Stillness returned to the Tomb of the Thousand Lords—but it was no longer the silence of slumber. It was the hush of held breath. Of predator's anticipation. Marla stood before the barnacle-eye dias, its jagged shell blooming with slow, tidal pulses of greenish light. Her fingers, long and talon-tipped, hovered just above its slick, barnacled eyed rim. She closed her eyes. Her mental energy—dense, first coiling tightly, then relaxed and unfurled from her forehead like smoke underwater.
It seeped into the dias, threading through ancient ley-conduits, following buried channels to every remaining gorgon eye and barnacle-eye relic scattered across the realm.
''Reach forward.'' Artifacts. Forgotten fangs still sharp enough to pierce fate. The tomb darkened. Through the dias, her consciousness split, flooding across space like phosphorescent plankton. One by one, the vision-nodes blinked closed—dead. Sealed. Broken. She continued to reach out with her pool of mental energy.
Just then there was a Ping. A flicker. A living node. Back aboard the Star bite my barnacle-eye Compass blinked open. Marla gasped, "What blind luck, the holder of this relic is not far away!" Marla couldn't help but do a little dance she knew from back when she was human. Lately she had such a crummy run of bad luck she was beginning to wonder if the gods hated her. It all began almost four hundred years ago when she had been sealed in this place by the Thousand lord's clan.
Thankfully she had consumed many life enhancing cultivation items along her martial journey of the wicked path. She could burn four hundred years cultivating in some tomb somewhere while the surface world forgot about her. By her estimations she had cultivated at least a twenty-five hundred year long life span. She was in no hurry, but she did feel a nagging desire to get out all of a sudden, her thread of fate was being pulled on by some unknown force.
Besides she had reached a bottle neck in her progress and was running low on resources in her Spirit necklace. She turned her mental energy back to the drifting sky-ship.
"Found you" Marla whispered, eyes opening with a serpentine glint. A wild card. She reached into the Dias again, this time with delicate strands of glamoured Intent—not to dominate, but to entice. To seduce. To call for aid, without revealing what, or who, she truly was. High above the clouds, in the Star bite's navigation room, my compass pulsed with a faint green shimmer.
I unhooked the compass and made eye contact! A green light flared out of the Compass, and I saw a beautiful woman in distress. A voice echoed in the back of my mind—not words, exactly. Just sorrow, beauty, and a desperate yearning. ''Help me'', it seemed to say. '' The tomb is breaking. The seal is fading. I am alone.'' Felicity, elsewhere on the ship, stirred instinctively. Something hungry was calling. And not just for food. Far to the south of the tomb of the thousand lords, across broken reefs and mist-choked cliffs, a lone figure limped through the bramble-choked gulch of the Gorgon Isles' outer edge.
His Koga uniform was torn, blood-soaked. One eye was burned shut from a partial petrification pulse. His spirit core was cracked, his blade shattered. But he was alive.
And worse—he remembered. He stumbled into a listening post built into the jungle cliffside, where a small camp of Thousand Leaves Crest observers kept watch over the isle's cursed tides. One monk rose. "Koga agent?" The spy collapsed to his knees. "They're all dead," he rasped. "The tomb... The Medusa... She's awake." The monk went pale. "Impossible. That seal—"Broken. I saw her. Wings. Snakes. Eyes like suns."
Silence.
Then a scout bolted from the outpost into the jungle—to signal the nearest Thousand Leaves Crest Ascendant. War was coming. And something older than war had just drawn breath again. Inside a living citadel grown from lacquered roots and obsidian-petaled trees, the Council of Verdant Jade gathered beneath the hanging sigil of the Thousand Leaves. Scrolls rustled. Incense curled. Tension clung to the canopy like wet silk. At the center, Elder Umenori, veiled in weeping bamboo sleeves, tapped a branch-carved scepter to summon silence. "The Koga mission failed," she said. "Medusa Marla has awakened. The Tomb of the Thousand Lords breathes again."
A younger general barked, "Then we send an extermination force. Root her out before she spreads." "Fool," hissed another. "She is not some beast of flesh. She is cursed essence coiled around an animus throne. You do not 'slay' a Gorgon Queen. You seal her away in some god forsaken corner."
A nomadic scholar stepped forward, robes scrawled in inked formulas. "The problem is not her awakening alone. The problem is her signal. A barnacle-eye glamour reaching out beyond the isles."
"Someone will answer," whispered Umenori. "Some fool. Some hero. Some pirate. Or worse." A silence fell across the assembly. One word drifted through the air like poison—"Quarantine."
But another elder countered. "If we seal the isles, we lose access to the tomb's decay essence a natural cultivation treasure. She may already be unraveling its spatial anchors."
Many whispers rippled among the council elders: Whispers of the delta pirate kings heir finding the Inheritance. "So we risk more intrusions?" the general snapped.
"We risk the wrong intruder breaking her free," Umenori said calmly. "We act now, or we prepare for a second Gorgon Era." A final vote was cast.
I stood at the ship's railing, the clouds parted around them like sheets of silver silk. The wind dragon Wisp coiled lazily overhead, sensing unease in the chi currents. Beside me, Felicity stood barefoot, still holding the frost rapier. The blade whispered faintly when the signal came again. From within my coat, the barnacle-eye compass pulsed with a dull green light. "Help… alone… break the seal… please…" The glamour was stronger now. Almost beautiful. Almost human. I narrowed my eyes.
"She's not crying for help," I said flatly. "She's fishing." Felicity tilted her head. "But you want to bite the hook." I didn't deny it. There was something in the call. Something ancient. Twisted. A gravity pulling my spirit toward it. The scent of a challenge buried in myth. Felicity's hair shimmered, her eyes flashing red for a heartbeat.
I turned to her, and for a moment, the ship's wind fell quiet.
"Now I'm really curious. Should we answer?"
"O-You'll answer," she said with certainty. "I'll just make sure you survive it."