Chapter 1226: The Third Entity

Unlike Phei’s Void-Ice, which belonged to the Dragon deeply enough that he could command it with frightening instinct, Danton still required his essence to reach the Flames of Beginning and drag their primordial fire into the world.

Without essence, his greatest weapon existed behind a sealed gate.

Danton closed his eyes and turned his consciousness inward.

Danton could feel the Flames of Beginning far below the surface of his soul, the primordial gold stirred.

Heat spread.

The beginning of fire awakened.

Danton reached for it and the necklace responded.

Its tiny blue stones brightened; the suppression surrounding his throat descended into his soul with terrifying exactness, sealing his meridians, compressing bloodline power and severing the flow of essence before it could connect him properly to the fire.

The transparent sphere drank everything he had gathered and the Flames retreated.

Danton opened his eyes.

The ocean outside had grown darker.

The sphere had not stopped descending.

Far beyond it, immense silhouettes occasionally travelled through the depths. Some moved slowly enough that Danton could watch their outlines pass through the blue-black water for nearly a minute, while others vanished the moment he attempted to focus upon them. Whether they were creatures, formations or merely shadows cast by things much farther away, he could not tell with his perception suppressed.

He remained calm.

Panic was a habit of short-lived creatures.

Danton had been imprisoned before. He had endured seals designed by beings who thought eternity was an acceptable sentence, broken soul restrictions that had outlived the civilizations responsible for creating them and killed jailers who had spent entire epochs believing their cages infallible.

Every prison possessed a flaw and every suppression had a cost.

Every law required something in order to remain law.

He would find it.

The question troubling Danton was no longer whether he could eventually escape.

It was how much Phei could accomplish before he escaped!

That thought sharpened his expression.

The Coffer remained in Anarctica and with the eleven Chained remained there.

So did the Dragon.

Whatever had taken Danton had removed the one mind capable of coordinating those monsters properly at exactly the instant the Coffer became vulnerable.

The timing was too perfect.

Danton looked through the clear prison into the abyss.

He had expected Consort.

Of all the individuals likely to interfere with the Coffer operation, the Head Maid had occupied a particularly irritating place near the top of his calculations. Her loyalty to the One Above, her strange interest in Phei and the sheer strength she carried beneath that deceptively elegant body made her involvement almost inevitable if the Dragon somehow learned enough about the plan.

Danton had prepared for her.

He did not expect to defeat Consort casually of course. Ancient arrogance had never required stupidity. Yet his eleven Chained could, his Flames of Beginning could burn through time itself and they’d defeat whoever came!

That was the purpose of numbers but someone else had rendered the numbers irrelevant:

But when Phei shouted Consort moved and Danton saw her and he was prepared but then Consort had only moved just so far before she ceased being the fastest thing in the moment.

Something else had reached him first.

Danton’s eyes narrowed.

He had failed to perceive its approach.

That bothered him.

He could forgive being overpowered; a stronger being existed somewhere in every hierarchy. He could even accept being outmaneuvered if the opponent had prepared well enough.

But for his perception to fail entirely?

For something to take him while Consort herself was already moving?

That carried implications far uglier than simple strength.

Danton stared into the abyss and quietly asked, "Who are you?"

The ocean remained silent.

The sphere continued downward.

Far beyond the range of Danton’s suppressed perception, a figure watched him sink.

Blue hair streamed through the depths as it spread behind the woman in an immense silken blue wake, impossibly long strands drifting through the ocean without becoming tangled or heavy beneath the water. She travelled through the currents with such effortless speed that the sea appeared to open before her rather than resist.

And long golden dress embraced her figure.

The ocean should have seized the fabric, billowed and twisted beneath every current, yet the gown remained almost perfectly arranged around her body, moving with the restrained grace of clothing touched by a summer breeze rather than something worn thousands of meters beneath an ocean.

One side had a long slit and as she curved through the depths, it revealed the familiar tattoo upon her skin.

The big roses and the huge dragon in them.

Pale underwater radiance passed across the markings, and for an instant they seemed to move with her; the woman crossed an impossible distance in several breaths.

Her body possessed a strange fluidity in the water, every turn unnaturally smooth, every acceleration silent. There was something about the way her lower figure vanished through darkness beneath the golden dress that made the mind want to imagine shapes it could not properly confirm.

Something graceful made for the ocean but the impression disappeared each time the water shifted.

Only her lips were visible as they curved into a small smile.

She watched Danton’s transparent prison descend through the abyss and showed neither anger nor excitement, merely the quiet satisfaction of someone watching an arrangement settle exactly where it belonged.

Then she turned; the surrounding ocean bent with her... her blue hair and gold dress disappeared into the darkness with frightening speed, leaving scarcely a disturbance behind.

Far below, Danton’s sphere continued sinking until its faint outline became little more than a pale bead lost inside endless black-blue water.

A few moments later, even that vanished.

***

Back in Anarctica, Consort remained frozen above the Titan and the cold had entered her eyes because she had forgotten to blink; Consort’s mind remained trapped within the single impossible instant that had just passed.

She had moved.

She knew she had after Phei’s signal had reached her and Consort had already calculated the angle, the distance and then Danton had disappeared.

Her hand remained upon the hilt of her katana as she stared at the empty place where the Jörmungandr Prince had been. For the first time in an age she could no longer conveniently measure, Consort’s mind had arrived late to an event involving her own body.

That realization carried genuine weight.

Consort was a World Transcendent standing at the very threshold of Lesser Godhood. She had refined her perception until ordinary speed had long since stopped possessing meaning. Powerful cultivators could move across kilometers before mortals completed a blink, and Consort could still follow every contraction of muscle, every shift of essence and every disturbance in space and she had killed enemies who folded space itself.

Speed was familiar to her but what had happened to Danton belonged to another category.

Something else completed the action before her mind finished acknowledging that she had begun it.

Her eyes widened another fraction.

"Impossible..."

The word slipped from her lips almost soundlessly and vanished into the screaming winter.

She spread her perception.

It erupted across the basin, through glaciers and storms, over the Coffer and every Chained surrounding it, before plunging beneath the ancient corpse of the Titan and probing the spaces Danton had occupied only an instant earlier.

There was nothing.

No recognizable spatial scar marked his disappearance or essence or any lingering fold she could trace.

Whoever had taken him had done so cleanly enough that even Consort’s perception found only absence where an ancient Jörmungandr Prince had existed.

Her fingers tightened around the katana.

She considered her Mistress first.

The thought died immediately.

Consort knew the texture of her Mistress’s power more intimately than she knew almost anything else in existence. Had the One Above interfered, Consort would have recognized the touch before it finished manifesting and her Mistress couldn’t because of her situation.

Lucienne entered her mind next.

Also wrong.

The Monster possessed her own particular wrongness, something difficult to describe yet impossible to confuse once experienced. Lucienne’s presence left reality feeling as though it had been quietly persuaded to lie.

This was different.

’One of the Ryujin Tiamats?’ Consort’s expression tightened.

She knew too many of them, had watched too many, crossed paths with enough of their monsters to recognize several of the more terrifying signatures even through concealment but this belonged to someone else.

Someone who had known.

That possibility was perhaps the most troublesome.

The timing had been immaculate.

Whoever moved had waited until Phei gave Consort the signal, until Danton began opening his portal and until eleven World Transcendents had arranged themselves around the Coffer.

Then they took exactly one piece.

Danton.

Consort’s gaze hardened; a being capable of moving that quickly had no reason to wait unless waiting itself served a purpose.

Which meant they had been watching.

Or they had known the plan beforehand.

Neither possibility pleased her.

The ancient winter screamed around Consort as her thoughts raced, yet beneath all of them lingered one particularly unpleasant realization.

If that unknown being had wanted Danton dead, the Jörmungandr Prince would never have realized he had been attacked.

Consort herself might not have been able to stop it.

Then something detonated behind her.

BANG!

The sound struck Anarctica with enough force to make the dead Titan beneath her tremble.

Consort spun.

A colossal pressure wave tore across the frozen basin, ripping thousands of tons of accumulated snow from mountain slopes and throwing them high into the storm. Ancient glacier faces burst apart beneath the shock, while great fissures raced across the ice surrounding the Coffer.

The crown beneath Consort’s feet shuddered.

World Transcendent powers collided against each other making the red winter around the Blood Elf surge, death stirred and oceanic pressure descended while corruption darkened the horizon.

And somewhere amid all of it, something happened that made even the impossible disappearance of Danton leave Consort’s mind.

Her eyes found the battlefield and widened.

Her grip crushed around the hilt of her katana.

For one terrible instant, the Head Maid could only stare at what Phei had done.

Then her composure shattered!

"NOOOOOOO!!!!"