“Who are you?” the cultist demanded, clenching her blood-stained teeth. “This attack will not go unnoticed. What sect are you with?”

Cyril stared at her. In truth, he had never seen someone look so enraged, so defiant. Like most cultivators that had ascended to her level, her close attunement to the world had refined her beauty. Her smooth features and crystal blue eyes contrasted with her mask of blood and rage.

Some of his numb certainty faded at the sight of her. She didn’t look much older than him, though cultivation also maintained one’s youth; her true age may well have been over a century old. While he could very well see himself in her shoes if a stranger attacked his own tribe, such rational empathy wouldn’t prevent him from taking action.

The cultists of Behemoth and Leviathan had been at war as long as humans had worshipped the divine Titans. They followed in the footsteps of their idols, genuflecting upon the altar of violence.

“I recognize your magic,” she said, using the westerner term for qi manipulation. “Gravity, is it? And that armor. One of the lost scions of Fissure, then?”

Cyril frowned.

A memory broke to the surface of his thoughts, clearer and more focused than the Titan's usual perspective: a cultivator in blue robes, hovering in front of Behemoth’s right eye, as tiny as a drop of water in scale. The Titan almost never remembered a human’s face, but this one had been carved into its memory. A man terrible and beautiful beyond comprehension, his features sharp and arrogant in a way that demanded respect. He absolutely reeked of Leviathan’s qi.

As advanced as the man’s cultivation level must have been, he could not hope to truly harm Behemoth, a feat that even its counterparts struggled to accomplish.

So, instead, the cultivator had launched a horrifying assault upon Fissure, freezing the entire city under a layer of permafrost and launching one cataclysmic glacier after another in the seconds before Behemoth’s ponderous mind reacted. Before facing the tribulation of the Titan’s wrath, the man vanished as suddenly as he had appeared. Like water through a clenched fist, he slipped through the physical and conceptual barriers Behemoth threw up to imprison him.

Cyril could tell that Behemoth had held this memory back from his conscious awareness until now. Not deliberately, but because even the divine golem was capable of hiding from terrible thoughts. Cyril still hadn’t managed to meditate upon the memories of his fight with Hunger-Made-Alive, and that trauma paled in comparison to the slaughter of thousands of devout followers.

“I’m not answering your questions,” said Cyril. “How long have you been conducting operations in this region?”

The woman bared her teeth at him. “I don’t know this barbaric language well. Use easier words. Strange. Until now, I didn’t even know there was any Asteki nobility in Fissure.”

Cyril tilted his head to the side before remembering that ‘Asteki’ was the general term westerners used for natives of the desert.

He begrudgingly cast the Translate Cantrip, channeling Knowledge qi into the small channels around his mouth. Like all techniques from the Dominion of Knowledge, it required a surprising expenditure of qi, even with his augmented core. Since his prior interactions in the past months had been solely with spirits that innately understood all languages, he hadn’t needed to use this function of the technique before. He repeated his question in the universal tongue of spirits.

The cultist’s eyes widened slightly in surprise. She quickly banished the expression and lifted her chin in defiance. “I won’t tell you anything. Are you planning on torturing me for information?”

Cyril shook his head in disgust.

“What?” she said. “Are you upset I would think that about you? Is that worse than being a murderer?”

“Your junior attacked me first.”

“Gregor was what you would call a Second Sphere initiate in the Early Condensation Stage. Do you have no honor, that you would kill him for a small thing? Like you killed Johan for daring to question you?”

Cyril opened his mouth to respond, but he realized he needed to be careful not to reveal too much information about himself. Especially his true connection with Behemoth. There was no way for them to realize he was bonded to the Titan, and the news would spread like wildfire throughout the Cult of Leviathan. The cultist was making him want to respond defensively, to justify his actions to her. Worse, he realized that she was likely stalling for time. He doubted maintaining the oases was a three-person operation.

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“Awfully quiet, aren’t you?” she said, sneering at him. The bluster, now that he realized her intentions, seemed awfully transparent.

“I’ll admit I acted rashly in the heat of the moment,” Cyril conceded. “However, what’s done is done. Don’t expect any tears from me on the matter. Answer my questions, and you may still avoid your companion's fate.”

In truth, he wasn’t sure what to do with her. The ethics instilled upon him by his tribe harshly condemned the mistreatment of prisoners, but the idea of leaving her behind after killing the others seemed illogical to him.

What was he supposed to do, drag her through the desert and have his family judge her? The moment he took his eyes off a slippery cultivator like her, she would escape his grasp.

His words, however, did seem to have some effect on her. All cultivators were ultimately selfish individuals, bonding with spirits to subvert their own meager Destinies. The idea that she may still live took some of the fight out of her, or at least reassured her that she had time for a rescue. Given her earlier defiance and how easily she capitulated, he didn't like the potential cause of her somewhat helpful attitude adjustment.

“We’ve been in the desert for five years now.” The cultist refused to make eye contact, and her voice dripped with resentment.

“What is the date, by my people’s reckoning?”

Her gaze quickly flicked up at him, her sharp blue eyes revealing a hint of intrigue at the question. “I don’t know what calendar your people use.”

Cyril shook his head. More and more, he felt like this interrogation was being turned back on him. That his answers, and his silences, had told her more about him than he had learned about her and the cult’s purpose.

“Are you doing this with permission from the tribes, and if so, from who?” he asked.

The cultist wiped the trails of blood from beneath her eyes with the back of her hand. The flow appeared to have stopped. Water cultivators were notoriously tricky and quick to recover, the diametric opposite of most who followed the path of Earth. While some cultivators practiced paradoxical techniques, like the one employed by the sandwyrm that dragged him beneath the desert like it was swimming through an ocean of sand, most conformed to the innate strengths of their elements.

“There was an agreement with some of the locals,” she said. “That information isn’t shared with me. All I know is some of your people grew tired of having no roots, and they accepted our oases and settlements with open arms.”

Cyril wanted to deny the possibility, to assert that the desert folk were nomads, but in truth, the ways of the west held some appeal. Many of his people--himself included--found their culture mysterious and fascinating, and wise men debated the benefits of the nomadic lifestyle with no obvious conclusion outside of ‘tradition.’ The Wandering Phoenix Tribe had their preference displayed within their very name, but even his own mother had absently wondered aloud about clinging to old habits that had outlived their usefulness.

He bit down the next question he wanted to ask, which was whether she recognized the name of his tribe. That particular question would be a death sentence for his people. They were one of the most respected families within the desert, but since they had avoided open war for so long, their unofficial placement relied on the reputation of his mother and elder siblings.

In comparison, the Cult of Leviathan had a decent chance of wiping out the entire desert even if by some miracle they united into one army. If the cultivator who obliterated Fissure showed his face, he could have handled many of them alone, though he probably wouldn’t succeed on his own. In enough numbers, quantity beat quality.

There were also several legends about old monsters in secluded cultivation that would emerge if the desert faced such a catastrophe. He had doubted their veracity before, but after being dragged down into the ruins of Beljeza, his estimation of the mysteries within his homeland had received a healthy boost.

Cyril thought he was beginning to better understand why he had bonded with Behemoth, though their specific oath eluded him. In a way, the Titan of Earth was the oldest of all monsters, and had an ancient connection to the desert. There must be a reason that it chose to bond with someone with his origins, as well as Leviathan’s infiltration of the region.

Before he could continue his interrogation, he noticed a peculiar event taking place above. The sky shimmered. A series of vast ripples spread throughout the heavens, like a stone had been dropped into a placid lake. Then the blue expanse of the sky became a mirror, perfectly reflecting the world below, down to the most minute detail. Cyril even saw a replica of himself, staring down at him in turn.

A feeling of dread settled over him. He had been right. The cultist had been stalling for time, though he doubted he could have escaped this being even if he fled immediately after his attack on the oasis. Whatever technique was being used stretched from horizon to horizon.

As he watched, the figure of a woman blossomed into being overhead, seemingly right at the division line between world and reflection. In a bizarre symmetric growth, her body emerged from itself, starting from a pair of opposing heads that elongated into twin bodies, connected foot to foot.

She was, of course, a stunning beauty, though the truths of reality etched onto her physical form were not quite so refined as the cultivator that had destroyed Fissure. Bolts of turquoise silk revolved around her like a robe formed from disconnected strips of cloth, obscuring most of her body. Her skin was like marble, and a sheet of long silver hair whipped about in the currents of her aura, so dense that it affected the material world directly. Sapphire and aquamarine gems dangled from her neck, her wrists, her ankles, her fingers, most of them set within ivory and silver jewelry, though some of them appeared to be embedded within her flesh. In her hands, she clasped an ornate staff, topped with a blue ring in the shape of an ouroboros.

Cyril clenched his fist at the sight of her. While he had made short work of that man, Johan, who had been in the Foundation realm, he knew from the first moment he laid eyes on her that she was far beyond him. Even with Behemoth augmenting his vision, he couldn’t perceive her spirit beyond the aura raging off of her like a bonfire.

“May I have the pleasure of introducing you to my elder,” said the cultist, her voice smug with a mixture of awe and pleasure, “the Lady Firouza.”