"I was born in the deep, where darkness favors none. Would everything be different this time if I was one of them? The guppy thought.

  The koi had lived in the deep for a full season after the mother's silhouette shrank to nothing and never grew back. It navigated by pressure changes against its lateral line, by the faint electrical halos of other living things. Sometimes by the mineral taste of different root species dissolving into the current. It learned which dens were too shallow for Albino Floa and which were too deep for anything with warm blood. It ate what it could find. It grew slowly; the way things grow when most of their energy goes to listening for death.

  It was alone before the darkness rearranged.

  The darkness itself pulled back from a single point, retreating the way a curtain parts for a hand that has every right to enter.

  The blackened Floa.

  It bore the shape of its lesser kin, but banded in black and not cream, Its body was longer than any serpent the koi had encountered; eighty meters at least. But almost liturgical in its emaciation, as though it had traded mass for concepts.

  Along its spine, translucent fins rose like the remnants of a burial shroud. Bioluminescent filaments drifted from its skull in a disheveled corona

  Its eyes were two hollow wells set deep in a skull narrower and more angular than any Albino Floa. Bone ridges swept back from those empty sockets in formations that stylized wings.

  Its presence didn't fill the water so much as replace it, so that the darkness around the koi was but an audience.

  The koi froze. Some thread in its blood woven into the species at a depth below instinct; understood what this creature was. The white serpent opened its mouth. It set the tone with a pale rhythm. Steady as a metronome and patient as the thing it served.

  The water between them had become a corridor leading only one direction, before the water tore.

  A shape came through the dark like a siege engine through a wall. Its veins ran with light blue, electric, rolling in waves from skull to tail-tip that turned the abyssal black into a stream of azure.

  It hit the blackened Floa behind the skull. The impact sent shockwaves rippling through the deep. pressure built in waves the koi felt in its teeth, in the thin bones of its fins, in the stuttering rhythm of its heart. The white serpent convulsed and the sea dragon's body changed.

  The blue veins guttered before dimming. Then reignited in a different spectrum entirely — crimson bleeding through the azure like ink dropped in still water, and the black following close behind, in stains, as though the dragon's hide were a canvas being overwritten by a painter working from memory. The shape didn't change, the size either; only the colors. Blue to red. Teal to black. The veins that had oceanic bioluminescence now burned with hues of red and black.

  The sea dragon stared at the koi as it wore borrowed colors like armor. The dark closed back in as the guppy panicked. "Could I pretend to have lungs, or something with legs? Oh my, It's so silly to think these thoughts at the end. There should be a better ways, to spend my last breath.

  The memory gentled like calm water. A shelf of pale stone where the current slowed to a whisper, far from the falls. The sea dragon had carried the koi here as it fed it minnows caught along the way.

  The minnows collected in the still water where the koi could reach them and eat. For the first time since its father was taken. The koi was not afraid but a tear mixed the current as it spoke. "But now my gills barely flutter, and my gold has gone to brass.I sink the way all spent things sink; toward a pressure I cannot name.Like the sound inside of me, drowning out my heartbeat with a wordless scream.

  The last memory came crashing abruptly.

  The koi had followed the sea dragon for weeks through root networks that spiraled into depths unknown. The koi stayed close, drafting in the dragon's wake, and somewhere in that journey it began to believe that this was what its life would be now. A sentiment kept as the water turned white.

  An electrical storm had found the waterfall above, and the cascade became a conduit. Lightning inhabited it, threading through the upper column in branching lattices of raw charge that turned the water into a medium for energies it was never meant to carry. The light it produced was a brightness that burned the shadows from every hollow, every den, and every crevice.

  The sea dragon broke.

  Its veins flared white-hot, before erupting outward in a wave that hit the koi like a wall of compressed water. The dragon's body arched, its jaws opened in what might have been a roar but produced no sound the koi could parse.

  Blood. The water turned copper-sweet and opaque, and the koi dove on instinct alone, its small body corkscrewing downward through a column that tasted like the inside of a wound.

  Above, through the blood-dark water, the sea dragon's silhouette thrashed against the lightning-white surface. The koi dove until the sound became pressure became silence became black.

  The memory ended and the drakeling hit the bottom of the falls.

  Below the cascade's terminal fury, the drakeling curled in a comma of exhaustion on a shelf of root-wrapped rock. It sank the final few meters and came to rest against something solid.

  The drakeling's new eyes, still negotiating the treaty between fish-brain and drake-brain, could make out the massive architecture of the root systems spiraling away in every direction, their trunks disappeared into darkness above and below like the columns of a floorless skyscraper.

  Here the Albino Floa built thier nest. They had gathered around the base of the in hundreds. a trunk so vast its curvature was indistinguishable from a wall, and the serpents had wrapped themselves around it and each other.

  The ball was a thousand hundred meters across.

  The albino Floa had woven themselves into a structure so dense and so intricate that individual serpents were indistinguishable from the mass. It became a living sphere of scaled muscle, with each body threading through and around and between the others. From within the sphere came a low, subsonic vibration that the drakeling felt not in its ears but in the marrow of its newly formed bones.

  The water around the sphere was thick with translucent husks of scale, ribbons of sloughed skin, clouds of biological debris that drifted outward from the mass like snow from an inverted sky. Producing a blizzard of dead matter that turned the water for fifty meters in every direction into a translucent fog of what they had been.

  The drakeling watched from its shelf, paralyzed. That not all of the serpents had made it into the ball.

  One circled the sphere's perimeter in slow, orbits. It had arrived too late, or had been denied entry by whatever hierarchy governed the Floa's communion. It sped into a blur of parchment.

  The annihilating, terminal white of bones left in sunlight for a century.

  The newly revealed Albino circled the shed remnants of its former self; the husk of scales, the ribbons of discarded skin, and ate them. Without haste, it ate the shed material of others.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The biological debris that clouded the water around the great ball. The Albino swept through the molting fog like a reaper through a field. As it fed, its body continued to change.

  Small protrusions pushed through the white scales along its ventral line. Four of them, evenly spaced, each beginning as a nub no larger than a tooth but they grew as the Albino consumed. In the span of minutes, the nubs became limbs.

  The Albino completed its final orbit of the sphere, newly limbed, and newly crowned in pale fire. its hollow gaze swept the water above and fixed on the drakeling.

  It ascended the water as though the water were solid ground and the serpent were climbing a staircase only it could see. Its filaments trailed behind and above in a train of spectral light.

  The drakeling could not move. Its new legs locked against its belly. Its new heart, stuttered and slowed.

  The Albino's filaments reached the drakeling first; they were thin, pale threads that brushed against its new scales. The Albino Floa mouth was fully open now now. The needle-teeth angled inward as it coasted forward.

  The drakeling's body remembered Arasaka's breath. The Albino lunged; its jaws closed around the cloud of shed material still drifting from the drakeling's transformation. the discarded remnants of fins, the husks of scales that had been gold and were now nothing. The last physical evidence that the creature on the shelf had ever been a koi. The serpent consumed it all with the same vigor it had applied to its own shedding, but it came too close.

  The magic that Arasaka had breathed into the koi was not a spell. It was not a charm or an enchantment or any of the discrete, bounded things that lesser creatures called magic. It was a current of possibility.

  The Albino Floa was, at its core, a vessel built for absence. Its hollow eyes. Its empty throat. Its body stripped of all former identity and rebuilt around the single function of receiving. And Arasaka's magic was the most perfect pressure.

  The drakeling didn't choose what happened next. Its body chose did; using magic as a catalyst. The swathe of magic that had remade a dying koi into a breathing drake simply expanded its reach. and the nearest vessel was right there.

  The Albino's body began to come apart in layers, the way the serpent itself had shed its former skin. The white scales softened, then dissolved, then flowed toward the drakeling's body. The filaments detached from the Albino's skull and drifted toward the drakeling's spine, where they sank into the new scales and vanished.

  Then the vision cleared, and the Albino Floa was gone, and the drakeling's scales carried a faint nacre sheen they hadn't possessed before.

  Far above, where the mist thinned and the cascade's thunder softened to a vibration. Arasaka rested along the luminous tree spiraled around her. Her crimson scales emitted red light and returned it darkened, stained, so that the stone beneath her seemed to be in the presence of a star.

  Nami was smaller than Arasaka by one magnitude. She carried a jaw-pouch distended with seawater, and inside it, three drakelings squirmed.

  "An interesting event," Arasaka murmured. Her voice moved through the water the way tremors move through bedrock. One of her eyes tracked the waterfall's plunge below. Somewhere in that cascade, she could feel the newest drakeling's heart. Still beating, carrying on to the point that if she concentrated. The faintest echo of a heart beat anew.

  She turned her great head toward Nami.

  "Do you remember your birth on the Crimson Continent?"

  The question broke the nervous tension between them like a stone dropped into still water. Nami's jaw tightened around her pouch. The drakelings inside squirmed at the sudden pressure change. "I remember enough," Nami said. The way one handles a container whose contents are known to be volatile.

  "I sometimes wish for my old life," Arasaka continued. "Boring and exciting in equal measure. Before the terror." She let the word settle. "Before the responsibility."

  She shifted her massive forelimbs against Nami's right wing. "Every tier we ascend demands the surrender of the tier below. The comfort and ignorance of a small world's safety. Her tail moved in a sweep that displaced enough water to create a minor current below. "I was once small enough to be afraid of things that could eat me. Now I am afraid of things I might become. Tell me which fear you prefer, and I'll tell you which tier you've reached."

  Nami shuddered.

  The roots kept the water warm here, and still Nami shuddered. The Crimson Continent was the one place in all the world where Nami could feel like a cub again at this point in her life. Going there would be like becoming a wyrm again; stripped of rank, stripped of capability. Robbed of everything she'd built since the day she'd first tasted mana and felt her body respond to it.

  "The higher you climb," Arasaka said, watching the falls, "the more you grieve for the ground."

  She fell silent, then Arasaka's gaze shifted.

  Down, she looked at the drakeling through the mist; "Watch," Arasaka said.

  The sensation arrived; A terrible itch. The drakeling had claws now.

  The realization hit its nervous system approximately half a second before the motor impulse reached the relevant leg, and in that half-second the drakeling experienced something it had never felt as a koi; anticipation.

  The hind leg shook; it moved with the subtlety of a battering ram.

  Every muscle in the limb fired as the claws raked across the patch of new scales behind the left ear. This caused the drakeling toppled sideways.

  It righted itself; the new tail was good for that, at least and scratched again. Harder, as the feeling of pleasure and pain mixed. It scratched behind the ear. It scratched along the flank. It scratched the place where its dorsal fin had been and was now a ridge of interlocking scales that itched.

  It scratched with its front claws. Its back claws, and in one spectacular moment of overcompensation. It attempted to scratch with its tail. Though it missed entirely, and spun itself in a full rotation.

  The scratching went on for longer than dignity would have allowed, if the drakeling had possessed any concept of it. It carved furrows in the stone. It shredded a patch of moss to test its new arms. It was almost preoccupied when it seen a remora coming in fast.

  It had been shadowing the drakeling's descent since the upper falls. Drawn by the electromagnetic chaos of a body mid-transformation and waited till the Albino Floa disappeared. The scratching had been the final signal for the parasite.

  With the new understanding that the distance between its own jaws and the remora's body was not a problem but a measurement, and measurements could be closed with time. So the drakeling dodged. Its legs kicked against the stone shelf in an graceless thrust that launched it sideways. The parasite shot past before correcting. It banked for a second approach.

  The drakeling caught it in its teeth. The crunch was satisfying and the taste was entirely new.

  Drakes descended through the cascade and picked up the drakeling with gentleness. The drakeling squirmed against its new siblings. The drakeling, pressed against bodies as new and confused as its own, watching the deep shrink below.

  The sea drakes gathered the writhing masses of transforming koi, their bodies erupted and reshaped in violent bursts of evolution. Each drake carefully cradled two or three of the successful ones in the curves of their tails. Protecting the vulnerable half-formed creatures from the aggressive currents.

  Nami's massive head turned to watch the harvest. A sense of satisfaction rippled through her consciousness. The orb embedded in her tail began to glow with concentrated mana. She brought it close to her body, and the light intensified, washing over her mountainous form in waves.

  The scars that crisscrossed her scales were remnants of wars and feeding frenzies when younger; began to knit together. Wounds that stitched her hide for centuries smoothed and faded, the tissue regenerated as if time itself reversed. She focused the orb's energy on a section of her left wing where the membrane had bent awkwardly, the bones had healed incorrectly from some long-forgotten injury.

  The wing shuddered.

  Bone cracked and reformed with sounds like breaking ice, the structure slowly straightening as cartilage dissolved and regrew in proper alignment. Arasaka released a rumbling sigh of relief as the wing flexed properly for the first time in decades.

  "Finally," her voice resonated through the water. "With most of the tier fives disaster's are gone on migration, so the mana flows freely again." Nami sighed. "No more fighting for scraps of ambient energy while Xerxes and Andromeda drain the atmosphere with their mere presence."

  One of the attending sea drakes drifted closer with curiosity.

  "This new batch," Nami continued, her eyes tracked the koi, "they'll grow three times faster than usual. Maybe more. The island will practically drown in unused power now. These drakelings will reach full size within a decade instead of three."

  The sea drakes began their journey upward, carrying their precious cargo through the massive tree roots that formed the skeletal infrastructure of the waterfall. The newly evolved drakes twitched and convulsed in their protective embrace, their bodies still adjusting to their new forms. Legs kicked reflexively. Thier tails lashed. Newly formed wings twitched as neural pathways rewired themselves for entirely new methods of movement.

  They emerged into one of the larger root hollows where the true caretaker community thrived. Sea wyverns perched in the upper chambers, their wings folded against bodies adapted for perpetual moisture. Below them, the smaller drake-kin darted through the interconnected passages. But they came upon what dominated the central chamber.

  Three meter bodies shaped like seals, but far more robust. Their thick fur shed water in sheets, and their paws were massive things that could cover and shield their entire bodies when curled defensively. Each sea bear possessed a tail five meters long, thick with muscle and capable of generating tremendous force.

  The largest of them, a ten meter long male with patches of silver in his dark fur, raised his head as the sea drakes entered. His small eyes fixed on the cluster of vulnerable, transforming drakelings.

  The sea drakes moved quickly, trying to reach the safety of the higher root chambers. But the sea bear was already in motion.

  He launched himself through the water with his massive tail providing thrust that sent him rocketing forward. His paws tucked against his body, streamlining his form as he closed the distance. The sea drakes scattered, trying to protect their charges, but the bear was focused on the smallest, the weakest.

  He caught two of them in the first pass, his jaws clamping down on writhing drake bodies. The creatures shrieked, their new vocal cords producing sounds somewhere between a fish's gasp and a lizard's hiss. The bear's momentum carried him past, and he released the bodies to let them drift while he circled back for more.

  The revived drake, struggled near the back of the group. Its body was still adjusting to transformation, resorting to uncoordinated spasms. It tried to swim upward, toward the safety of the root chambers, but its tail moved awkwardly, propelling it in erratic spirals.

  The sea bear noticed.

  He adjusted his trajectory mid-swim, his powerful tail beating the water into foam. The drake sensed the approach and panicked, its limbs thrashing wildly. It managed to angle itself toward a narrow gap between two roots, too small for the bear to follow.

  The bear's jaws snapped shut inches from the drake's tail. Frustrated, he slammed his massive paw against the root, trying to dislodge the hiding creature. When that failed, he wedged his snout into the gap, his breath materialized bubbles that obscured the drake's vision.

  The drake pressed itself deeper into the crevice, its claws dug in the rough bark. It kicked out reflexively, its newly formed talons raked across the bear's sensitive nose. The bear recoiled with an angry bellow that sent pressure waves through the water.

  For a moment, hunter and prey regarded each other through the narrow gap. The drake's chest heaved with exertion, its gills fluttered rapidly. The bear's eyes narrowed, before he turned away. There were easier targets, and he'd already secured two. The massive tail swept around in a wide arc, propelling him back toward where the sea drakes continued their desperate ascent.

  The drake remained frozen in its crevice, listening to the sounds of pursuit fade into the distance. Its heart, still adjusting to its new size and rhythm, hammered against ribs that moments ago hadn't existed.

  The cramped space around it began to feel less like a trap and more like a sanctuary.

  After some, time, it followed the rest of sea drakes through the kelp forests They should have continued directly to Xerxes' domain, but hunger and opportunity made them pause.

  Below, in a clearing between massive coral formations, a herd of Don Dugongs grazed on sea grass beds. The massive creatures the size of a small vessel floated with laziness their gold-capped tusks were sharp, long and battle ready. Barnacle patterns decorated their cape seaweed and compacted earth. Several had smoldering coral-cigars clamped in their jaws.

  The lead sea drake, still flush with evolution-granted an aura of arrogance, descended with its brethren. "Well, well. Look what we have here. Some fat cows ripe for the taking."