The moment the submarine's nose touched the shimmering edge of the current, the world dissolved into a symphony of controlled chaos.
The first thing to hit them was the sound—a deep, resonant hum that vibrated up through the deck plates and into their teeth. It was the sound of the sky itself singing, a low, chord that spoke of ancient serpents and celestial pathways. Then, the light flooded the viewport, not as a mere visual, but as a physical pressure. Ribbons of emerald, sapphire, and violet swirled outside, so vibrant they seemed to dye the very air inside the sub, casting everyone in a shifting, dreamlike glow.
"Hold onto your tails!" Galit barked, his hands a blur on the controls. The sub surged forward, caught in the current's heart like a leaf in a hurricane. The ride was impossibly smooth, a silent, gliding acceleration that pressed them back into their seats.
For about ten seconds.
"IS THAT A GIANT SPIDER MADE OF CLOUDS?!" Atlas roared, pointing a clawed finger at the viewport.
Ahead, spanning the width of the brilliant orange band of current they were riding, a vast, intricate web of gossamer-thin clouds shimmered. And skittering across it were creatures with too many legs, their bodies shifting color to match the current, their eyes like polished jet.
"Prism-Weavers!" Vesta yelled, clutching her keyboard which had, predictably, transformed into a set of panic-stricken maracas. "They spin Gossamer Clouds to trap vessels! It's from the legend! Bobbi-Bobbi's final gift was almost ruined by—"
"Less singing, more not-dying!" Jannali shouted back, already slamming a new cartridge into her boomerang. "Those things look hungrier than a shark in a trout farm!"
The sub shuddered as the first strands of cloud-web slapped against the hull with a sound like wet silk. The view began to fog over, the brilliant colors outside blurring into a sticky, pearlescent white.
"Jelly!" Marya's voice cut through the panic, calm but firm. "The viewport. Now."
"B-Bloop?" Jelly quivered, his form wobbling between a puddle and a question mark.
"Make yourself into a wiper. A big, sticky, clearing-the-view wiper."
Comprehension dawned on Jelly's simple face. "Bouncy-clean!" With a determined squeak, he launched himself at the main viewport, flattening his gelatinous body against the reinforced glass and sliding back and forth with frantic, squeaking sweeps, clearing a smeary but vital arc of visibility.
"Brilliant," Galit muttered, wrestling with the steering. "Now I'm piloting a sub with a jiggling windscreen wiper."
He banked hard, the sub groaning in protest as he veered from the amber current into a narrow stream of indigo. The sudden shift in G-forces sent everyone lurching. Eliane let out a small yelp, and a tiny, white wing and a flicker of halo-flame burst from her back for a split second before she suppressed them with a gasp, her face flushed.
"Sorry!" Galit called out, not sounding sorry at all. "The current's splitting! The Chime Dial's going berserk!"
The dial's projected arrow was spinning wildly, unsure which path to follow. The indigo stream they were in was choked with floating, crystalline shards that clinked against the hull like a thousand wind chimes.
"Star-Stealer birds!" Jannali warned, spotting sleek, iridescent shapes diving through the crystal field towards them. "They'll pluck your eyes out as soon as look at ya!"
One of the birds, its beak like a sharpened sapphire, dove straight for the viewport. Jelly, in his wiper-form, saw it coming and let out a high-pitched shriek, morphing into a perfect, terrified copy of the bird an instant before impact. The real Star-Stealer pulled up in confusion, colliding with its doppelgänger in a puff of blue mist and a frustrated squawk.
"Did he just… mimic it?" Atlas asked, impressed despite himself.
Marya allowed a small, tight smirk. "Apparently."
Their reprieve was short-lived. A massive shadow fell over them. A Sky Shark, its hide the color of a storm cloud and as large as their sub, glided into the current alongside them, its one dead eye fixed on the vessel with casual menace.
"Right," Galit said, his voice tight. "Time to change the channel." He slammed the thrusters, and the submarine shot out of the indigo stream and into a raging river of pure, blinding crimson. The ride instantly turned violent, the sub bucking and rattling as if it were being shaken by a giant.
Unsecured tools and Vesta's spare hair ribbons flew through the air. Eliane, thinking fast, began expertly catching stray kitchen knives that had leaped from their block. Atlas braced himself in a doorway, his fur standing on end, blue Electro sparking uncontrollably from his fingertips and shorting out a nearby console in a puff of smoke.
"Hey! My tactical slate!" Galit complained.
"Your tactical slate can get stuffed! I'm trying not to turn this can into a lightning rod!" Atlas shot back.
Through it all, from the rear of the sub, a low, rhythmic snore continued, utterly unperturbed. Aokiji had somehow remained in his reclined seat, blindfolded, a small pile of frost gently forming on his shoulder from a nearby vent he'd subtly iced over.
The chaos peaked as they hit a junction where all the colors of the current collided in a roaring, psychedelic whirlpool. The sub spun, the world outside a dizzying kaleidoscope. For a moment, they were weightless. Jelly, having reformed into a blob, floated serenely in the center of the cabin, giggling. "Bloop-woo!"
And then, as suddenly as it began, it was over.
The sub was spat out of the Rainbow Current like a pit from a cherry. The deafening hum ceased, the violent shaking stopped, and they were once again floating listlessly in the silent, uniform white of the White-White Sea. The only sound was the frantic panting of the crew and the soft, persistent snoring from the back.
Everyone was draped over consoles, slumped in seats, or, in Jelly's case, slowly sliding down a wall into a puddle. They were bruised, breathless, and wide-eyed.
Vesta, her rainbow hair a magnificent disaster, was the first to speak, pointing a trembling finger at the now-calm Chime Dial. Its arrow pointed steadily into the white. "Okay," she wheezed, a giddy, hysterical laugh bubbling up. "So, according to that... we go... that way."
A collective groan filled the sub. In his seat, Aokiji shifted, mumbled something about "annoying birds," and settled back into a deeper sleep.
*****
The air in the secluded living quarters was thick with the scent of old stone and the faint, sweet smell of the polishing wax Jane used on the ironwood trim. Aurélie ran a finger along the frame of the mysterious locked door they'd been led to, her touch light as a moth's wing. "The grain is wrong," she murmured, her steel-grey eyes narrowed. "It flows against the mountain's heart. This was added later."
"Like, way to state the obvious, Miss 'I-see-with-my-fingertips'," Bianca chirped, already on her knees, a sonic screwdriver whirring in her hand as she examined the lock. "But the mechanism is, wow, it's like… ancient and new at the same time. Super weird. It's singing a song I've never heard." Her multitool holster, drape around her waist, was open, an array of curious implements spilling out.
Jane watched them, a dust cloth held forgotten in her hand. Her calm, earthy eyes were fixed on the door, her mind cross-referencing every pipe, every wire, every structural beam she'd ever cleaned behind. This door was a lie in the Monastery's truthful stone, and it made her deeply uneasy.
Then the world shuddered.
It wasn't a violent quake, but a deep, single pulse, as if a great heart had beaten once beneath the stone. The harmonic hum of the monastery's crystals dipped into a profound, worrying silence. Dust, ancient and fine, sifted down from the ceiling, glinting in the soft light.
"Whoa! Okay, that was not me!" Bianca yelped, scrambling back from the door.
Aurélie's hand went to the hilt of Anathema at her hip, her posture coiling into a fighter's stance. But before the black blade could clear its sheath, the air in front of her and Bianca began to bend.
It was like watching ink swirl in water, if the ink were made of night sky and dying stars. A form gathered itself from the shadows and the very substance of the air—a towering, elegant humanoid whose body was a map of swirling nebula dust and gentle void. Her silhouette was traced by the graceful, flowing patterns of a moth's wings, and her robe shimmered with the captured light of nascent suns. Her compound eyes held a glimmer of a thousand different realities.
Bianca stared, her jaw slack, a half-formed "like…" dying on her lips. Aurélie stood frozen, not in fear, but in a kind of stunned reverence, her poet's soul recognizing a beauty so absolute it bordered on terror.
From behind them, there was a soft, sharp gasp. Jane, the custodian, the unseen observer, took one look at the entity and her knees gave way. She dropped to the floor, the dust cloth falling from her nerveless fingers. Her face, usually so neutral, was a canvas of shock and a dawning, impossible recognition. "The Silkmoth…" she breathed, the words a prayer she'd only ever seen carved in forgotten corners. "The Great Weaver…"
Ibu's gaze, vast and compassionate, settled on Aurélie and Bianca. Her voice was not a sound, but a resonance that filled the space inside their skulls, gentle and immense as the tide.
The tapestry is tangled, the voice echoed, a statement of cosmic fact. We must reweave.
She moved, a motion like constellations turning. She reached out with hands woven from cosmic strings and placed one upon Aurélie's cheek, and the other upon Bianca's.
Time stopped.
The motes of dust hung in the air, frozen. Jane was a statue of awe on her knees. The world ceased its turning.
For Aurélie, the touch was not cold, but cool, like the smooth surface of a river stone in the deep woods. And with it came the past, rushing up like a long-submerged memory breaking the surface of a still pond.
She was a child, hiding in the dojo's weapon cupboard, the smell of oiled wood and iron thick in her nose. She was scribbling, not calligraphy drills, but clumsy, heartfelt words on a scrap of rice paper. A poem about the way the sun caught the dew on a spiderweb. Her father's voice, stern and disappointed, echoed from the main hall. "This fanciful nonsense has no place in a warrior's house." The hot shame of tears welling in her eyes, the desperate, secret conviction that the web was more beautiful than any sword stroke. The first time she understood that the thing that made her heart feel most alive was something she would have to hide.
The memory was a shard of glass, sharp and defining. It was the origin of the secret notebook she carried, the source of the shame she attached to her own art.
It was the scent of old pine and cold stone from the Dojo of the Cursed Bladesmiths. The air tasted of solemnity. Before her, her mother knelt, her own face a mask of serene strength, but her knuckles were white where they gripped the sheathed katana.
"This is Anathema," her mother's voice echoed, a ghost in the chamber of her mind. "Its name means to be cursed by the gods. Our ancestor, in his pride, sought to forge a blade that could sever fate itself. He did not quench it in water, but in the heart of a captured Tenjin—a sky spirit. Its divine wrath became the steel's soul."
Aurélie, in her memory, was sixteen. The weight of the name Nakano Takeko—the warrior from a lost land who chose a clean death over dishonor—was already a cloak on her shoulders. But this was heavier.
"It is our shame and our pride, Aurélie. It does not grant power; it tests it. It will listen to your spirit, but on moonless nights, it will whisper your every failure back to you. To wield it is to accept a legacy of defiance. Will you bear this weight?"
Her younger self's hand reached out. The moment her fingers touched the black lacquer of the scabbard, a jolt, like static from a storm cloud, raced up her arm. A cold presence unfolded in her mind, ancient and furious. It was not evil, but it was wrath given form. She felt its hunger to cut, to unravel, to defy everything. In that moment, she felt infinitesimally small.
"I will be the hand that guides your edge," her younger voice whispered, a fragile vow in the silent dojo. "I will wield this curse for protection. Not for ruin."
The memory shattered, replaced by a sharper, more visceral one. The acrid smell of gunpowder and the coppery tang of blood. A mission on a barren rock of an island had gone wrong. Her Consortium comrades were falling. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a frantic drumbeat of failure. Her eyes locked on a strange, spiral-patterned fruit in an enemy cache. A choice: let them take it, or deny them.
The flesh was like chewing on dust and rotten flowers, a taste that haunted her dreams. Then, the pain. It was not a breaking, but a reforging. Her bones groaned, shifting under her skin. A chittering, clicking chorus, a thousand voices, erupted inside her skull. Her vision splintered into a thousand fractured images—compound eyes. The world became a mosaic of panic.
She saw, through that fractured lens, the horrified faces of her saved teammates. She had protected them, but the sound that ripped from her throat was not a cry of victory. It was a sonic shriek that tore the very air, a wave of force that shattered the surrounding stone. She had become the monster, the living embodiment of the plague her clan's blade was always accused of harboring.
Aurélie's hand, in the present, instinctively went to the small, worn leather notebook tucked in her waistband. This was her anchor. The memory of her first poem, scrawled with a trembling hand after that horrific transformation. The words were clumsy, a child's attempt to capture the moon on water. But as she stared at the inadequate verse, a single locust, no bigger than her thumbnail, had emerged from her shadow.
It did not devour or destroy. It picked its way across the page with an almost reverent care, its delicate feet tracing the ink strokes. Then, it began to nibble gently at the corner of the paper, consuming the words of her self-doubt. A single, hot tear had escaped her then, smudging the ink. It was not a punishment, but a strange, terrible absolution. A silent promise between the woman and the curse she carried.
Aurélie Nakano Takeko stood, a woman forged in divine wrath and biblical plague, her soul a battlefield where a cursed blade whispered and a swarm chittered, forever holding onto the fragile, defiant hope of writing one perfect poem.
For Bianca, the touch was a sudden, vibrant warmth, like the heart of a perfectly tuned engine. And her mind, always racing three steps ahead, was violently wrenched backward.
The memory began with the cold. Not just any cold, but the deep, gnawing chill of Frigus Island, a place in the North Blue where the wind didn't whistle—it screamed. She was small again, huddled in the familiar clutter of her father's workshop, the air thick with the smell of stew and engine grease. The world outside was a howling white, but in here, it was safe. The whole town was safe, because of the Heart of the Mountain.
Thump-thump-thump.
The great machine's rhythm was the island's true pulse. She could feel it through the soles of her worn boots, a vibration that traveled up her spine and into her dreams. She'd press her ear to the warm copper pipes, convinced the ancient relic was talking to her. Her father, his face smudged and kind, would just smile. "It's just steam and pressure, little spark," he'd say. But she knew better. It had a soul.
Then came the day the Heart screamed.
A deep, grinding shudder rocked the mountain. The steady thump-thump-thump stuttered, choked, and twisted into a shrieking, metallic wail. The lights guttered. Frost, cruel and fast, began to bloom on the inside of the windows.
Panic. Her father and the other engineers scrambled, their shouts swallowed by the machine's death cries. Then the men in white arrived. World Government. Their leader, a man with eyes the color of a dead fish, surveyed the chaos without a flicker of feeling. "The technology is a hazard," his voice cut through the noise, clean and cold. "The island is to be evacuated. The device will be confiscated for the good of the world."
Confiscated. The word meant they were going to cut out the island's heart and leave its body to freeze.
Her own heart hammered against her ribs. She slipped away, down into the roaring, burning belly of the mountain. The heat was a physical blow. The air tasted of scorched metal and desperation. The main conduit was vibrating itself to pieces, glowing a terrifying orange. The adults saw a broken system. Bianca saw a living thing in its death throes.
Her small hands, already calloused, knew what to do. She didn't think. She listened. She heaved a hydrospanner twice her weight, her arms screaming in protest, and tapped a frantic rhythm on the seized valves—clank, clank, clank—a counter-beat to the machine's panic. She rerouted scalding steam, her fingers blistering, guided by an instinct deeper than knowledge. She was singing back to the Heart, a duet against the dying of the light.
With a final, shuddering WHUMP, the scream died. The violent shaking settled. A weak, thready, but steady thump… thump… thump returned. Warmth, tentative and beautiful, began to seep back into the stone.
Silence, heavy and absolute, fell over the chamber. She turned, chest heaving, to see the entire town staring at her. And the World Government man… he wasn't looking at the machine anymore. He was looking at her. His gaze wasn't grateful; it was the look a collector gives a rare insect he's just pinned to a board.
That night, her father held her, his tears hot on her forehead. "You were magnificent," he whispered, his voice cracking. "But you have to go, my spark. There's a place, a library called the Consortium. They'll keep you safe from men who see a miracle only as a tool."
The journey was a blur of secret seas and the weird, quiet hum of a submersible. Then, the world opened up. A petrified tree so vast it blotted out the sky, its hollowed trunk a city of glowing windows and whispered secrets. The Consortium. She stood on the deck, a small, grease-stained girl from a frozen rock, utterly lost.
"Are you the my roommate?"
The voice was quiet. A girl with long, raven hair like her father's stood there, a monstrously beautiful black sword sheathed on her back. She looked… untouchable.
Words, as always, burst out of Bianca in a nervous flood, her hands painting frantic pictures in the air. "Yeah! I'm, like, Bianca. This place is, like, insane! Your sword is… wow. It's, like, so dark it looks like a hole in the world! Does it, like, have a name?"
The girl's severe expression softened at the edges. "Eternal Night," she said. Then her eyes dropped to Bianca's overalls. "You've got… jam. Right there."
And just like that, the ghost of Frigus Island let go. Marya, with her quiet gravity, became her new anchor. In a world of overwhelming knowledge, Marya was a constant. When Bianca's racing mind and jittery hands frustrated the other scholars, a single look from Marya silenced them. When Bianca lost herself for days inside a broken Dial, she'd surface to find a sandwich and a cup of tea placed silently beside her. And in return, Bianca fixed everything—the loose strap on Marya's pack, the delicate mechanism of her mother's old music box. She filled the silence between them with a clattering, joyful noise, building a friendship not with grand speeches, but with the simple, unshakable language of being there.
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