The Odyssey drifted through a maze of floating ice, its engines muted against the cold. A soft snow fell in slow spirals, and the light was strange — blue-white, diffused through mist.
Cyrus leaned against the railing, half-awake, watching the water churn beneath the ice. His thoughts kept returning to the glow under the northern sky, to Kyogre's eyes. He couldn't shake the feeling that the island was watching him back.
Tyrunt sat bundled in a heat-wrap near his boots, while Meltan perched on the railing, spinning its hex-nut head like a compass needle.
When the current shifted, Cyrus noticed something unusual. The chunks of ice around them were moving in rhythm, pulled not by wind or tide, but by pattern. Perfect, even spacing — as if drawn along invisible magnetic lines.
He frowned. "That's… not natural."
He turned toward the navigation display. The Odyssey's instruments were flickering again, nterference from magnetic flux. Meltan buzzed nervously.
Then the sea beneath them hummed. A low vibration rose through the hull, steady, ancient. Tyrunt's claws scraped the deck, eyes darting.
"Alright," Cyrus muttered, pulling on his gloves. "We're checking that out."
He took a small landing craft and pushed toward the shore, the motor echoing off frozen cliffs. The coastline here was jagged, carved by centuries of wind. Blue veins ran beneath the ice like glowing roots.
At the base of the cliffs, a dark shape jutted from the frost, a stone formation half-buried in snow. Cyrus climbed down, brushing away the powder until markings emerged: patterns of circles and dashes, in symmetrical clusters.
Regi script.
Cyrus's breath caught. "No way."
As he traced a line with his glove, the markings flared faintly, releasing tiny crystals of light into the air. The ice beneath him shifted, and from the snowdrift beside the cliff, something rose.
A figure of pure ice, its core pulsing pale blue. The shape was unmistakable humanoid, massive shoulders, a body segmented like armor, seven points of light arranged like eyes.
Regice.
But not the Regice from the Hoenn records — this one's form was translucent, streaked with liquid veins of darker water ice, almost alive.
Tyrunt barked and took a defensive stance. Meltan retreated to Cyrus's shoulder, trembling.
Cyrus raised his hands. "Easy… We're not here to destroy anything."
Regice's "eyes" flickered. The ground crackled under its feet, frost spreading in perfect geometric lines. For a moment, it simply studied him — as if weighing his presence — then the humming deepened.
The ice beneath the sea responded.
Cyrus turned toward the shore and saw another shape emerging from the dark — massive, serpentine, crystalline like flowing water. It broke through the surface with a surge of mist, smaller than Kyogre but powerful, its body etched with the same circular runes.
Regiwater — an ancient sibling to Regice, unseen in recorded history. Its body glowed with shifting shades of blue and silver, veins pulsing in time with the hum.
The two titans faced each other across the shore — not in aggression, but synchrony.
Cyrus stumbled backward, voice low. "They're… linked. Guardians of something deeper."
Meltan hummed, its magnetic ring spinning faster. Data on Cyrus's wrist console flickered uncontrollably, energy readings climbing off the scale.
The snow began to fall harder, driven by a strange static pressure. Then, deep beneath the ice shelf, came the faint, echoing thud of movement — slow, seismic.
The Regi pair turned toward the sound. Their lights synchronized — a pattern, a rhythm.
Cyrus realized it wasn't random. It was a signal. A call.
And from miles away, beneath the frozen crust of Frostveil Isle, the island answered.
A pulse so deep it shook the air, rolling through stone and sea alike.
Cyrus fell to one knee, gripping the ice to stay upright. Tyrunt pressed against him, growling at the unseen tremor.
When he looked up again, the Regice and Regiwater had stopped glowing. Slowly, as though their duty was complete, they began to retreat, sinking back into the ice, vanishing beneath the frost like returning spirits.
Only the glowing symbols on the cliff remained, shimmering faintly with residual light.
Cyrus whispered, "They didn't seem to be attacking, so were they guarding it?"
He looked toward the mountain ridge inland, where the snow clouds seemed unnaturally thick, swirling around a single point.
Whatever slept there… wasn't going to stay asleep for much longer.