Shaeleg inhaled, still watching Silas.
Her divine eyes traced the weathered features of the man who had once been banished, as if searching for the faintest sign of regret.
But what she felt… was the same as always.
"You haven't changed."
Her voice echoed like the lament of an ancient spirit, carried between the breath of the trees and the silence of the mountain.
"Fifty years have passed, and your aura is still the same. Sharp as a ritual blade. Provocative like thunder trapped between mountains. Lethal."
Shaeleg brought her muzzle closer to Silas.
The scent struck him like venom burned into memory.
"And even now, drenched in the stench of potions and strange substances… your body still reeks of imbalance."
Silas shrugged, feigning modesty.
"I'm touched. Nice to know I still leave an impression."
"It wasn't a compliment," she growled.
The trees trembled.
Glenn, even without grasping the deeper meaning of the exchange, could feel the tension building in the air like steam before a storm. Nature grew still once again, but now with a heavier weight. Even the dust motes seemed to stop midair. A warning.
Shaeleg stepped back.
"I've let your games run wild in this valley for too long. You've crossed the line. Whatever you came here to steal, your time is—"
And then everything stopped.
Like a reversed tide sucking the world into a silent void.
The Mother of the Forest froze.
Her once calm and vivid eyes glazed over. Her muscles locked. Her claws sank into the soaked earth with a dry crack, and her fur bristled like black-and-white spears aimed at the heavens.
Something had happened.
Glenn couldn't grasp the weight of the moment—in truth, the whole situation was far too bizarre for his mind to process. The two beasts before him were creatures vastly, impossibly stronger than he was. The aura of the first alone had given him a pathetic premonition of death. Yet the second, the so-called Mother of the Valley, had treated that same first beast—who had already left him bleeding from every orifice—like a mere child.
His mind struggled to measure just how much stronger the white panther was compared to himself. But no conclusion came. It was like staring at a wall so high his eyes couldn't even find its top.
Something had happened.
But not in words.
Not in sound.
It felt more like an ancient, primal summons from the very essence of the Valley. A silent atmosphere swept through the towering trees. A breeze both dreadful and refreshing.
The earth shuddered.
The sky, once gray-blue, darkened violently, as if night had fallen at noon. Birdsong ceased. Insects fell silent. Even the sound of his own blood rushing through his veins became audible in the absolute stillness.
A spectral whisper slid through the air like the mourning of the valley's spirits. An unseen force that seemed to cry… or scream.
Shaeleg closed her eyes.
For a moment, she trembled.
And when she opened them again, the creature was gone.
Not physically.
But everything rational or measured within her had vanished.
Before them all, the Mother of the Valley of Floating Waterfalls became the wild embodiment of nature's outrage. Her aura didn't just overflow… it devoured the world. Rezon, the fearsome guardian, collapsed forward and curled up, like a cub before its furious matriarch.
The Sleipnirs dug their hooves into the ground, snarling in mental agony. Glenn felt something tear inside him—like his very soul was being shredded by a presence too ancient to exist, too sacred to comprehend.
The waterfalls, which had been still until now, began to rise upward as if gravity itself had been denied. The sky spiraled into black vortices. The roots of trees lifted from the ground like pleading arms from the underworld.
The valley was collapsing under the weight of its guardian.
And then came the roar.
It wasn't sound.
It was cataclysm.
A vibration that split stone, that made the heavens quake, that bent reality into pure panic.
"You knew this would happen?!"
Shaeleg's voice now sounded like the ruin of the world itself.
And even before this formless fury, Silas only shrugged.
Like a man accepting rain he had long expected.
"I figured as much."
He didn't try to lie.
Didn't try to dodge it.
Because the truth… was already before them all.
Something had changed. Something impossible to ignore.
And Shaeleg… could not understand how the situation had been led to this.
Silas tilted his head slightly, lips curved into a smile that was part irony, part reverence.
"My dear… I know your eyes are sharper than the claws of time. They always have been. Able to see the peculiarities of the world long before any of us even sensed the danger. I'm honestly surprised you're surprised by this."
His tone softened.
"See, in the last fifty years… though my strength hasn't grown, these blind eyes"—he tapped lightly at the bandage covering his face—"have learned to see far deeper than they appear."
The words hung in the air.
Even Rezon, brash and taunting by nature, seemed bewildered, glancing sideways at Shaeleg like a wild animal facing something his instincts recognized but his mind refused to accept.
And then, Glenn came back to himself.
His body, which had felt like it was being pierced by millions of needles, loosened with a silent snap. He gasped. The first breath felt like it came from a place where the air was made of pure freedom. The pressure around him eased, as if the world itself had taken a few steps back.
But things only grew stranger.
Because, in a surreal turn, gentle words came from Shaeleg's mouth—breaking the sepulchral silence with an almost maternal sweetness:
"Come. I'll take you to him."
And then the impossible happened.
The Mother of the Valley's aura shifted.
Not in an explosion, nor in an uncontrolled burst of power.
It was graceful—like the entire world had chosen, in unison, to bow to her.
The light around them lost its bearings. Colors vibrated in layered hues. The trees seemed to turn without moving, while birds frozen in the air began to move again—but in improbable directions, bending space to her will.
Glenn felt the universe compress.
Like a colossal spring compressed beyond its limits, kilometers of terrain, forests, rocks, and heights condensed into just a few centimeters before them.
The ground trembled lightly—but not from impact. From density.
Reality folded with grace.
They had not been "transported."
They slid between layers of existence, diving fold upon fold, as though the very fabric of the world was being gently rearranged to accommodate Shaeleg's will.
And suddenly… they were there.
Somewhere in the upper mountains.
But without portals, without dimensional rifts, without prana spiders gnawing at the fabric of the world. There was no scream of space being torn, no familiar sound of glass shattering.
There was only… harmony.
The air here was thin and clean, a deep blue like celestial eyes.
The breeze carried the scent of wet moss, crystal, and mist.
And the sound of water trickling through tiny spring veins filled everything with an almost incorruptible serenity.
Glenn was in shock.
His mind—so accustomed to the controlled brutality of spatial magic, the fractures, the anchor points, the precise calculation of energy flow—simply short-circuited.
This was not merely magic. This was a forgotten language between worlds.
It was as if Shaeleg's magic wasn't used to tear space apart, but to persuade it. She bent it as though it were warm fabric in the hands of a goddess.
It took Glenn a while before he could move.
His eyes still searched for the "transition point."
But there was none.
There had been no crossing.
They were here simply because Shaeleg wanted them here.
And that… was more terrifying than any brute force.
The place where they arrived was monumental.
At first glance, it seemed like a fragment of legend preserved by time—or by the will of something greater.
The sky here was clearer, purer. The air carried a subtle electricity, as if the clouds whispered prophecies long forgotten. The ground beneath their feet felt solid, yet floating.
The group stood at the center of eight floating islands, arranged with divine symmetry around a massive circular abyss in the middle of the open sky.
But this was no ordinary chasm. From its depths, a golden light rose like an eternal flame turned upside down—a glow so intense and vivid it made it seem as though the sun itself was buried deep below, struggling to reach the sky again.
The island beneath their feet was so beautiful it bordered on the surreal.
Instead of green grass, there was an indigo-blue turf, vivid and shimmering—not like paint, but like a liquid mirror reflecting the heavens. It swayed gently in the wind, like living silk… as if each blade moved in sync with the heartbeat of the world.
Glenn knelt and touched it. It was cold. But alive.
For a moment, he thought that blue was the natural landscape.
He was wrong.
Seconds after their arrival, the blue began to shift—not like grass swaying, but as though it were peeling away from the soil. The blue turf started to withdraw.
It slid in threads and waves toward the center of the abyss, as if drawn by some ancient force dwelling below.
As it retracted, it revealed ordinary, green, natural grass beneath—as though the very landscape had been a mask.
Glenn instinctively took a step back.
"What is…?"
But he didn't finish.
A muffled sound—deep, like a wall of wind being torn apart—echoed.
The air vibrated.
The abyss pulsed.
And then…
A colossal head began to emerge from the depths.
First, the outlines. A curved beak, like a black blade forged in ages before time itself.
Then, gray eyes—worn, yet unfathomably alive.
And finally… the feathers.
Blue.
As blue as the sky.
As immense as mountains.
The creature wasn't coming out of the abyss. It was the abyss.
It was part of it.
Glenn stepped back again, craning his neck, trying to take in the creature's full size. And when the light fully bathed the being's body, the truth became clear:
It was a blue macaw.
But not just any.
It was a titan. A living entity. An inconceivable pillar.
Its eyes were veiled in an opaque gray, betraying the passage of countless centuries. But its plumage… still gleamed as if in the prime of youth.
And then Glenn understood.
The "blue turf" covering the island was its wings. The creature had been lying there the whole time, resting with its wings stretched across all eight islands like a celestial mantle.
The silence was broken by the sound of bodies touching the ground.
Silas knelt.
Shaeleg bowed deeply, her forehead nearly to the grass.
Rezon bent low, curling in respect.
The Sleipnirs lowered their heads in absolute reverence.
Only Glenn remained standing.
Not out of arrogance.
But because he didn't know what to do.
He didn't understand.
His knees faltered.
His mind tried to resist the collapse.
But then…
The voice came.
Not an ordinary voice.
The sound of volcanoes whispering before eruption.
Of planets aligning in silence.
Of a forgotten force speaking through time.
It did not shout.
It simply was.
And then everything went dark.
Glenn fell face-first to the ground.
His consciousness was ripped away so violently that not even the instinct to react had time to surface.
Only the void.
His body had shut down for its own safety.