Interlude 3.39: Sybil [Water Leviathan] (Patreon)

What would one do upon realizing the world they inhabited was nothing more than a game— designed by its creator to run its course and implode upon itself when the time arrived and the correct player entered the scene?

Most would collapse beneath the weight of such madness. That was precisely what Sybil faced when she came into contact with the horrors of the world she was inhabiting.

For a certain while, she wished she could forget it all and simply continue living her relatively normal life, to think of anything other than the horrifying path their lives were all heading toward. But… she couldn't. For a creature forged with Reflection as her primordial core, oblivion was an impossibility. She could not let go. The motionless depths of her internal sea would preserve every agonizing fracture in that same eternal clarity.

She had always been a bit different from her siblings. Even before all this— when they were just small hatchlings and not the apex predators they would become, these gigantic leviathans— they had always been special in some manner.

Before she knew the true nature of this world, Sybil simply thought fate itself was turning every tide in their favor. From the very beginning, when they hadn't even learned to crawl properly, it always felt like events edged in their favor just enough that they survived the brutal jungle rule this place followed. The myriad beasts that roamed the land— everything operated under the rule of hunt or be hunted.

And so, they learned to hunt. They fought to conquer the apex.

Of the five, Sybil was unique. They didn't know who had birthed them— for every creature had a mother, yet they seemingly had nothing when they hatched from those eggs. But fate… that ever-devious fate was always with them. Always ensuring they never suffered an injury severe enough to kill them. It didn't mean their lives were any less tumultuous— quite the opposite, as fate knew when to throw them into opportunities brimming with chaos, always feeding them the proper way to incentivize maximum gain.

And thus, they grew.

Sybil was slow in her physical growth, but she was the first to outgrow her mental, bestial instincts. By submerging herself into the mental tides of the beasts they brought down, she began to see beyond raw sinew. She learned to attune herself to the Dream Sea binding all consciousness. She learned their fears. She learned their places in the cycle. She understood her own. Their desires, deceits, pre -drives, and territorial wrath, every psychic resonance Reflected its likeness across her core.

At first, she just mimicked these impressions to discern the fatal vulnerabilities of predator and rival alike. But mimicry soon gave way to a profound self-awareness.

In that moment, she surpassed her siblings entirely.

They were still together in that time. Despite being so different from one another, despite being attuned to different concepts that sometimes clashed, they were in a way both strength and weakness to each other as they grew.

She loved them fiercely, and they answered with an devotion that transcended the unthinking fury of their kind. She served as their intellect, thus marshaling their colossal strength to bring down horrors far older than themselves. Their bond felt unyielding.

Inevitably, their hunting grounds grew too small.

Having grown vast enough to survey the lands with unclouded vision, they gazed beyond the canopies. For the first time, they beheld the sprawling civilizations beyond their territories.

And the myriad of Domains that seemed to sing to them each, like they had a broader destiny to fulfill.

At first, they refused to answer the call, for the bond between them was too strong to be severed so easily. But the allure of dominion proved an intoxicating poison. It began when the first of them yielded, crossing the threshold of his aligned domain. The moment his claws sank into that forest of burning divine flames, his might swelled to monstrous proportions, becoming a living god of that singular territory, so long as it never strayed much beyond the boundary.

And there were other creatures within said domain. That was the moment the harmony between them shattered. They had always been destined to part this way, the power itself was calling to them.

Sybil tried her best to stop the separation. She wove reason and memory to stay their departure, but to minds governed by ascending might, what could possibly outweigh the song of godhood?

It was then that the first true seeds of suspicion took root in her soul.

She had observed the different races across the lands, watching their lives play out from the safe periphery of their dreams. She had listened to their bards chant epic sagas of the chosen, those heroes for whom destiny bent the knee, whose paths were cleared by unseen design.

…similar to how it all started.

However heroic it may have seemed, she couldn't help but question… why was she chosen? What even was her purpose? The sagas always had villains that heroes needed to surpass, but they never saw any such things.

Suspicion was her nature; fortune’s unnatural benevolence only sharpened it. But in those days, she was powerless to arrest the tide. She could only mourn the severed bond and the moment they had shared together.

Hah… it was fun while it lasted. They might have forgotten, as she had expected, with their primitive instincts and limited worldview— but Sybil never forgot. The Reflections in her deep sea forbade oblivion.

For ages, she considered the Reflection a curse. Why had she been forged so dissonant from the others? The answer eluded her until she grew weary of lingering on the periphery and thus she chose to plunge into her own abyss.

The world that called for her was never within the world— but it resided in the infinite currents within. The Dream Sea. It had always called for her, but she never answered its calls truthfully. But… for the first time, she did. Leaping from the fog-shrouded island into the sea of dreams, she descended toward the depths calling for her.

The deeper she sank, the greater the resonance sang through her spirit, until the barrier fractured, and she ascended into the threshold the civilizations revered as the Golden Core.

It was a stage where she truly felt the rush of power. The sheer expansion of her cognition in real time, the way her body broke and molded itself into something new and far more powerful. The rush itself was unlike anything she had experienced before. Such raw power… and with it came a single thought: what couldn't she do with it all at her fingertips?

Though her siblings were rather limited to their domains to fully utilize their powers, the Dream Sea existed everywhere. She wasn't limited as they were— but the limit she had was rather different.

She could not access the Dream Sea with her physical body. So she had to hide it someplace secure to work from there. But the abilities she had more than made up for it.

Through the Dream Sea, she could suggest, unravel, possess, and reshape almost any mortal mind. The mightier the spirit, the firmer its defenses, yet Sybil had no need for crude siegecraft. She understood the fragile sovereign seated upon the throne of the skull, the fickle ego that commanded the limbs of kings and conquerors. The Dream Sea cast such pristine, unvarnished reflections of every mortal ‘dreamscape’ that violence became obsolete.

She could simply understand them, manipulate them, and steer events in a way that left no claw marks on anything.

She was ecstatic.

She began using it to its full utilization. She was never seeking something akin to domination. The local civilizations were growing as well— they had powerful beings of their own— so she kept a diplomatic relationship.

Instead of attempting to consume, she… assisted them with their own woes. She allowed safe passage through the dangerous Dream Sea to anyone attuned to Reflection like herself— for while it held no creatures or entities that could threaten them, the sea itself was a ravenous beast that would inflict a fate worse than death if not charted correctly. She had a soft spot for anyone like her. She even guided those who, in turn, became great leaders.

Not just that, when her siblings, drunk on their newfound powers, attacked the civilizations in order to expand their own domains and even clashed with each other, she in turn helped those people find safety from her own siblings' wrath.

Before she knew it, they had begun worshipping her as some kind of guardian entity. She was called the Lady of Deep Waters, the Dream Goddess, Divine Fragment of the Great One— though some opted for the simpler term of Water Leviathan.

But one of her own students, who was leading the Kovraths at the time, once came up with a proper name for someone like her: Sybil. That was the term for someone like her in the ancient texts they had read. And it suited her as a name. She liked that name.

When the situation and her role within it all solidified, she fully delved into the origins of it all. The world was created by a being called "The Divine Dragon." The true origins were rather vague. Records stated that one day she materialized everything within because she was lonely and had no progeny— so they all became her children, whom she could watch over from the sky as they lived their own lives. Some claimed they came from a ruined world, when the Divine Dragon heard their plea and offered them a new place to stay. As always, there had been debates regarding their origins.

And Sybil couldn't deny there was a certain charm to it all. She loved solving mysteries in itself— that was her favorite pastime. After staying for so long with everyone, she began to love this place. It was her home. And what else would she want but to see it prosper?

So she made it her mission. First was to get through to her siblings, to stop them from wreaking havoc, to get their own domains under control, and to prevent them from spilling out. It started with the Abyss Domain, with the Abyss Leviathan, who still had no name like she did and preferred it that way. He was closest to her, with his innate drive for solving mysteries, though not quite similar, the approach was still rather primal. She knew she could reach out to him, for they still shared that deeper bond.

She thus showed him how his actions had been inflicting suffering upon the people within his domain, the Kovraths, how much better it would be if they stopped this ongoing war of domain expansion. What would they achieve? More power? They were already at the top of the food chain. It took her more than a few attempts, but she did manage to make him neutral, a bit. It was still fragile. But her approach was working. They needed harmony. Instead of wreaking chaos, the era demanded peace. She did not rest until they all got it.

It was a golden age for a while. All her siblings were in a peaceful state, much more so than before. They hunted anything powerful enough to threaten the local ecosystem and kept a balance intact, hence protecting the local species of their domains as well. Thus, the local populace of their domains offered them offerings on a regular basis, recognizing them as a sort of guardian. The species advanced, now that they no longer had to worry as much about their existence and lives, with these behemoths watching over them.

Sybil was happy watching them all prosper… in their own way. Some turned to being more primitive, following in the footsteps of their deity, but Sybil didn't mind.

And yet, like all things, it all came to an end.

They came when everything was at peace. There was a tear in space whence they emerged. The locals had a few names for them— the mutated beasts, the aberrants, the outsiders. They were seemingly insanely powerful beasts from a place called the "Spirit Plane." That was the first time their worldview expanded. When they realized what they were existing in— where they were almost godlike— was in fact a rather small place, when a single beast from the Spirit Plane required all of them to combine their powers just to fight it off.

Whatever fragile peace existed shattered at that. It once again ignited the hunger for power within them all.

But for the first time, Sybil questioned the events. Recalling the details of the encounter again and again, she found what was bothering her. The beast… was never defeated in the first place. Their battle against it ended when the beast seemingly disappeared— right when it had been preparing a powerful attack that must have killed one of them.

Fate had never interfered this blatantly. That was the final nail for Sybil. Someone— or something— had been with them from the very beginning. And the closest shape she could make of it came from a story she used to hear amongst the locals. One she had dismissed earlier as nothing more than fiction.

They mentioned meeting a leviathan— the Heavenly Leviathan, it called itself. The naming scheme was eerily similar to their own. And Sybil, who knew the land intimately through the Dream Sea, had never seen such a being anywhere.

Even the traces within the minds of the people who sang its tales had nothing but void regarding its presence, something that only happened when said presence was fictional.

But… what if it was not? What if it was a being so powerful that it could manipulate things so well that even Sybil was fooled? While tension once again rose in the lands, Sybil couldn't help but devote time to searching for this enigmatic being called the Heavenly Leviathan.

Driven by obsession, she devoted ecades to hunting that phantom. Following the jagged tear of its conceptual void across the psychic landscape, she finally cornered her on a desolate, black mist choked shore at the edge of the Abyssal Domain.

There, the mask was pulled back. There, she learned the absolute, nauseating truth of their origins.

What were they?

Livestock.

Nothing more than engineered sacrifices, fattened upon the ambient resonance of the land, awaiting the arrival of the world’s true successor, the true player of this game, to slaughter them and pluck the "Keys" crystallized within their dying marrow. Their entire lives, their bonds, their trials, their domains… they were not gods of an organic universe. They were nothing more than just actors on a stage, starring in a playground custom-built for another's entertainment.

Sybil broke in a manner that no mind had ever fractured before.

By all laws of psychology, despair should have consumed her. Yet beneath the shattered ruins of her sanity, a flame ignited, burning with a fury hotter and louder than any pyre.

She wanted to defy fate.

How utterly laughable. How absurdly insane. She possessed the vast mental fortitude to recognize the sheer futility of rebellion against the architect of reality. But being a creature born of endless rumination, she welcomed the absurdity.

Would she dare?

If fate had spent eons guiding her hand, she would force it to spend eons trying to tear hers off.

She would dare!

Thus she cut herself off from the world. Amassing knowledge and power in secret while she buried her physical body beneath layers and layers of earth, sealing it with strata of lethally complex conceptual traps designed to obliterate any intruder.

She became a mysterious ghost from the world, no longer caring about anything anymore.

She knew the timeline down to its final grains, whispered to her by the Heavenly Leviathan. She knew that being hadn't lied, for she possessed the innate power to decipher truth from lies.

The time came when the new outsiders entered the world. These ones weren't as formidable as the one from the Spirit World, but they were not to be underestimated, their knowledge and everything about them was alien. It was the cue that the time had come. They had almost a decade before the world ended. By this time, she had purged everything people knew about her, but she could only watch in sorrow as the invisible gears of fate began to grind in the coming years after these people appeared in these lands.

First, her eldest sibling, battered in a skirmish, crossed paths with the newcomers by "chance" and died. Soon after, the second fell to mysterious, orchestrated circumstances. Then the third.

The slaughter had begun.

The ones who had started worshipping her siblings as deities suddenly began behaving unpredictably once they passed away. Some ritualistically burned themselves alive. Some dug themselves into their graves while still living and died a slow death, suffocating beneath the weight. Some embraced the true abyss by tearing open the boundaries of the world itself and vanished before even she knew what had happened. The domains themselves started going haywire after their heirs dropped dead.

The last of her siblings hid out of self-preservation, for that was the concept he resonated with. And yet, even that ice wasn't enough to save him when she finally arrived.

The true catalyst. The sovereign heir for whom all this suffering had been carefully cultivated.

The dragon.

The wretched one born to inherit the hoard their creator had sealed within this land, purchased with the slaughter of Sybil’s entire bloodline.

Her counter-gambit, however, was already taking form.

The previous vanguard of outsiders who had crossed into this realm carried a flawed, fragmented understanding of their mission. Sybil had preyed upon those fractures. Slithering through their dreamscapes in the guise of the Phantom Dragon, she wove promises of power and salvation, bending their wills until they became her blind, fanatical puppets.

Within a year, their minds were thoroughly conditioned to retrieve the Keys she required.

Their leader, however, possessed a sharp intellect. He detected the rot spreading through his ranks, rounding up her indoctrinated thralls and plunging the outsiders into a vicious, paranoid civil war.

Sybil had kept her distance. To reveal her full hand prematurely was suicide; fate was an unforgiving adversary. She needed merely to wait until the psychic saturation within their ranks reached its zenith, when a decisive strike would snap their minds and deliver her triumph.

She orchestrated the board with patience. She seeded false intelligence concerning her capabilities, cultivating an aura of omniscient myth, biding her time until the true heir crossed the threshold.

And the moment the dragon breached reality, Sybil felt it.

She had stamped a minute psychic imprint upon every sentient mind in the land. When eight mortal consciousnesses abruptly dissolved, replaced by alien souls seizing their flesh, she knew the new outsiders had arrived.

The final curtain had risen. The hour to shatter her chains was at hand.

The opening gambit did not proceed cleanly. Seven of the eight invaders vanished almost instantly as their presences completely severed from her perception, leaving only the dragon stranded in the open world.

It was an unexpected complication, but far from fatal. Sybil held the superior vantage and the dragon was still fragile, and the invisible currents of fate had not yet rallied to her defense.

She allowed it when the dragon killed her last sibling, fueling her anger further.

But she waited for the perfect opportunity to strike. She knew she couldn't kill her, as she had seen what fate does when you try to kill someone who is not supposed to die then, but it didn't stop her from imprisoning her.

She used the mind-broken depth dwellers for this purpose. With her last sibling gone— the one who was her true weakness— nothing protected their minds from her. Using them as a powerful force, she wreaked havoc. She knew the rest of the new outsiders must be somewhere, and the only place where her eyes couldn't reach was the Kovraths' sanctum. A spot the Heavenly Leviathan frequently wandered.

She no longer feared that phantom titan. The Leviathan was bound by something resembling non-interference; it could not lift a finger unless the broad strokes of fate were directly violated. And so long as the dragon drew breath, the script was technically unbroken. Sybil held the field.

Before this plan, she needed a physical body. Burying her true body had been a necessary step to ensure she stayed intangible, but it severely throttled the physical manifestation of her arts. To wield her full authority in the waking world, she required a vessel of flesh.

And there happened to be a girl amongst the outsiders named Avena who possessed a deep attunement to Reflection like her. It wasn't perfect as she was still fragile, but she would do.

A physical form was the linchpin. To command a legion and bend the waking world to her design, she required mortal flesh to anchor the cage she had prepared for the dragon.

After that, storming the Kovrath fortress took time. They were formidable, and their minds were protected by the sacred aura, making it difficult for her to overtake them in such a short span. Further, their leader would notice her intrusion and might make the situation spiral in unpredictable ways. Much as Sybil despised crude violence, brute force had been her only recourse.

But it worked. It took time, but it did. They tore open all defenses, allowing her new form to slip through the unprotected minds of their people and enter the deepest part of their sanctum— where she finally found the seven remaining outsiders.

The true Players of this game. The only souls who possessed the mandate to conclude the game.

And what was the finishing condition? It was the murder of her siblings to retrieve the keys their respective domains had manifested within them— to break open the gates to the sky.

Her own death was included in the tally. To break the sky, she had to execute herself.

Yet Sybil had already solved that equation.

The Keys were nothing more than the concentrated authority of the domains, congealed into physical form within their anatomy. She could excise that authority from her own core, but doing so would permanently mutilate and cripple her colossal true body.

A trivial price all things considered. She was not using that gargantuan carcass anyway; its sacrifice aligned flawlessly with her escape.

After collecting all the keys, nobody knew what would happen next. The one doing so would be declared the true heir of this trial and get to exit to the true world with all the power. The rest would die.

So, what if she were to fully possess the true Player and open the door to the real world? She knew she could do it. For it was the only way she would survive. But doing so meant a full transfer of her very soul into a new vassal. Something she had learned for this very day.

She could overwrite someone else's mind and soul with her own. But doing so meant relinquishing everything she had built so far in power. She would become that person in both body and power. She would have her knowledge, but none of the power she had after doing so.

And she would gladly pay this price. Let her ancient flesh wither in the deep earth; she would walk free of this slaughterhouse forever.

So that was when she went in full force. Retrieving the one potential vassal— she left them all behind— her powers were slow and insidious. In the short term, they meant nothing. And her current vassal was weak, unable to fully channel her strength, so it took a while to do even that as they opposed her. But she managed.

After that, she just needed the rest of the keys before the dragon broke free. The dragon had been carrying one at the time of imprisonment; she retrieved it the moment she was sealed.

She had three keys now. Her own, the Ice Key, and the Verdant Key. The Abyss Key and the Flame Key were still with the leader of the outsiders.

But her time was running out. She didn't have much at all. The dragon had broken free from the seal much earlier than expected, and emerged more powerful than ever—destroying the force she had left behind that had earlier managed to easily corner her.

Sybil knew it was now or never.

So… that was what she was doing. Sybil extended her will. With a singular pulse, she triggered the latent psychic spores she had seeded across the city. The minds she had saturated snapped like dry twigs, collapsing instantly into her thrall.

If she could not coax the commander through subtle infiltration, she would break him over his own conscience.

For when does a savior crumble?

Not when cold iron pierces his breast.

He breaks when the souls he bled to protect turn toward him with dead, milky eyes, raising jagged daggers to their own throats.

Could he endure the sight of his flock systematically flaying their own skin and flesh to the bone at her command?

COULD HE?!

A bitter revulsion coiled in Sybil's gut. She despised the grotesqueness of it all; inflicting such mutilation upon mortals turned her stomach. Yet morality was a luxury for beings not sentenced to the butcher's block. Survival demanded monstrosity.

But… it seemed she wouldn't need to do it at all. Even before the event started, she perked up in glee as his mental shields began to shake. It would require a singular psychic lance on her part, to breach his defences, and tear the location of the Flame Key from his burning thoughts, and crown her victory.

"The decision is yours," Sybil proclaimed from the mouth of a possessed faerin kneeling at his feet. She watched with delight as the man’s eyes widened in spiraling horror.

But before she could celebrate, a familiar voice echoed from beside the man, and Sybil felt her heart drop.

"Oh, bloody hell. Truly? Let's see you try that before I do my thing and atomize your scaly carcass from the face of the mortal plane, you damp little bitch."