its cascade so immense it rivals the breadth of an ocean. A single curtain powered by countless torrents, each stream thick as a river, braiding and separating as they plummet through the mist-shrouded air. Arasaka broke through the cascade without hindrance. She swam upon her usual path; a skeleton of earth and flora.

  Within this aquatic titan, Tree roots, their trunks lost somewhere in the heights above. Are massive; some wide enough to house Cities.

  cutting through the churning waters where bodies of the fallen drift in the aftermath of battle. A gathering, a ritual as old as the waterfall itself.

  Through the churning cascade, dozens of sea dragons stirred. Their serpentine bodies, each a dozen times larger than a whale, wove between the massive tree roots in formation. They were herding. The waters churned with thousands of silver-scaled masses that scattered and reformed like living clouds as the dragons guided them with movements of fin and tail.

  But it was the koi they sought.

  The sea dragons' control over the currents was immaculate. With sweeps of their tails and adjustments of their wings, they created spiraling vortices that separated the golden-scaled koi from the lesser fish, drawing them toward the heart of the submerged forest where something massive stirred.

  Arasaka's attention focused there.

  At the center of it all, coiled around one of the tree roots, was Nami. The mountain-sized dragon dwarfed her gathered tribe, her lindwyrm form wrapped in great loops around the ancient wood. Her scales had begun to loosen and the shedding had started.

  The koi sensed it and went into a frenzy immediately.

  What had been an orderly gathering erupted into chaos. The golden fish surged forward as the first scales began to drift free, falling like sacred leaves through the water. Koi fought and raced; leaving their normally graceful movements something that transformed into desperate thrashing. They bit at each other, rammed competitors aside, and presented their hunger for transformation overriding every instinct of self-preservation.

  The scales glowed faintly as they descended, each one a promise of evolution. The goal of ascension beyond the limitations of their current forms.

  The sea dragons maintained the barriers as best they could, controlling the currents to keep the competition within bounds. But the frenzy intensified as more scales fell. The stronger koi claimed their prizes, clamping down on the offerings with jaws that would soon reshape into something greater. But the violence of their competition created riptides and pressure waves that reached beyond the designated area.

  The older koi; those who had survived previous sheddings but lacked the strength to compete, were caught in the turbulence. Most tumbled away, pulled by currents too strong for their failing bodies. Some struck the massive roots and drifted down, with thier consciousness fading. Others were simply swept into the depths where the waters grew cold and still.

  But one ancient koi, its scales more brass than gold, its lizard-like features scarred from a lifetime of failed attempts. It saw a scale drifting just beyond the boundaries. With the last reserves of strength its dying body possessed, it lunged.

  For a moment, it seemed the koi might reach it, but then the mob found it. A dozen younger koi descended on the intruder, tearing at fins, and slamming into its weakened body. Within seconds, the old koi was tumbling through the water, consciousness fragmenting, its brief spark of hope extinguished as it began the long drift toward the rocky depths below.

  Arasaka descended then, her dragon form cut through the cascade without resistance.

  She approached Nami first as protocol demanded it. The mountain-sized lindwyrm's head turned. Around them, several koi had already begun their transformation, their bodies erupting into wriggling flesh as evolution took hold. The successful ones twisted and writhed, their forms expanding, reshaping, ascending toward drake-hood.

  "Sister," Nami's voice resonated through the water, a sound like distant thunder beneath waves. "You wake at an auspicious time."

  "The shedding proceeds well," Arasaka observed, watching as the victorious koi continued their metamorphosis.

  "The best of my flock will soon join Xerxes' ranks," Nami confirmed. Several sea drakes moved to gather the transforming koi, ready to bear them to their new master. "The king's armies grow stronger with each generation."

  "As they should," Arasaka said, but her consciousness had already found what it sought below. That spark of fading life, still clinging to existence despite the mob's violence.

  Still alive. Barely.

  "Pardon me, Gresham," Arasaka murmured, invoking the name of death itself as she turned from Nami and descended toward the dying koi. "For I present this one with the opportunity to delay the ultimate dream."

  Her shadow fell across the golden koi floating belly-up near the rocky depths.

  Her consciousness sweeps across the submerged carnage, until it finds what she seeks. 'Dont thank me or luck little one. I was once considered food for your lessers; so i return the act king Xerxes bestowed upon me once" Arasaka said as she sunk near what assailed her senses.

  Arasaka lifted the dying koi telekinetically, cradling it in waves of psychic energy. She breathed a stream of supercharged water over the koi's motionless form. The Koi body responds, beginning to stretch and thicken. Its skull elongates, taking on the blunt, powerful shape of a monitor lizard.

  The small barbels around its mouth grow into sensitive forked tongue. Its fins reshape into four sturdy legs ending in webbed claws, perfect for both swimming and climbing the rocky falls. A thick, muscular tail develops. "See if my attendant can see to your health. Our time is a few months aways from hardship little one. Be ready for my return." Arasaka scolded.

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  As the drake's new heart begins beating with renewed vigor, its consciousness awakens.

  In the hollows and chambers; a remarkable community thrives. Wyverns adapted to sea life have claimed the larger root caverns as their domain. their smaller cousins originating as koi; offered sleek forms perfectly adapted to this perpetually wet environment.

  Small, membranous wings that allow them to dart through through the root networks. Functioning as caretakers, all have inherited the knowledge to care for dragon eggs. A task rewarded by dedication and longevity. Older koi are rewarded with eggs unable to hatch for a millennium.

  Their colors brilliant against the dark wood. Scattered throughout the infinite depths, countless eggs float suspended in the water; their combined illumination creating a map Arasaka could barely forget.

  She sent a telekinetic pulse radiating through the fallen sea and found a koi on the brink of death. Its brain muddled with the processes of death.The waterfall took the drakeling the way a god takes an offering; without negotiation.

  Arasaka's breath had remade it but the body was an argument the drakeling's mind hadn't agreed to yet; still rippling like calm waves. Its new heart beat in a rhythm its brain couldn't follow. Its legs tucked against its belly like folded prayers, and the waterfall's cascade seized it completely. Down it went.

  Through torrents each thick as a river, braiding and separating as they plunged through mist-shrouded depths. Past root systems so massive their trunks were lost somewhere in the heights above

  The pressure built In shelves. Each depth the drakeling crossed slammed a new weight against its reforming bones, and the cold stopped being temperature and became substance. This thing with texture;,boiling with intent. A s though the deep itself were pressing its thumb against the drakeling's chest; to check whether its new heart deserved to continue.

  The drakeling's freshly formed eyes began to glaze. Its consciousness, thin as wet silk, folded inward. Though the body remembered what it had been. The mind, unable to reconcile the two shapes it had worn in a single day, chose the older one. And with that, the memories rose to the surface.

  "From the Belly Up, I have watched them from below. Those lizards crowned in fire, who fly as I swim along." A guppy gulped.

  Tanned and no larger than a child's fingernail. It swam in the center of a school; two hundred siblings moving as a single thought through root corridors where the water tasted of mineral and age. Their father held the column's edge. He was the largest male the guppy had ever seen; its scales were still vivid as hammered coin, his barbels swept the current for the electrical signatures of danger, his body angled always between the school and the open water beyond the roots.

  The Albino Floa came from the silt. It erupted like a buried cable snapping free. Sixty meters of banded muscle in patterns of rust and dirty cream, its head was flat as a mason's trowel, its jaws were already unhinging before the father could turn. The serpent hit the father koi center-mass, folding his body around its skull like cloth around a fist, and the water bloomed with copper light as scales sheared free and blood threaded the current in ribbons.

  The school detonated. Two hundred golden bodies scattered in every direction. Some flew into root hollows, behind egg clusters, and downward into the dark. The guppy at the center of it all tumbled in the shockwave, with spinning tail over head. its lateral line screamed with the pressure signatures of a dozen panicked siblings colliding around it. Its last image was the father's tail beat once before it stopped.

  But then the image cracked. The memory split down its center like a struck mirror, and through the fracture something else bled in. The guppy was no longer watching its father die. It was swimming forward through clear water toward a shape so large it replaced the horizon. A dragon with crimson scales streaked with black like spilled ink. the same stains that marked the king Xerxes, but arranged differently, uniquely, as though the ink had been thrown by a different hand. A circlet of branching horns swept back from a skull built for authority.

  The guppy swam toward her. Though It shouldn't have, because It didn't. The koi had never seen this dragon, and would not see her for the entirety of its life. It had no frame of reference for the shape or the colors or the horns. But the magic that Arasaka breathed into the koi's dying body had already begun,. Embedding itself in the creature's memories like a watermark pressed into paper before the ink is laid. The bond preceded the meeting, so the rescue preceded the need.

  The father touched the dragon's shadow and dissolved into light. And from the light, something with legs stumbled forward on limbs it had never owned, blinking with eyes that faced forward for the first time.

  The vision shattered. The waterfall thundered back and with that; the drakeling sank deeper. "They who can split the water's ceiling and never once look down. They swim as I swim, but when the current bores them" The guppy rasped as another memory pierced it.

  The guppy had grown enough that the school had thinned around it. It had watched the sea dragons breach the waterfall's ceiling a hundred times by now. Water parted for them by choice, launching themselves into the bright absence above that the elder koi called the "dry death" and the young ones simply called "up".

  "They ascend as I fall down. The beasts that claw the air like it owes them currency, and the sky lets them in; Like one ignorant of their worth." The guppy exclaimed as it breached.

  A single, stupid, brave leap with its body clearing the surface by barely an inch. water streamed from scales that had never felt air. And for one shuddering heartbeat it saw an expanse of blue. Wind hit its gills like a slap until sound changed and became thin. The world above was made of a different blue then his. A contemplatiom broken by a predator. The Albino Floa hit from the shallows below. It drove its body onto the wet stone shelf where the water thinned to inches, muscular contractions pulled it forward like the land itself was reeling it in. Its jaws opened wider than the guppy's entire body, and the stink of digestion rolled forward like a fog.

  The mother koi came like a thrown blade.

  She was scarred terror with ridges along her flanks, and one fin torn while another was regrown at an angle, her scales carried the dull sheen of a body that had spent more energy on survival than beauty. But she was fast, and she was furious, and she swung her tail into the serpent's skull with a force that sent a shockwave through the shallows, slapping water against stone in a white explosion of spray.

  The Albino Floa recoiled as the mother struck again and again. Brimming with the clarity that only parents possess, that this fight ended one of two ways and both of them were acceptable as long as the children survived. "Mother" the guppy screamed.

  Blood in shallow water is a dinner bell that rings for miles. The scavengers came first; eel-bodied creatures with translucent skin stretched over visible organs. Their movements were jerky and opportunistic. Then the snapjaws; armored fish with shearing plates instead of teeth, circling the chaos. A clutch of juvenile root-crawlers detached from the nearest trunk system and drifted toward the commotion, their tendrils were already extending.

  The school panicked and shattered.

  A true fracture with siblings peeling away in ones and twos, darting into hollows too small for the predators but too small for the koi as well, wedging themselves into root crevices where the pressure of their own bodies was the only thing between them and the open water. The guppy saw three siblings taken in the space of a single heartbeat. One by a snapjaw, two by eels that moved in pairs, herding and striking with teamwork.

  The mother fought on in the choas. Though her silhouette grew smaller as the guppy sank. A dark shape thrashing against a darker shape against the bright wound of the surface. The sounds of combat reached the guppy as pressure changes. She became smaller until she was the size of a coin, then a pinprick before disappearing.

  The drakeling hit a pressure shelf and the memory released its grip. The water here was black and thick and carried no sound from above. The new legs curled tighter against the belly. The tail, still more fin than muscle, wrapped around the body in the old way.

  It sank as it thought of returning to its birthplace at the sandy bottom.