Youri and Lea stood before the colossal vessel in silence, utterly dwarfed by its scale. The ship stretched across the ruined district of Atlantis like the corpse of a fallen god, its immense body half buried beneath oceans of crimson sand and shattered stone. Whole buildings had collapsed against its hull over countless ages. And yet, for all the erosion of time, it still radiated an overwhelming presence. It felt ancient: older than the city around it, older than the Orbitons, older than the wars.
Youri stepped slowly closer, his boots grinding on the dust-covered stone. The dark metal plating towered overhead in massive layered sections like overlapping scales. Jagged protrusions lined the hull like the spines of some gigantic beast, and enormous fractures ran across parts of its surface where time itself seemed to have tried, and failed, to destroy it. It had endured — even now.
Lea approached quietly, and for the first time since Youri had known her, her movements seemed hesitant. Almost reverent. She raised a gloved hand slowly and laid it against the cold black plating. The moment her fingers touched the metal, she froze. Youri noticed at once.
"So this is where you were," Lea whispered.
He frowned and stepped closer. "You've seen this before?"
She shook her head slowly beneath the hood. "Not with my own eyes. But when I was among the Sacros, there were murals of this ship everywhere." Her voice echoed faintly against the dead silence of Atlantis. "Ancient carvings. Great temples. Entire halls built to honor it." She walked slowly along the hull with her hand brushing the ancient metal. "To the Sacros, this ship wasn't merely a vessel." Her tone darkened. "It was salvation."
Youri looked up at the endless structure stretching into the distance. "What exactly is it?"
Lea stopped and turned slightly toward him. "This," she said quietly, "was the first step the Sacros ever took toward becoming what they are now." The crimson wind swept through Atlantis, and far above them the colossal spire at the heart of the city loomed silently beneath the blood-red heavens. "Building this ship changed everything. Before it existed, the Sacros were trapped within their own realm — limited, weak, mortal." Her hand tightened slightly against the plating. "But this vessel allowed them to break the barrier between worlds."
His eyes narrowed. "The Corridor…" he muttered.
She nodded slowly, and a faint sadness crept into her voice. "Yes. It was the first vessel ever able to travel through the Corridor."
Youri stared at the ship in silence. So this was it — the beginning, the thing responsible for all of it: the Sacrosian expansion, the God Units, Tartarus, even Altopereh's imprisonment. Everything led back here.
Lea suddenly brushed a thick layer of dust from a large section of the hull. Ancient symbols appeared beneath the grime — a language unlike anything Youri had ever seen, sharp and elegant markings carved deep into the dark metal itself. Yet Lea recognized them at once, and her movements slowed. "To think," she whispered, "that I would actually get to see it."
Youri stepped up beside her. "What does it say?"
She brushed her hand gently across the ancient text once more, and then she read it aloud. "The one who started it all…" Her voice dropped. "Tartarusios."
The moment the word left her mouth, the whole city trembled. A violent rumble burst beneath Atlantis. Youri and Lea turned at once as the ground shook hard enough to crack the ancient stone beneath their feet. Great towers across the city groaned loudly, and clouds of dust erupted from distant ruins. Then the wind came. A colossal sandstorm rose beyond the outer districts and spiraled into the crimson sky like a living wall of destruction, waves of crimson sand twisting violently around something massive hidden within it. Youri's eyes narrowed. Something was inside it.
Slowly, the storm began to move toward the city, and every step it took made the ground quake; ancient buildings collapsed in the distance under the sheer pressure of its presence alone. Lea stiffened beside him. "No…" she whispered.
The sandstorm slowed as it entered Atlantis, and then, suddenly, it stopped. The swirling dust burst violently outward. The thing inside it finally revealed itself, and Youri felt his whole body go tense. Almesis. The ruler of the endless desert had finally appeared.
The creature towered over the ruins like death given form. Its body was horrifyingly skeletal, impossibly tall and thin, as though its flesh had long since rotted away and only fragments of it remained stretched over an ancient frame. Jagged black bones jutted outward across every inch of it, piercing dark flesh in uneven growths. Its torso looked hollow; whole cavities gaped between its ribs and showed only endless darkness within, as though there were nothing inside the creature at all. And yet it moved — alive. Its head was a twisted crown of bone and shadow from which two gigantic horn-like spires rose straight upward like blackened lances, and its face barely resembled anything living. From that distance there were no visible eyes, only a cavernous mouth filled with countless needle-like teeth stretched into a permanent grin. Not a smile. A predator's grin — something ancient, and starving.
Then Youri saw the wings. They were colossal — vast skeletal limbs unfolding slowly behind Almesis with torn membranes hanging between long, bone-like fingers — less like something meant for flight than like the remains of an angel stripped down to raw anatomy, and every movement of them warped the air over Atlantis. Jagged hooks stood out from every joint, uneven spines burst from its shoulders, hips, forearms and legs as though its own skeleton were trying to tear free from inside it. Behind it a long segmented tail dragged across the ground, carving deep trenches through the streets as it moved. The whole city trembled beneath its presence.
Youri couldn't move, and neither could Lea. For the first time since arriving in Tartarus, he truly understood what fear meant in that realm. Tikadello had been monstrous; Albatros had been terrifying; even Kalian had carried overwhelming pressure. But Almesis felt different. It didn't feel like a Domain Ruler at all. It felt as though the desert itself had taken shape.
The creature stopped moving, and its enormous skeletal wings spread slowly outward, throwing whole sections of Atlantis into shadow. Then that grin widened. A deep sound echoed across the city, not a roar, not a scream, but laughter: low, ancient, and endless. The sound alone made the ruins tremble, and Lea stepped back by instinct.
But somewhere above them, another voice answered. Altopereh laughed — not nervously, not cautiously, but with excitement. "So," it echoed through Youri's mind, "the king of the wasteland finally shows himself."