Genetic Ascension

Iskaleth awoke to the sound of someone calling her name.

Her thoughts returned slowly, dragged up from darkness by a voice from someone she remembered being an insufferable bastard.

She blinked out of habit, though opening her eyes changed nothing about the darkness she had known since birth, and then the Fate in front of her sharpened into focus.

A huge head loomed over her, close enough that she could feel the weight of its existence crowding her senses. Iskaleth flinched backward before she could stop herself.

"Dry Mouth?" The enormous Serpentes recoiled as though she had struck him.

"Ah, you remember me, my love. My heart is overflowing with warmth and happiness. You know, ever since I saw you the first time, I've been waiting for another chance to admire your beauty."

Iskaleth's expression twisted into something between confusion, and then she settled on awkward disgust.

"Can I have some space, please?"

"Beauty, why must you wound me so?"

Iskaleth stopped as she was about to reply, deciding halfway through that it wasn't worth it.

Instead, Iskaleth turned her senses outward, and all her distracting thoughts died.

Everything around her felt enormous. Not merely physically large, but heavy, as though every structure carried so much accumulated weight that her Fate sight had to push through layers before she could make sense of what she was looking at.

Then she saw the city. Her eyes widened even though the gesture was meaningless.

Legendary. There was no mistaking it. The density of Fate, the way the city's existence seemed to anchor itself into the world around it, the sheer number of paths tied to its streets, walls, and structures, all of it carried a weight she had never encountered from any other settlement before.

Iskaleth searched her memories and failed to name even a single Legendary City in the entirety of the Skai Heaven's Demi-God Plane. Not one.

Powerful organizations had ancient cities, sacred capitals, ancestral worlds, but Legendary was something else entirely. Yet Sylas had one inside his body. Worse, judging by the lack of reverence surrounding it, he didn't even seem to care very much.

Her Fate sight shifted again and immediately caught on something stranger.

Yamero sat not far away, the Serpentes formed entirely from Runes focused on a book as though the rest of the world barely existed. He didn't glance toward her. But what was odd was that his Fate was what made Iskaleth's thoughts catch. It was broken and fragmented. Not damaged exactly, but split in ways she had never seen before, as though several incomplete possibilities had been stitched together and formed into a life.

She couldn't even properly identify what sort of Serpentes he was. There was no bloodline pattern she recognized or ancestral echo she could trace. He felt constructed, but that answer somehow seemed even more ridiculous than everything else she had seen so far.

Then she looked toward what she had assumed was a mountain.

Pain exploded through her eyes.

Iskaleth hissed and jerked her head away, blood immediately rolling down her cheeks.

For several seconds she couldn't even breathe properly, the pressure of what she had seen still stamped against her mind. Slowly, cautiously, she looked again, this time only allowing the faintest edge of her Fate sight to touch it.

The "mountain" shifted. A vast body lay coiled across the land, so enormous and dense with potential that its future looked less like a path and more like a storm swallowing everything around it.

Iskaleth's heart began to pound. The bloodline was ancient. No, ancient wasn't enough. It carried the kind of depth that made her feel as though generations of impossible ancestors were staring back through one body, and the future branching from it was so violent, so expansive, that even glancing at it made her eyes threaten to burst again.

Basilisk King.

The words echoed through her mind and her entire body trembled.

She understood then.

The realization settled slowly, but once it did, she wondered how she had missed it before.

The Basilisk King felt overwhelming because its past and future were both immense. Sylas, however, had never felt that way to her. Even when she looked at him, even when Fate around him became too complex to properly read, there hadn't been that same ancestral pressure. Sylas had no great forefather whose accomplishments had already carved a path for him.

His Karma was still alive.

It hadn't settled into some great story she could trace backward and forward because it was changing too quickly. Every time she thought she understood the direction of his Fate, he became something else before the reading could finish.

The Basilisk King's Karma was terrifying because she could see the scale of what it might become, and what it had once been. Sylas was terrifying because there was no final shape yet, nor any reference shape. He was still adding to himself, writing his future path himself.

Iskaleth's breath caught.

What would happen when it finally did?

When Sylas' Living Karma stopped changing because there was nothing left for it to become, when his story settled into whatever final shape the universe would remember him by, would she even be able to think his name without her eyes rupturing?

"—and then I told him that if he wanted the fang back, he should've been stronger enough to keep it in his mouth in the first place."

Dry Mouth's voice finally broke through her thoughts.

Iskaleth stared in his direction, having no idea how long he had been talking.

Yamero turned a page with a tail. "Drink."

Dry Mouth straightened immediately. "Right, right."

He slithered away with such speed that Iskaleth almost thought an enemy had appeared, then returned carrying an enormous bucket of lemonade, the pale nearly as large as his head. He carefully lowered it beside Yamero and stared at the Rune Serpentes for several seconds.

"Can you even drink that?" Dry Mouth wondered, looking at Yamero's distinct lack of a digestive system.

Yamero slowly looked up.

Dry Mouth shrank back. "Just curious."

Iskaleth's lip twitched.

Then her senses caught another familiar Fate nearby.

She turned.

Sarethvane lay tied into a pretzel.

His enormous Serpentes body had been folded over itself so many times that even Iskaleth needed several moments to understand where one coil ended and another began. His coffins had been stacked off to the side like confiscated toys, while Sarethvane himself radiated the sort of murderous humiliation that would have made most people flee the area. Clearly not anyone here, though.

Suddenly Iskaleth understood why one of the most arrogant bastards she had ever known was behaving like an obedient servant.

Her lip twitched again.

What exactly had she gotten herself into here?

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