Then he saw it... everyone saw it.

Maddie inhaled sharply.

"Oh my fucking freaking big cock Dragon!"

Every head turned toward her.

Maddie did not give a rat’s fuck.

Her eyes were fixed on the distance, wide, bright, utterly shameless in their shock. Patricia, as the teacher among these gloriously ungoverned children, clearly felt the instinctive need to correct her.

Unfortunately, she too had seen what Maddie saw, and the correction died in a far more reverent form.

"Oh my gods."

Which, really, was not much better.

Swearing to the gods was an understatement for what stood beyond the city, beyond the hotel’s shadow, beyond the ordinary reach of even this absurd tower.

"You live there?" Valentina asked, her hand finding Patricia’s without conscious thought.

Patricia held it back just as tightly.

Maya smiled softly.

Beyond the impossible distance, beyond the wide sweep of Hell’s Paradise Island and the endless arrogance of its forest, a white mansion sat atop a hill.

No.

Not simply sat but...

Floated.

At least, that was the illusion.

The mansion was enormous, yet elegant, its white walls gleaming beneath the morning sun with the serene glow of something both ancient and untouched. Its rooflines rose in graceful peaks, sharp yet delicate, and the highest towers shimmered through the distance like marble carved out of moonlight.

Beneath the hill, an impenetrable white fog wrapped around the slope so completely that half the land vanished, leaving only the upper rise and the mansion visible above the mist. It gave the impossible impression that both hill and house had been lifted from the earth and set adrift over a hidden sea of cloud.

Around it, the forest offered absolute protection...

...the endless forest surrounding the hill stood like a living shield, ancient, proud and impenetrable, its canopy forming dark waves around the white fog as it was daring anything to approach. No road could be seen. No path. No gate or any visible line of access.

Only the mansion, the floating hill, the fog, and the forest guarding it like a beast asleep with one eye open.

Phei stared.

He had never seen it before; not once no matter how many times he stood here watching city and the three celestial bodies that governed the island.

And that was impossible.

A mansion like that could not simply exist within sight of Infinity Chaos Hotel without being noticed. Not by him. Not by Eira or by the people who lived in rooms with walls of glass and eyes trained to devour secrets.

Yet there it was, white and still and sovereign in the morning light, as if it had always been there and had only now received permission to exist.

As if Maya had pointed, and the world had obeyed.

Sierra’s voice came softly from beside him. "It was hidden until you showed it to us, wasn’t it?"

Maya laughed, her sound was light, but not quite innocent enough:

"Sierra, stop being ridiculous."

Phei turned his head slightly but Maya kept smiling, before anyone could ask more, the doors opened behind them.

The room changed.

Not loudly like thunder.

Worse...

The air thickened.

The sunlight lost confidence first. It did not dim, not exactly, but something in it seemed to hesitate, as if the gold pouring through the glass had suddenly remembered that brightness was a local custom, not a universal law before the warmth in the room cooled at the edges.

A pressure entered before the girl did, low and ancient, like the first breath from the mouth of a tomb buried under three worlds.

The girls felt it one by one. Conversation died without being ordered; Cassiopeia’s eyes sharpened and Victoria’s body went still. Delilah turned slowly as she watched with a smile while Nastya’s lips parted.

Maddie’s smile vanished replaced but with an even wider but wary one.

Phei felt the shiver crawl up his spine...

...Sienna Ryujin Tiamat strolled in.

She moved as if nothing in the room was worth hurrying for. Small, beautiful, composed, seventeen in body and far older in presence, she crossed the threshold with hands relaxed at her sides and silver-dark elegance folded around her like a secret no one sane would force open.

But it was not her posture that struck him...

...Not her beauty or even the black-violet miasma that clung to her presence like the memory of a world that had died screaming.

It was her eyes...

’They have changed completely.’ Phei realized.

Before, Sienna’s power had leaked through her like something too vast for the vessel, black-violet Nether Energy bleeding into the world in fragments, uncontrolled and half-contained, a girl carrying a storm behind her ribs and her eyes then were only starting to change.

But now her eyes were violet in a way Phei had no word for. Not pretty violet; True violet like sovereign violet; it was the color of a goddess remembering her own face.

The color of a wound in existence deciding it was beautiful.

Around her, the air carried the thick miasmic presence of a world-ending abyss.

’Death.’

Not death as mortals understood it as corpses, graves and endings written politely on stone.

It was older. Wetter. Deeper as far as Phei could tell with his limited knowledge about the concept of death.

Phei’s senses brushed the edge of it and recoiled before his mind could tell them to behave.

He did not know when he moved.

Only that he had...

One step back...

...then another.

Silence.

The dragon had taken two steps back from Sienna.

Phei’s breath caught, and the realization hit harder than the pressure itself. His body had moved without asking him. His instincts, bones and soul had recognized something before the boy inside him could remember cousin, family, Sienna.

Across the room, everyone saw it.

Sienna saw it too.

For one tiny moment, something almost human passed behind those impossible violet eyes.

Then it vanished.

The Nether Goddess had arrived.

And she was no longer the girl with leaking powers.