Each rise of the bow was followed by a breathless dip, the world rocking in a rhythm older than memory.
ProlixalParagon stood near the port rail, the wind threading through the short fur along his arms, carrying the chill tang of brine and something older — the scent of salt left too long in shadow, the breath of deep trenches far below the light.
It had been two days since the Troupe boarded.
The ship had taken to sea smoothly, a lattice of chain-secured wagons lashed across her broad main deck like strange, immobile beasts. Below deck, sailors moved with quiet discipline, guiding the mana-crystal power lines that webbed the hull, drawing smooth arcs of light in the ship’s reinforced belly.
The Vermillion Troupe had been given quarters near the rear cargo hold — cramped, but dry and safe.
Prolix had claimed a cot by the small circular porthole, through which the sea whispered constantly, lulling him to sleep with stories he never quite remembered come morning.
In the galley, Nara now worked beside the ship's cook, her voice rising and falling like a song as she passed bowls of lentil stew to passing sailors. The youngest kits peeked around doorframes and under crates, treating the ship like a new forest to explore, held in check only by Lyra’s ever-watchful gaze.
Ralyria had spent much of the first day carefully mapping the structure of the mana conduits running through the decks — more than once pausing to trace her fingers along the glowing seams of the walls with childlike curiosity. The ship intrigued her.
Marx carved almost constantly, his latest project kept close, the shavings brushed into neat piles beside his feet. He never said what he was making, but the pattern of his strokes suggested something sacred, or meant to be gifted.
Kaelthari stood watch most evenings, high above on the quarterdeck, gazing westward across the sea. Her chains and charms shimmered like strands of stars in the low lamplight. She rarely spoke, but when she did, it was with a calmness that calmed others — the eye of a storm that had not yet passed.
But there was something beneath the serenity.
Something... not wrong.
Not yet.
But watching.
The first sign came at dawn on the third day.
A sailor screamed — not in fear, but in awe — drawing crew and Troupe alike to the starboard rail.
There, rising out of the water far in the distance, was a great vertical spiral of seafoam and kelp — twisting slowly, impossibly, like a helix reaching toward the clouds.
It stood motionless, untouched by wind, untouched by wave.
No birds circled it.
No fish broke the water near it.
No sound came from it at all.
Just the hush of reverent quiet — as though the sea itself held its breath.
Lyra had stared at it for a long time, her voice low when she finally spoke.
"Old waters remember old cycles."
By afternoon, the spiral was gone — collapsed without splash or sound, as though it had never been.
That night, the stars above flickered in strange rhythms — one moment familiar constellations held their place, the next, subtle gaps yawned between them, as though someone had rearranged the heavens in their sleep.
ProlixalParagon sat alone near the forecastle, the sails creaking above him, his journal open but untouched in his lap.
His mind turned over the memory of the fifth anchor. The fragments left behind. The relic’s quiet weight in his pack.
The cycle hadn’t ended with Sern Ka’Torr.
It had merely shifted location.
The sea was no less a forge than the desert or the city.
It ground down what it carried.
And sometimes, if the winds were right, it gave something back.
Somewhere in the night, deep in the lattice of the ship's structure, he felt a small pulse — not mana, not metal — but recognition.
The system flickered faintly at the edge of his vision.
>Ongoing Quest Updated: The Fractured Cycle Watches.<
He closed his journal and rose slowly, paws silent on the deck.
Overhead, the stars realigned again.
And from somewhere far below — deeper than any trench should go — he felt a current shift.
The Reverie sailed onward, and with it, every soul aboard now bore the weight of what came next.
The stars above settled into their silence again — no longer shifting, but watching.
Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
The Distant Reverie rolled gently across the open sea, the creak of its hull and the whisper of canvas the only sounds beyond the deep murmur of the ocean. Somewhere far below deck, the crew laughed quietly over cups, and the Troupe's younger members had long since slipped into sleep.
But near the stern, high atop the quarterdeck, a soft chiming drifted through the night like windblown crystal.
Kaelthari stood with her back to the ship’s wheel, arms folded, horns tilted toward the sky.
Her long, mulberry scales shimmered faintly in the moons' light, the gold chains strung between her curving markhor horns catching each breeze with a low, musical clink. Charms and polished crystals swung gently, reflecting the stars as they danced.
She did not turn when ProlixalParagon approached, but her voice came low and sure.
“I heard you pacing.”
Prolix hesitated, one hand resting on the railing. “Was I that loud?”
“No.” Her tail flicked lazily. “But you carry weight when you walk now. The deck listens.”
He stepped beside her, casting his gaze out toward the horizon. The sea stretched to every edge of sight, broken only by the silver ripple of starlight on waves. “Feels like everything listens lately. Gods. Anchors. Shadows. Even the sky.”
Kaelthari made a low, thoughtful sound in her throat — not agreement, not dismissal, just presence.
A shared silence followed. It was not awkward.
They had both stood in the path of storms before.
“It hasn’t left me,” Prolix said at last. “What happened in Sern Ka’Torr. I keep thinking about the things I made. The anchor. That… construct that wasn’t quite mine. It felt like something else was building through me.”
Kaelthari turned then, only slightly, her profile framed in pale light. Her golden chains shifted with the motion.
“Do you think it used you?”
“I don’t know.” Prolix leaned forward, elbows on the rail. “I don’t think it wanted to. But it was there. Watching. Guiding.”
Kaelthari tilted her horns to the side, the gesture curious. “Dedisco.”
The name was a whisper between them.
She continued, “Not evil. Not kind. Only inevitable. The storm that asks if you will rebuild after it passes — not the one that clears the path.”
“Or maybe one that waits to see if you’ll become the storm.”
Her tail stilled.
“I don’t want to be a destroyer,” Prolix said quietly. “But I don’t want to be helpless either. And now I’ve been changed by something I can’t even define. I don’t know what kind of person that makes me.”
Kaelthari’s golden eyes met his. Calm. Fierce.
“I do.”
He blinked. “You do?”
“I’ve seen people fold under far less. Seen those who scream about justice cut and run the moment their hands get bloodied. But you… you stood.” She gestured gently to his hands. “You built in the middle of collapse. That’s not destruction. That’s duty.”
He swallowed hard, throat tight. “It still scares me.”
“Good.” Her voice was steel wrapped in silk. “It should. If it didn’t, you’d be lost already.”
The wind shifted, cooler now, rippling the sails overhead.
Kaelthari lifted one clawed hand and gently adjusted a charm on her horn chain — a sliver of obsidian carved into the shape of a broken tower.
“A charm of ruin,” she said softly, noticing his gaze. “To remind me that some things are meant to fall. And that even ruin has purpose.”
Prolix looked down at his satchel, at the faint outline of the Fractured Circle Relic stitched into the canvas.
Maybe that’s what Dedisco was doing.
Not commanding.
Not punishing.
Testing.
To see if he could carry what came after.
“Do you think I’ll make the right choice?” he asked.
Kaelthari didn’t hesitate. “No.”
He blinked.
“I think you’ll make many choices,” she said. “Some right. Some wrong. Some that will haunt you. But I believe you’ll carry them. And that matters more.”
They stood a moment longer beneath the stars, the ship gliding forward like a dream chasing the edge of morning.
Finally, Kaelthari turned and walked quietly down the stairs, her chains chiming softly in her wake.
Prolix remained at the railing.
Staring into the sea.
Into the sky.
Into himself.
That night, sleep took ProlixalParagon slowly.
Not with the sharp descent of exhaustion, but with the slow, deliberate drift of a body sliding beneath the surface of still water. His limbs felt too heavy to rise, his thoughts too tangled to resist.
Somewhere far above, the ship creaked softly in rhythm with the waves.
Somewhere farther still, the moons wheeled silently through a sky too vast to witness.
And beneath it all, he dreamed.
It began with the sound of bells.
Faint. Distant.
But not like those of Sern Ka’Torr — not the warning peals or funeral tolls that echoed through crumbling towers.
These bells were slow, resonant.
Ritualistic.
Each chime hung in the air like a held breath, reverberating through a place without shape.
The world around him was a liminal plane of pale ash and shifting sand, flat and endless. Not desert — not quite — but the memory of what once was desert. Color bled out of the edges of the sky, and the horizon turned endlessly inward, folding upon itself like a scroll half-written, then burned.
And before him—
A figure.
Tall. Hooded.
Not cloaked in shadow, but woven from it — threads of soft black and silver-streaked smoke that shimmered with every breath of windless air.
They stood with their back turned, watching the horizon shift and shatter like glass being rewritten.
He couldn’t see their face.
Didn’t need to.
Dedisco.
Not as an enemy.
Not even as a god.
But as a force. A watcher.
A weight behind every door marked “end.”
Prolix stepped forward, the sand beneath his feet curling upward with every step, reforming behind him into tangled spirals.
The god did not turn.
But they spoke.
Not aloud — not in any language he could name — but into him.
Like gravity.
Like grief.
“You survived the breaking.”
“But surviving is not becoming.”
The sand shifted. The horizon cracked like old porcelain.
And from the cracks emerged versions of himself.
One bore metal wings, tethered by chains forged from stars. Another wore armor shaped like a city, hollow and echoing. A third stood cloaked in fireless shadow, eyes dim and distant, holding a dagger that wept ink.
Each of them turned to face him.
Each of them said nothing.
Dedisco’s voice — or was it presence? — echoed again.
“There are many ways to be forged.”
“But even metal breaks when the fire is wrong.”
Prolix tried to speak, but no sound left him.
His mouth moved — his thoughts reached — but there was no language in this space.
Only meaning.
And fear.
And the quiet ache of not knowing what he was becoming.
The ground beneath him fractured.
The ash and sand split apart, revealing great gears grinding below — impossibly vast, spinning in patterns he could not follow, shifting too quickly, too slowly, all at once.
Between the teeth of the gears, he saw fragments of future paths:
Himself, leading the Troupe through broken forests of glass and salt.
Himself, alone, standing on a black tower beneath a sky with no stars.
Himself, laughing beside children not yet born.
Himself, broken and crawling, dragging a single spark across a battlefield made of memory.
None of them felt false.
None of them felt certain.
Dedisco finally turned.
No face.
No eyes.
Only the mirrored mask of a shattered moon — cracked and curved, reflecting not ProlixalParagon, but the possibility of him.
The god spoke one final time:
“The cycle waits for no one.”
“But those who shape it may ride the edge between loss and legacy.”
Then the figure raised one hand and touched a single finger to Prolix’s chest — directly over his lattice.
It did not burn.
It hummed.
And the world unraveled like thread.
He woke gasping, cold sweat beading on his fur despite the warmth of the cot.
The porthole beside him showed only sea and moonlight.
No sound but the ship’s soft sighing.
No mark on his chest.
No scars.
But when he checked his system—
A new notification blinked, slow and pulsing, as though it too had just awoken.
>Hidden subclass pathways continue to manifest.<
>Further dreams may guide your path.>
>Current trajectory: Divergent.<
ProlixalParagon sat up slowly, breathing deep.
He didn’t know what it meant yet.
Didn’t know what path he would walk.
But one truth rang clear through his bones.
The god was not done watching.
And Prolix was not done becoming.