The first account of an encounter with the strongest creatures of the Oasis had happened at the very beginning of everything.
Back then, the strongest race of the Oasis was known only as the Wayward — the most powerful beings, by far, of that place. The account of that civilization was so ancient that, at the time, even the Aqrabuamelu — Livina's race — were still newcomers. If I were to risk a period, I would say millions of years. Not thousands. Millions.
But time erases a lot of things.
And, in the end, even the strongest race of that era lost itself amid so many others that took its place — reduced to a footnote in the memory of a universe that never stops walking.
The irony is that the Wayward were a race known for two things: strength and arrogance. And not just any arrogance — an arrogance that even the arrogant races pointed out with vehemence. They were one of the few civilizations to dominate the Oasis with an iron arm, enslaving each race they managed to find. An empire built upon chains.
But, like every story of strength tied to a nation, theirs too went into decline.
Only, the decline of the Wayward had a name.
Dragons.
At some point in history, the Wayward decided, in their arrogance and haughtiness, that dominating the races that existed wasn't enough. So they tried to dominate the creatures. No one knows the real reason. Maybe it was just the need to challenge themselves in a place where there was no longer any challenge. Maybe it was pride raised to the point of generating a permanent blindness.
The fact is only one: in less than ten years after declaring war on the dragons, the race of the Wayward was extinguished from the Oasis.
Ten years. A civilization of millions of years, erased in less than a decade.
And it didn't stop there. Because, without the Oasis, it didn't take long for other races to usurp the power the Wayward had accumulated — and, consequently, to destroy their very homeworld. Losing the Oasis while having enemies cost that race everything. The empire, the world, the existence. Even their name survived only as a warning.
Of course, the accounts were so ancient and distant that they seemed more like a horror story — a warning to the impious that even audacity has a limit.
In the end, the only thing that made me believe that story was true was a simple fact: no other race, at any other moment, ever dared to do what the Wayward did.
At least, that was what I believed.
Until I saw the creature in front of me — and understood, with my entire body, millions of years of prudence in a single glance.
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"How interesting… What race are you?"
The creature before me was terrifying and beautiful at the same time.
I couldn't see much beyond its head — which, alone, occupied the greater part of my vision, the way a mountain decides to occupy a horizon. But what I saw was enough to rewrite everything I thought I knew about beauty and about fear.
The scales overlapped in perfect layers, each one the size of a tower shield — deep-blue at the center, silver at the edges, changing tone with each breath like the surface of a sea touched by light. It wasn't a shine of metal. It was the shine of a living thing: mother-of-pearl breathing. When the head moved, waves of light ran across the skin in directions that obeyed no logic of reflection — as though light itself were afraid of staying still on top of it.
The face was elongated, crowned by a prominent snout — and, even so, capable of clear features. There was expression there. There was legible curiosity, drawn in muscles no scholar ever catalogued. Long, translucent filaments hung from the jaw and the temples, floating too slowly for the air of that place — swaying as though they were underwater, obeying a current that existed only for them. Along the neck, membranous crests folded and unfolded in a rhythm of their own, resembling fins at rest.
And the eyes.
Feline, vertical, the size of gates — with irises that seemed deep water lit from within, minuscule storms spinning slowly where there should be only color. Ancient eyes in a face that observed me with an almost juvenile interest — and that dissonance, more than the size, more than the pressure, was what engraved the creature forever into my memory. Something there was old as the world. And something there was… new. I couldn't name what that meant. I only knew it didn't match — and that things that don't match, in the Oasis, tend to be the most dangerous of all.
Each exhalation from those nostrils reached me like a tide — hot, humid, carrying a smell that didn't belong to that hole at the bottom of the earth: rain. Salt. Something of storm and of deep water. The colossal neck rose behind the head and disappeared into the sourceless light of that place, leaving the rest of the body merely suggested — a sleeping mountain range of which I could see only the first peak.
And, over all of that, the pressure.
That weight coming from all sides at the same time, calm and uniform, like the bottom of an ocean that doesn't care about your capacity to withstand it. Beauty and terror didn't dispute space in that creature. They were the same thing. The specific beauty of things that can kill you without noticing you existed.
"A dragon."
It was all my mouth managed to produce.
"Well… I think that would be something easy to notice."
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"Now, you don't seem to me to be anything I know. Your form is fragile… but, surprisingly, I feel something inside you as strong as my brothers… Did the wanderers of the void tear the veil? No. That would be impossible without help from within, perhaps the misted ones. Perhaps the… No. It would need too much power… What could be happening out there?"
The monologue was strange to watch.
The names it spoke were completely unknown to me — and perhaps they were unknown to any living being of the current Oasis. Because time, for someone who lives forever, transforms names and places into something impossible to trace. He might be speaking of something that happened millions of years ago — of wars that turned to dust, of races that turned to legends, of entire eras of which not a single written stone remained. Even the accounts of a few million years were treated, among the most ancient races, more as fantasy than as truth.
It was vertiginous. I was watching a mind that thought in eras — and each loose fragment from that mouth was a door left ajar to an abyss of history that no library in the universe contained.
And, in the end, the creature, despite seeing me, wasn't speaking to me.
It was as though it had found, in itself, the answers to questions no one besides it would ever have asked.
"Lord… I beg forgiveness for entering your place of rest. I am fleeing—"
Before I could finish, the creature looked at me.
And, even without saying anything, my voice simply… died. It wasn't a choice. It wasn't fear. It was as though the part of my body responsible for producing sound had been politely switched off — a switch I didn't even know existed, pressed by someone who didn't even need to move.
He closed his eyes. And opened them in a few seconds.
"I see… What interesting races. Pathetic, but full of energy… Why are you fleeing from such insects?"
Before I could answer — my voice back, released as silently as it was captured — he closed his eyes again. And opened them quickly.
"Well, well… You're the exception, not the rule… What an interesting thing. Well… it makes sense."
And again the creature plunged into an interminable monologue.
Morgana and Livina remained unconscious at my side — and, however much I wanted to do something, anything, my body seemed not to respond to my stimuli. It was surreal. I, who spent every day of that world calculating, acting, anticipating… reduced to a piece of furniture in the living room of a god.
What left me less anguished was that the millenary creature seemed little interested in me.
But, every time our gazes crossed, I felt — with a physical, animal certainty — that I could be killed right there. Not out of rage. Not out of decision. The way an elephant kills a flea: without thinking, without wanting to, without even registering that it happened. And that made me tremble like a green reed.
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"Now explain to me, little one… what are you doing with the key to my Home?"
Finally, after what seemed like centuries, the enormous dragon stopped speaking to itself — and spoke to me.
But his eyes still seemed stuck somewhere else, distant, as though my answer were just one more piece in a game he was playing on some board I couldn't see.
"It was… it was a gift I received after the Purge."
And then the creature smiled.
And its smile was like a sequence of punches inside my mind. Blood began to run from my mouth, from my nose, from my ears — hot, immediate — while the creature simply ignored the effect of its own joy on me, the same way we ignore the insects we kill while walking past.
"Hahaha… The Oasis still plays with its harvest… Disgusting creature."
That was surprising to hear. On more than one level.
Many people had something against the Oasis — I myself hated that place, which killed without shame and charged bodies and blood from all the races like an eternal tax. But speaking openly what you thought of the Oasis was a certificate of madness. Because it was clear, to anyone with half a brain, that the Oasis knew everything. Heard everything. Even the complaints. Speaking with so much rancor and hatred, out loud, could trigger something horrible — and no one ever had the courage to find out what.
And yet, that dragon treated the Oasis as though speaking of a younger brother. Reckless. Stupid. Irritating.
There was, still, another word stuck in my head, repeating beneath all the others: creature. He had called the Oasis a creature — like someone speaking of something alive. I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't even know where to begin.
That, in itself, was already something I couldn't understand.
But it told me a lot — a whole lot — about the power of those creatures.
✦ ✦ ✦
While the dragon assembled its own puzzle inside its mind, I began to notice its body — which appeared in glimpses, piece by piece, with each gesture of the colossus.
After so long stuck to that face, I finally managed to glimpse fragments of the rest. A curve of shoulder that displaced the darkness. An arm that rose and disappeared. Forms that passed too fast to be studied — and, among them, lines that didn't match any anatomy. Too straight. Too rigid. My mind, without my asking, went joining the fragments with all the rest: the question about what was happening out there. The place's own time. A god who didn't leave home.
And the pieces assembled a disquieting conclusion — which, to me, was the heart of everything happening there.
Before good sense could hold it back, my mouth spoke on its own the truth that unsettled me.
"Why are you trapped here…? Was it Tiamat who put you here?"
My words seemed something rotten in that dragon's mouth.
Because, for the first time, I saw much more than just his face move. The colossus gesticulated — and brought down a slap on the ground with its colossal claws. The impact tore me from my place, knocking me down and pushing me a good few meters backward, along with the unconscious bodies of Livina and Morgana, like leaves swept by a gust.
"HOW DARE YOU SPEAK THAT NAME?!"
The words came out like punches inside my mind.
And, even being few, I felt as though my brain would come undone with them. The scream rose up my mouth out of pure instinct — and I held it in my throat, swallowing pain with blood, while I watched the dragon rise completely, going up, up, until it almost touched the darkness of the sky…
Sky?
And it was only then that I truly realized: that place was no longer the gallery. It couldn't be. A creature of that size would never fit in there. I felt the firm ground beneath my hands — but, looking around, there was nothing anymore. No wall. No ceiling. No horizon. Just the void… and that creature, raised in the middle of it like the only real thing in the universe.
"You are pathetic. You can't even bear to hear my voice… but you dare to ask irritating questions."
Little by little, the risen dragon seemed to calm down — upon realizing that the only person it could talk to was practically dead in front of it.
And, deep down, I believed I had understood why. He was, probably, there alone for a long time. Too long. So long that even the audacity of an ant had become a pastime too interesting to be crushed.
"Sorr—ARGHH… Sorry… I don't know this Tiamat. I only—"
Blood ran down my mouth with each word — and, before my state, the creature finally seemed to calm down for good.
"Of course you don't know him. That disgusting one… crafty one… He would NEVER usurp all that is mine and imprison me in this place if I had been prepared. I would tear off each scale of that son of a bitch, one by one, with my claws… if I could."
And, while he gesticulated his own fury, I finally managed to hear something beyond those penetrating words.
A jingling. Of steel — or of something similar.
My eyes hunted the origin of the sound in the dark. And then I saw it. That great being also carried something unique with it: gigantic chains, of a material similar to metal — only dark as the night itself, drinking the light instead of reflecting it.
And I knew what that chain was.
It was the same one I had seen on the creature that stood beside Zaridan. Identical in shape, identical in the darkness — the only difference was that, this time, I could see it with much greater clarity. That was identical. And I had not the slightest idea what that meant.
I lost myself there for a while, investigating with my eyes each link that bound that colossus to the place — until I realized the dragon had stopped speaking.
He seemed to be thinking of something else now. As though he had had a glimpse of something — and, by the way his silence changed texture, it was a glimpse that frightened me far more than it comforted. Then, after what seemed an eternity, the creature finally approached me — the colossal face descending, descending, as though it were going to swallow me whole.
I didn't close my eyes.
Not out of courage. But because something, deep down, told me his intention wasn't that. There was something different in that approach — something calculated, almost… commercial. His face stopped a few meters from mine, close enough for each word to arrive with the weight of a tide.
"How about we make a deal… human?"
Human. I had never told him what I was. He never asked again. And, even so, somehow… he knew.