Bestaria's words hung suspended in the air of the chamber, too heavy to fall.
Lost. No one argued. No one tried to soften it. Morgana just pressed Livina a little tighter against her own body, and the silence did the rest.
And the worst part was that Bestaria had a point.
Even without ever having traded a single blow with the guardian, all it took was remembering what I had seen up above — that thing turning the Tyrin queen into a toy inside its own hand — to understand that its capacity went beyond anything anyone could imagine. Honestly, I wouldn't even know how to say what tier that colossus was on.
The image wouldn't leave my head. The way the bronze fingers closed. The way tons of fury became nothing. I had spent the entire night measuring enemies — Tyrin, colossi, a Matre Queen — and, for each of them, however bad it was, my mind found some number, some scale, some place on the shelf. With the guardian, no. With the guardian, the entire shelf collapsed.
Certainly, it was level S. But that, in itself, said almost nothing.
Because level S was a much broader nomenclature than the previous ones. Level C creatures, for example, had a beginning and an end clearly stipulated: stronger than the D's, weaker than the B's. A box with walls. A level S creature, on the other hand, was something much stronger than A… with no apparent limit. A box with no lid, open to the infinite.
There were many scholars who defended that level S should have subdivisions in its own nomenclature.
And, to me, they were right. Putting a Dragon or a Phoenix on the same level as an Ammit simply made no sense. Ammits were strong creatures, of course — but it was possible to flee from an Ammit. It was hard to say the same about a dragon. The fact is that no one could truly calculate how far the S could go.
To many, fighting against level S creatures had nothing to do with difficulty.
It had to do with the dangerous elasticity that existed within that single letter. A creature could be level S and die to a good kingdom manager with an acceptable military capacity. Or it could destroy an entire race because it woke up irritated. The same letter. The same label. Two completely different fates — and no way to know, before the fight, which of the two stood before you.
And, if the nomenclature existed, it was because giving names to things was the way all the races found to pretend they understood them. A label measured nothing. But it soothed. And, in that moment, with the fresh memory of that bronze hand squeezing a Matre Queen until it burst, I understood perfectly why the scholars preferred to discuss letters rather than discuss that.
A dull thud crossed the rock above us, dropping a fine rain of earth from our shoulders. Then another. Rhythmic. Patient. Deeper and deeper.
And, while my mind sank into those useless classifications — maybe because thinking about nomenclatures hurt less than thinking about what came digging in our direction — I finally remembered something. Something I had heard from the queen herself.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Bestaria… the Ant queen said something about a certain Tiamat. Do you know what — or who — that is?"
The effect was instantaneous.
Bestaria's eyes went wide all at once — and, before I noticed the movement, she had already grabbed me by the neck, her fingers closed with a strength that completely ignored the state of her own body. The feline face stopped a handspan from mine, and what I saw there wasn't rage.
It was shock. Pure and simple.
And that, in itself, already counted as information. Because Bestaria was the kind of creature that watched a massacre with boredom and treated her own imminent death with sarcasm. Whatever that name meant… it was big enough to cross through all that shell at once.
"When did she say this?! Actually — fuck it. What ELSE did she say?"
"Hey! Let him go! What are you doing?!"
Morgana advanced to hold back Bestaria, who seemed completely beside herself — but I stopped her with a gesture.
"Don't worry. I'm fine… She said it while we were fighting. Who the fuck is Tiamat?"
I kept my voice firm, even squeezed within that hand, but my heart raced. Because, if a name was capable of doing that to Bestaria… then that name was a weapon. And I needed to know which way it pointed.
Bestaria released me slowly, and her expression changed to something between incredulity and exhaustion — the look of someone who discovers they're betting their own life alongside illiterates.
But she didn't wait for me to ask a second time.
Instead, she advanced to the gate — to the great carving of the dragons in a circle — and pointed at one of them.
"This one here, in the drawing, is Tiamat. It's considered one of the strongest aquatic dragons that exist. After all… it's part of the Elite of 4."
The name wasn't strange to me.
I had devoured everything that existed written about dragons — every superficial study, every dubious account, every tavern legend transcribed by some bored scholar. And "Elite of 4" was a term I knew well. Morgana, however, didn't.
"My Lord… what is this Elite of 4?"
She asked without thinking, and I didn't mind the interruption. It had been nights and more nights hunched over those records, long before I dreamed that one day I would be standing before a nest gate. Dragons had always been my silent obsession — not out of admiration, but out of principle: knowing the top of the chain is the only way to understand the real size of one's own insignificance.
Bestaria rolled her eyes, visibly irritated with the interruption. I didn't mind. If we were going to die there, we would die informed.
"Elite of 4 is the name given to the dragons of dragons. They're considered stronger than the others for being, knowingly, capable of dominating other dragons. No one understands how the hierarchy among them works — but, since four were found with this capacity, they received that name."
Bestaria shook her head when I finished, like someone exhausted by my ignorance.
"You don't know anything. The Elite of 4 is known as the holders of the greatest power among the four elements — and each one lives in a territory of the Oasis. North. South. East. West. Tiamat is the leader of the aquatic dragons… but, unlike the other Elites, it's one of the only ones that never changed territory. It dominates the seas of the East. It always has."
I looked again at the carving — at the dragon in front of the other three — and something changed in the way the entire gate existed before me. That wasn't decoration. It was a signature. The owner of that place had engraved his own face on the front door of his home.
And that was when the logic broke in my head.
Because that made no sense. If Tiamat was an aquatic dragon — and if it had never changed territory — why would the queen cite its name here? In the middle of a dry valley, surrounded by earth and stone, who knows how many worlds away from any ocean?
Bestaria looked at my face. And didn't seem the least bit surprised by what she found in it.
✦ ✦ ✦
"You humans don't know anything. You've been here less than fifty years. Our race has been in the Oasis since long before you learned to walk upright. All of this here — where we are, this entire valley, as far as your eyes can reach — was once, one day, an enormous ocean."
The revelation threw me off balance.
Not because it was absurd — but the opposite. Because, the instant the words left her mouth, things began to make sense. One by one. Like pieces that spent months scattered across my table and, suddenly, fit together on their own.
"You're trying to say that the wall out there…"
"Yes. It was never a wall. It was, before, a dam."
A dam.
Finally, everything seemed to fit. That wall had never made sense to me — why would anyone build a structure of that size, of that absurd age, just to contain the Tyrin? It was too ancient. Too large. Too wrong for the function it seemed to have. And the plain — that dead immensity, without a single living thing growing on it — had also always been confusing.
But a dry ocean floor doesn't create life. A dry ocean floor is exactly that: a desert of salt and memory.
For an instant, my mind superimposed the two images: the valley I knew and the ocean it had been. Water as far as the eye could reach — dozens of meters above our heads, below the wall but above everything else. Schools of fish crossing the sky where today the griffins flew. And, in the dark depths of all that, an aquatic god guarding his own treasures in the mud. We had never been in a valley. We had built a kingdom on the seabed of a dragon.
"So the reason they never really attacked beyond the dam… was always because they never had interest. But, then… why let so many die defending this place?"
"Because we suspected Tiamat had a nest somewhere near the dam — and we couldn't let the Tyrin simply dominate the region. The truth is that, many years ago, the Travellers made a partnership with Tiamat. They offered what that dragon needed and, in exchange, gained other things. Honestly? We never knew how that exchange worked. The fact is that Tiamat allowed the construction of this dam — and allowed them to stay. But, when the water dried up and it moved further east… the Travellers abandoned this place too."
The pieces kept fitting together in my head, one after another.
The ancestral wall. The dead plain. The protection posts maintained for generations at an absurd cost of lives, without anyone knowing how to properly explain why. All of that was the skeleton of an ancient deal — the ruins of a partnership between a race and a god, kept standing by bureaucracy and stubbornness long after the god had gone.
And, in the middle of everything, a parallel question lit up and stayed blinking in a corner of my mind: what, exactly, does a dragon need? What could an entire race offer a creature that has everything — to the point of buying the right to live in its shadow? I filed the question away. It was the kind of knowledge that was worth kingdoms… and that wouldn't open that door.
But there was still a piece missing.
"But… why did the Travellers never invade the nest? I mean, they knew where it was. They had access. They had time…"
And, for the first time in the whole conversation, Bestaria truly didn't know how to answer.
I saw the exact moment the question hit her and found nothing to hold on to — and I saw, too, how much that irritated her. Being stuck without an answer was, clearly, something Bestaria hated from the bottom of her soul.
"I have no fucking idea. The fact is that, if the queen told you about Tiamat… she must have thought YOU knew something. It makes no sense for her to say that out of nowhere."
And, finally, she touched on the subject that also confused me.
Because she was right. The queen had no reason to say that name to me. None. Unless…
Suddenly, my body went cold.
A scream crossed the rock — and, this time, it was close. Very close. The guardian had arrived. But, at that exact same instant, something formed in my mind. Something that couldn't be real… but that was the only explanation I could conceive.
"Bestaria. What is this square hole in the middle of the four dragons for?"
"Fuck, we're about to DIE and you still want to ask questions?! I have no idea what the fuck that is! What I was told is that this gate can only be opened in two ways: by killing the guardian… or by the bearer of the key. You want a theory of mine? I think that shit there must be a lock."
My mind exploded.
A lock. A square hole. A key. I had an answer — I HAD an answer — but, before I could speak, the wall exploded.
✦ ✦ ✦
Rock, earth, and dust flew in all directions.
The impact threw me a step backward, the air becoming a solid wall of dust that scratched my eyes and filled my mouth with the taste of ancient earth. For a second, the entire world was reduced to the ringing in my ears.
"My Lord! It's here!"
Livina screamed while already summoning the Treebeards — the wooden giants sprouting from the ground one after another, forming a line between us and the cloud of dust.
And, from inside it, the guardian emerged.
Up close, it was even worse. The bronze of its body scratched by the digging, the perfect and empty face covered by a mask of earth — and its right arm ending in an irregular stump, a little above where the elbow should be. The memory of the giant fist fallen in the tunnel hit me in a flash: the Void's rift had charged its price. That thing had crossed forty meters of solid rock, with one arm less, without stopping for a single second.
"Damn, I'm not going to die in this shit! Give me cover while I try to cause damage to this son of a bitch!"
Bestaria pulled an enormous axe from inside a ring — a blade the size of a man, with a handle thick as a trunk — and advanced against the creature without a second of hesitation.
My mind still spun with a thousand things at the same time.
But there was one that wouldn't leave, hammering beneath all the others: the queen thought I would know who Tiamat was. To me, that made no sense — unless she had seen something in me. Something that marked me as a knower of that creature. But I clearly had nothing. I was a minuscule human before that world, with no power of my own, in a forgotten valley, holding…
The guardian's scream interrupted me.
It had seen Livina's summons. And, worse: it had seen us near the gate. The change was instantaneous — rage took over the creature in an overwhelming way, because, at the bottom of all that, its duty was to protect that place. And now it saw several enemies probing the entrance. It crossed the line of Treebeards like someone crossing a thicket — the wooden giants were nothing more than toys trying to stop it, torn from the ground and shattered one by one.
Each Treebeard destroyed was an invisible lash descending upon Livina. I saw her body fold, saw her knees give way, saw her stubbornness summon another one even so — because that was what she was, wood on the outside and iron on the inside — until the limit came.
Livina's scream, followed by the thud of her body on the ground, brought me back all at once.
"Livina!"
I ran to her — passed out from the pain of having all her summons destroyed in seconds, the rebound descending upon her like an avalanche — and that was when I saw it.
Bestaria reached the creature.
And struck the axe blow.
I had to be honest: her strength was colossal. The Tyrin queen, with all her size, hadn't managed to even scratch that thing — and Bestaria, with a single blow, sank the blade deep into the guardian's tendon. The colossus fell to its knees with a crash that shook the entire chamber, the perfect face contorting for the first time into something resembling pain.
But, at the exact instant the blow connected… she let go of the axe.
And ran to the corridor. Laughing.
"Now be useful for something and let me flee this shit! HAHAHAHAHA!"
Rage filled me all at once, rising up my throat like bile.
She never had the intention of fighting. The blow wasn't an attack — it was a distraction. A coin tossed over her shoulder while she fled, paid with our lives. And the worst of all was that I couldn't even blame her: it was exactly the kind of play that world taught. Zero sum to the end.
On another day, maybe, I might even admire the play. The coldness. The perfect calculation of someone who turned their own rescue into a coin and paid the debt with our flesh. But not today. Today, I only engraved her laugh into memory — in the same place where I kept all the debts I one day intended to collect.
I grabbed Livina off the ground, her body limp in my arms.
Morgana stepped in front of us, her crossbow aimed at the creature — which, on its knees, tried desperately to pull the axe from its own heel with the only hand it had left. And, for the first time since that thing emerged from the earth, there was something different in its movements. Something hurried. Something… frightened.
Frightened. I registered the word with a shiver. That thing had crossed a queen, two colossi, and an entire army without changing a line of its face — and an axe from Bestaria in the tendon had achieved what nothing else could: put it in a hurry.
"That… We should have let her die."
"Don't worry, Morgana. Help me carry Livina to the gate. I had an idea."
Morgana still seemed confused — and it was clear that fleeing was no longer an option. Running led away from the nest; and, with that thing alive, away from the nest was just a more tiring way to die.
But, as in all the other times, she trusted me.
No questions. No hesitation. Morgana and I advanced quickly to the gate — she carrying my unconscious heroine, I carrying a theory that, if it were wrong, would kill us all in the next thirty seconds.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Morgana. You've got the Unique red box, right?"
She grabbed it and handed it to me without blinking, in the same movement in which I passed Livina into her arms.
Morgana's eyes went from the box to the gate. From the gate to the square hole. And from the hole to me.
"You don't think that…"
"Yes… I think so. The queen mentioned Tiamat after we used this box. I think this—"
I raised the box to eye level. Its red seemed to pulse under the weak light of the chamber.
"—is the answer."
Everything connected. The millenary growl that came from inside it. The queen resisting the soul damage — prepared, in her own words, to invade Tiamat's home. The shape. The size. The square hole at the center of four dragons.
And, along with the answer, came the comprehension of the rest: the queen never thought I knew something. She heard something. The growl that came from that box was the voice of the owner of that place — and, to someone who spent generations dreaming of this gate, that sound was a formal introduction. She didn't cite Tiamat to me. She cited Tiamat to what I carried.
I approached the gate without waiting for Morgana's answer.
And the guardian fell into despair.
Seeing me walking to the entrance made the creature wrench the axe out by force, in a single and brutal movement, its scream shaking dust from the ceiling. It stood up too fast — too fast for something of that size, too fast for my heart — and advanced.
But I had already raised the box.
The entire world shrank until it fit into that gesture. The thunder of the footsteps behind me. Morgana's scream somewhere distant. My hands — steady, for the first time in the night, as though all the fear in my body had opened passage for that single second of certainty.
And I fit it into the square hole, at the exact center of the drawing.
"Come on… don't make me die being an idiot. Please."
The box fit perfectly.
As though that hole had been sculpted, millennia ago, to wait for exactly it. And the guardian — already over me, its shadow swallowing me whole — raised what remained of its arms in my direction…
And stopped.
Centimeters from me.
The bronze hand hovered in the air, motionless, close enough for me to feel the cold of the metal on the skin of my face. No sound. No movement. The entire creature froze in place, as though someone had ripped its soul out between one second and another — a statue again, after centuries pretending to be something else.
The silence that descended over the chamber was so absolute that I could hear my own heart — and Morgana's ragged breathing behind me, holding Livina, not knowing whether we were saved or just postponed.
"What happened…?"
Morgana spoke in a whisper, without the courage to move.
But, before I could answer, a flash formed on the gate.
The drawings — static for who knows how many millennia — began to move. The four dragons came to life before our eyes, flying in perfect synchrony around the center, each turn faster than the last, the carving becoming movement, the movement becoming light, until the entire door entered a frenzy in which I could see nothing more than a blur of spinning dragons — four gods dancing around a little red box.
And then, slowly — gradually — the gate began to open.
The stone creaked with the weight of millennia. A current of air escaped through the growing crack — an ancient breath, cold and clean, that didn't smell of earth, nor of blood, nor of anything from that dead anthill. It smelled of a place where time didn't enter.
"So the box really was a key…"