Sky Emperor did not like being summoned.
He did not say so at first. The Jade Dragon almost never said what he disliked directly when speaking to his siblings. That was part of why the others found him so irritating. He preferred distance, ceremony, layers of courtesy laid over judgement so old it had hardened into instinct. But the moment he descended into the Dry Sea, it showed in the stiffness of his coils, in the way his antlered head lifted ever so slightly above the dead horizon as if the whole ninth floor smelled faintly of a problem he had tolerated for too long.
The Dry Sea stretched beneath him in all directions, a desert so vast it made ordinary scale feel dishonest. Its sand was neither yellow nor white nor red, but the grey colored of ash, as if the place was all the ash from every incense ever burnt at a graveyard concentrated into a location. It moved when there was no wind. It whispered when no one stepped on it. And if one stared too long into its distance, one could begin to see figures walking there—versions of oneself lagging behind, or striding ahead, or drifting along a parallel line through time that had not yet happened and perhaps never would.
Most minds could not bear long in the Dry Sea. That was one of the reasons Ōmukade liked it.
She waited for Sky Emperor at the edge of a ruined basin whose walls had long ago collapsed into the sand. It was difficult to look at her all at once. She was a centipede only in the way storms were weather or kingdoms were villages. Her body wound across the horizon in loops and broken arcs, each segment larger than fortresses, each leg thick as towers and rooted into the earth with the certainty of old curses. Half her vast shell had rotted away in places, hanging in blackened strips like peeled bark, and through the gaping cavities of her decaying body new centipedes could be seen moving inside her, blind and pale and hungry. They fed on her flesh even as she lived, and she endured them with the serenity of a thing that embodied stagnation so completely that consumption and preservation had ceased to be opposites.
Sky Emperor coiled above the basin without quite touching the ground.
Ōmukade raised the front portion of her body a little, enough to be considered greeting.
"You came."
Sky Emperor's long whiskers shifted once in the dry wind. "Thou didst call. I judged the matter likely irritating enough that it would not cease until answered."
Ōmukade's laugh was a slow grinding sound, like ancient stone dragged under the sea.
"You're in a mood."
"And thou art a mountain of rot with opinions. Let us both survive this conversation."
That was as close to annoyance as the eldest pillar ever allowed himself when speaking to family.
Ōmukade did not seem offended. If anything, his irritation pleased her. It meant she had interrupted something more important, which in turn meant what she had to say would be heard with the weight it deserved.
"Since you unlocked Celestial Skeletal for the humans," she said, "I want to release the Night Kings."
For the first time since arriving, Sky Emperor's eyes sharpened.
He descended a little lower through the dead air of the Dry Sea, enough that his scales caught the ashen light and threw ghostly reflections over the sand. He was beautiful in the way avalanches were beautiful—serpentine, antlered, crowned in cloud and storm, too vast to deny and too old to argue with.
"The Night Kings," he repeated, this time with his upper mouth, "are not puppies to be let out at thy leisure."
"No," said Ōmukade. "But they had the same right to inherit the world as the normal test subjects. Which is exactly why now is a good time."
The new centipedes inside her open wounds writhed and fed. One dropped from a cavity in her side, landed in the sand below, and immediately burrowed in.
"The humans have reached the lower cap," she went on. "They have seen your face. They have been given Celestial Skeletal. You pushed the age forward. Let me move my own pieces."
Sky Emperor said nothing for several breaths. The Dry Sea around them remained still, though far away one of those impossible time-ghosts crossed a dune ridge wearing a face that might have been his and might have belonged to someone not yet born.
At last he said, "One."
Ōmukade's countless legs stilled.
"One Night King," Sky Emperor said. "No more. Not this year."
"You're stingy."
"I am keeping the board from toppling into nonsense."
She considered that. The rot in her huge body shifted. Somewhere deep inside her, smaller mandibles clicked. Then she inclined her head.
"Agreed."
Sky Emperor did not move from where he hovered, but the atmosphere around him eased by a degree. Not kindness. Permission.
Ōmukade reached one colossal leg toward the open waste of the Dry Sea.
At the point where her hooked limb touched the air, reality unfolded. As if some piece of hidden space had been folded too tightly for too long and now finally opened under her command, a hole of wrongness spread in the desert—oval, vertical, black at the center and rimmed with geometry too fine and too ancient to belong to any human science. The sand around it trembled, though no grain fell in.
Something moved within.
Then Kdiê came out. (pronounced Ker-D-Aye)
At first there was only shape. A silhouette against the void, vaguely humanoid and far too large. Then she stepped fully into the Dry Sea and the world had to admit what it was seeing.
She stood four meters tall and broad with the swollen, famine-soft body of something that had once been human only to mock the idea forever after. Her breasts sagged almost a meter each, obscene with age and gravity, hanging against a pot belly wrapped only in a ragged loincloth. Long hair, stiffened and clotted with a strange resinous sap, hung around her like dead vines lacquered in grave oils. Two fangs jutted upward from her lower jaw, thick and yellowed, while above them her face carried three eyes, each as wide as a car's headlight and glowing from within with a blood-red radiance. Around her neck hung a necklace of skulls so old they had yellowed into ivory and cracked with time. At her side rested a mirror unlike any mere object had a right to be.
The relic was strapped as if it were a sword. Its frame was rich with old carvings and metal darkened by ages of handling, regal in a way that made crowns seem like trinkets. Even idle, it exuded a pressure that made the Dry Sea's false future-shadows recoil at the edge of sight. It was not only powerful. It was hungry in a still, ceremonial way, the kind of hunger old gods sometimes wore to formal occasions.
Kdiê inhaled.
The first breath she took outside the spatial hole sounded like a furnace drawing air.
She looked at Ōmukade. Then at Sky Emperor. Then, in a voice deep and roughened by long confinement, said, "I had hoped for a feast."
"You'll make do," said Sky Emperor.
Kdiê bared all three rows of teeth in what might have been amusement and might have been threat.
Ōmukade spoke before the moment stretched.
"Go," she said. "The higher floors are waking. Your kind had reached the lower cap once more. Feed if you must. Well, that was redundant. Of course you need to feed on their life force to lengthen your own as a Night King. So... try to be subtle."
Kdiê rolled one of her shoulders, and the skull necklace clicked against itself like loose teeth.
"I was never loud," she said.
Sky Emperor actually laughed once at that.
Then Kdiê turned and began walking.
Each step took her farther than a man could run in minutes. The Dry Sea bent under her path, and where her shadow crossed the time-ghosts they blurred and vanished like frightened fish in dark water.
Her destination was floor three.
Kdiê came upon the Greencap Bunnies' kingdom at dusk.
The forest there still held the charm of a storybook if one looked from far enough away: bright canopies, earthen roads, lantern-lit watchtowers, wagons, tents, and fields. But the Greencaps were not soft things in the way surface humans imagined rabbits to be. They were knights, riders, trappers, builders, scouts. They had kings and heraldry and cavalry lines that could run down lesser armies. They had blood on their lances and hard years in their eyes.
It meant nothing to Kdiê.
She found the king's encampment easily.
She stood in the treeline looking over the ring of tents, supply fires, and grazing war-steeds beyond, and she could taste command in the air. Kings always smelled of concentrated fear and concentrated expectation. It drew predators naturally.
Then she walked forward.
The first sentries died too fast to warn properly. One was crushed beneath a single backhand that caved his chest in. Another had enough time to scream once before Kdiê picked him up and bit through his throat. A third tried to sound a horn and found one of the skulls from her necklace driven through his face like a thrown stone.
Then the Greencap camp woke.
Shouts. Bells. Mounted riders half-armored and fully desperate.
The king's personal cavalry came at her first, and to their credit they did not hesitate. They were brave in the way doomed men often are when the alternative is to live knowing they failed at the wrong time. Lances lowered, steeds charging, banners snapping in the wind.
Kdiê let them come.
Then she drew the mirror. The relic's polished face reflected no light, no image, but somehow, a sound. A scream of agony so ancient it felt like it predated reality itself.
She turned it toward the earth and spun it three times in her hand.
Darkness fell.
Something lower and older than the night. A pressure-dark that swallowed the edges of the camp. The ground shook, wind roared from no direction and every direction. Rubble ran across the earth as if stones had learned fear and were trying to flee. The cavalry charge broke, not from cowardice, but from the world itself becoming briefly incompatible with motion.
When the spell ended, silence followed.
Then the first horse toppled.
It struck the ground with the dead finality of carved marble.
The rider fell with it, already stone.
One by one, every Greencap knight and every war-steed in the charge revealed itself the same way: caught mid-motion, turned utterly into stone where they had been. Lances became stone, mane turned to rock. Eyes, teeth, armor-straps, all of it were now just pebbles. A whole cavalry line immortalized in terror and force, transformed into a field of statues before the king's own tent.
The camp did not scream, for what noise could fit such a sight?
Kdiê planted the mirror beside herself and looked over the kingdom's gathered warriors with all three red eyes glowing brighter now that blood scent and fear had mixed in the air.
"I am thy empress now," she announced.
Her voice rolled through the camp like a funeral drum.
"The armies of the Greencap shall go forth and seek the Nine Secrets for me."
No one moved.
The king had been cornered by her skills and now stood white-furred and shaking in the shadow of his own tent, alive only because Kdiê had chosen him as leverage instead of supper.
"If ye disobey," she said, "I shall begin with thy king."
That worked. Not because the Greencaps loved submission, but because they understood extortion with a clarity that only old peoples trapped beside stronger monsters ever truly develop.
When the first scouting parties finally rode out under the weight of her demand, Kdiê snorted softly to herself and looked over the petrified cavalry line with contempt so old it had become almost domestic.
"If I had not spent so long in that hole," she muttered, "I would not need to blackmail rabbits."
Her hand touched the mirror's frame.
"I would have gone for my pretty spiders first."
There was genuine longing in that.
The body snatcher arachnids were hers in some old or twisted way. Creations, perhaps. Or favorite predators shaped by the same line of "human" corruption that had birthed the Night Kings and cà rồng alike. But she was weakened still, drained by confinement and long starvation. To hunt them down and reclaim their strength by force would take more levels than she currently had.
So blackmail it was.
A lesser tool, true. An ugly one, absolutely. But effective nonetheless.
That was when cà rồng appeared.
He did not enter the camp from the road or tree line. He simply resolved into sight from the dark between two stone cavalry statues, hovering with that same grotesque not-quite-human bearing Alex had once seen in the Croak Wood. He held his own ears with his hands, his feet bent wrong so his big toe stuffed his own nostrils, his bloodshot eyes alight with pleasure at the sight before him.
"Well," he said, grinning up at Kdiê with tusks long as ripe bananas, "you always did know how to make an entrance."
Kdiê looked down at him with the calm of a queen acknowledging a jackal that had proved useful before.
"What do you want?"
Cà rồng's grin widened.
"I found a copy of dǒu."
That made even Kdiê's three eyes sharpen.
The ever-shifting human answers carved against the dungeon itself: The Nine Secrets. Things older and more dangerous than most civilizations understood. A copy of one was no small bait.
"And," cà rồng added, "I would like to work with you."
He spread his arms slightly, theatrical and sincere all at once.
"The first Night King to reawaken. The first among the 'human' to reclaim this earth, as it's our right as its defenders."
Kdiê's mouth curled slowly around another near-smile.
She liked the title.
Defender of the world.