil began to open.