The text in my hands was an aberration.
I had read difficult things before — ciphers that had been built not to be solved by those without the key, technical manuals written by people who had confused precision with illegibility, ancient philosophical treatises written by people who clearly didn't want to be understood and who had developed linguistic complexity as an entry barrier for those who didn't deserve the content. I had encountered texts that required knowledge of three dead languages to be read and that rewarded the effort with information that any reasonable person would communicate in a direct paragraph.
But that was different. If someone had told me the scrolls came from the Voynich* Manuscript, I wouldn't have doubted it for a second.
"Lord, this text is impossible to translate and even more impossible to understand."
"Don't worry, Morgana. Go train with Livina. I'll continue a little longer."
I didn't blame her — with the honesty of someone who had arrived at the same conclusion repeatedly over the course of the week and had continued regardless for a reason that was more stubbornness than confidence.
It had been almost a week since I had first opened the scrolls — with the anticipation of someone who had paid three thousand stones for something and who expected the price to be fair, who had hoped that what they had paid would make what they had received correspond to what they had expected. A week of nearly uninterrupted reading, sleeping only what was necessary for the body not to collapse in a way that made reading impossible for physical rather than textual reasons — which was the limit I had used as the criterion for stopping.
And what I had discovered in that time was, to be honest, disappointingly little.
What was clear: the language used was something resembling cuneiform of Sumerian origin — which didn't surprise me. I already knew the vampires had influenced the human world long before any official contact with the Oasis. But there were also fragments of the Bloodsucker language, which despite its structural complexity was surprisingly close to English in some patterns — as though one had left marks on the other over enough time to erase the evidence.
The three texts formed a trilogy — not in the way that one pointed to the next, but in the way that the whole was larger than the parts. There was something that only existed when the three were read as a unit. The same story, told in sequence, ancient enough to predate human existence. Perhaps more. The events I had managed to approximately date placed the text in a period that made most of what I had read about history completely irrelevant as context. The protagonist was the first Bloodsucker to enter the Oasis as a Lord — with the specificity of someone identified by function and not by name, which was data about how that race thought about identity in ancient periods.
What wasn't clear: practically everything else — with the scope that made "practically" irrelevant as a qualification.
"Cursed obsession with ancient writing."
The problem wasn't just the content — which was the part I had calculated would be the challenge and which had been the least of the problems. It was the form.
The text didn't follow a line. It jumped in time without warning, without context, without the basic courtesy of indicating where it was before jumping and where it was going afterward — as though the author had assumed that whoever would read it would already know the order, that the text was a review and not an introduction, that there was an audience that shared the context and therefore didn't need the context to be provided. I could resolve that — I would create a mental map, connect the dots, reconstruct the chronology gradually with the method I had developed for texts that didn't respect linear order. I had done that with more chaotic materials, though chaotic in different ways.
But there was a second problem that made the first exponentially worse — with the specific multiplication of two problems that didn't just add up, but that interacted in a way that each made the other more difficult than it would have been alone.
They hadn't written in prose.
They had written in verse.
The idea, probably, was to tell the adventure in sung form — an ancient tradition in many cultures, a way of preserving memory through musicality that made memory harder to alter than written text because musicality had structure that detected alteration before the alteration was complete. The problem was that the author had been more concerned with phonetic structure than with any concrete meaning. It was like a song where the melody was perfect and the lyrics didn't need to mean anything, as long as they rhymed — where the composer had arrived at the conclusion that the function of the lyrics was to sustain the melody and not to communicate what the melody was framing.
"Why does your race have to be so exotic."
It wasn't a question. It was a statement.
Temporal jumps without context, combined with verses that prioritized sound over meaning, transformed that less into an adventure text — which was what I had bought, what the price had promised — and more into a pile of rhyming sentences that occasionally contained useful information buried amid structure that had been designed to be beautiful before being useful.
The question was finding that information — which existed, because the price communicated that what had been paid for existed to be found — before my sanity decided to leave along with it.
✦
After hours wandering through that sea of letters — with the navigation of someone who had stopped waiting for the map to be provided and had started building the map while navigating — I found two verses that made everything worth it.
Not gradually, which would have been the way the accumulated effort should have produced. Suddenly, with the quality of data that had arrived before I finished processing that it had arrived.
In the stillness of the night, there stood the queen,
Of complex beauty, white veil drawn close,
The sweet bite, so fatal and so mean,
Yet from her finest work did I come to nourish most.
O queen of cyan, save me and allow,
That I find salvation in your gaze,
That Vrala's grace will honor now,
And shelter me through these darkened days.
I stopped.
Read again.
The conclusion had arrived correctly.
The queen was a clear reference to the Yokai — the complex beauty I had myself observed in the clearing, that white presence suspended between the filaments that had communicated beauty before communicating threat. The white veil that was the web, which I had described to myself with exactly that vocabulary before reading the verse. The sweet bite was the bond — the process I had gone through that had established the connection with Arachne.
The salvation was the intent — using that bond in the same way I intended to use it now.
Vrala was the name of the main deity of the Bloodsuckers — with the reference I had found in other texts and had catalogued as cultural data before understanding it was relevant data. A plea for help to the divinity, at the moment the author had understood they had arrived at a point where what they could do had been exhausted and what remained was whatever lay beyond what they could do.
I kept looking at the verse for a long moment.
It was strange. Profoundly strange — with the specific strangeness of a coincidence that was too large to be a coincidence but that had no other available category to be transferred to.
Someone from that race — ancient, arrogant, with millennia of history and tradition and the specific certainty of a race that had arrived much earlier than me at everything I had arrived at recently — had had exactly the same idea I had. Without knowing the result, because if they had known the result they wouldn't have needed a plea to the divinity. Without having history at their side showing what worked and what didn't. Just a glimpse, a theory, and enough faith to risk their own life based on it — which was the kind of bet that was only possible when what you had to lose was less frightening than what you had to gain.
"Alright, you were a genius. I accept."
I paused.
"But then what? What did you do?"
✦
The text returned to chaos after those verses — with the specific cruelty of a text that had given enough to create expectation and had withdrawn the context that would have made the expectation possible to verify. More temporal jumps that took me to periods I still hadn't managed to date. More phonetic structure over concrete meaning, with the author returning to the habit they had briefly interrupted for the two verses that had made the week worthwhile.
I continued — mapping connections, ignoring what didn't fit for lack of context to fit it, marking what fit too well to be coincidence with the marking of someone who had developed a system for that text specifically because the text had demanded a system.
A few hours later, it reappeared.
Another temporal jump — but this time different from the previous ones, with the quality of a jump that had entered a period I had already mapped. It was a return. The author had returned to the period of discovery, to the moment of crisis, to the point where the theory had been tested and the cost had been real — the difference between theory and application arriving in those verses with the honesty of someone who had been through both.
On the last line, almost hidden among the pleas to the divinity — as though it had been placed there without the intention of being found, or with the intention of being found only by those who had arrived with enough attention to notice:
Allow me to see the sun, even if just a glimpse,
The weariness devours me slowly,
While I am emptied beneath the weight of custom.
The shadows in my body consume me unchecked,
Vrala, allow me to survive the chance,
Vrala, allow me to survive the blows,
Vrala, allow me out of this impasse.
Vrala, allow me to feed the children,
Vrala, allow me,
Allow me.
In the stillness, she came — blood-sucker among the rails.
I stopped at the last line with the stop of someone who had found something they had been waiting to find without knowing they were waiting.
Most would read it and move on — with the reading speed that produced an obvious connection and continued forward. Blood-sucker had interpretations too obvious to awaken curiosity in those who hadn't arrived with the context I had arrived with — it was a common archetype in Bloodsucker culture, a reference to creatures that resembled them in behavior and which they venerated as semi-divine figures, with the kind of cult that races developed for what resembled them in ways that made them more than they were. It made sense in a text like this, placed exactly where it had been placed.
But I had read enough — over the course of the week and over months before the week — to know that texts in the Oasis didn't waste words. Every choice had weight that I had learned to calibrate. And that specific choice, at that specific moment — right after asking the divinity to let him feed the children, which was a request that presupposed there were children, that there was responsibility beyond the survivor themselves — was too specific to be decorative.
There was something there, with the specific certainty of data that existed before being confirmed.
"Zeus, summarize the capabilities of the Asanbosam creature."
"Understood."
[Asanbosam — Creature that hides in trees and latches onto creatures that pass beneath it. Level E. Known for parasitizing hosts, offering great power in exchange for progressively reduced sanity and ferocity. Extremely rare in the human kingdom. Extremely common in the Eastern kingdoms, with isolated cases in the Central region. Data still under analysis. Oldest recorded nickname: Blood-Sucker.]
The pieces began to move.
Not gradually — which would have been the way reasoning normally produced results, with the construction of each element before the next. It was like someone pushing the last piece of a domino — it fell into place and dragged all the others with it, each connection clicking in a sequence I couldn't stop even if I wanted to, that existed before I finished deciding it existed.
"Of course. How could I have been so stupid."
The East.
The East was home to many races — with the diversity I had catalogued as geographical data and had stopped there, without pulling the thread that that data could pull. But it was also the preferred territory of the Bloodsuckers — a place they described as blessed, sacred, chosen by the ancestors, with the language of a place that had been selected for a reason that hadn't been communicated but was communicated by the intensity with which the selection had been made. I had found that too vague to mean anything concrete, the kind of sacred language that races used for places that had been chosen before any specific reason was necessary to justify the choice.
It wasn't vague. It was strategic — with the specific strategy of concealing the real reason beneath the declared reason, of protecting the relevant data beneath the narrative that made the data irrelevant to those who didn't know what to look for.
The East had the largest concentration of Asanbosam in the entire Oasis.
Asanbosam when hosted had a very specific side effect: it forced the host to produce blood in excess while feeding. The body of the parasitized entered a spiral. That biological imbalance generated a permanent hunger, a growing ferocity, a relentless search for sustenance. That was what made the infected dangerous. That was what made them uncontrollable.
That was what made them useful — with the specific logic of something that had been identified as a problem and had been recalibrated as a tool.
A creature infected by Asanbosam didn't need to be killed to provide blood. It needed to be kept alive. Fed enough to keep producing, with the specific balance of quantity that sustained the cycle without exhausting it. Contained enough not to destroy everything around it — which was the variable that made the model difficult and that had required the solution the Yokai had provided, because a Yokai could contain what the parasitized creature's excess blood produced.
It was cruel — there was no other word for it, and I wasn't willing to use another word when that one was correct. But it was functional. And in the Oasis, functional frequently beat ethical with the consistency of data that had been verified repeatedly in different contexts.
The theory completed itself thus: the infected creature became a source. A living reservoir — with the permanence of something that had been transformed into a function before being treated as a creature, that had been integrated into a system before the question of integration was raised. And the Yokai — which needed blood to exist, to grow, to feed the colony that was what made it a Yokai rather than just a spider — drank directly from that source. Simple. Brutal. Efficient — with the three qualities that rarely existed together and that, when they did, communicated that it had been thought through by an intelligent and ancient mind.
The only remaining question was obvious.
"What creature could withstand that sacrifice?"
It couldn't be something weak — with the certainty that came from understanding what the Asanbosam produced in the host and calculating what that production would demand of the creature. The excessive blood production combined with the growing ferocity of the parasitized would destroy any smaller creature in days.
It needed to be something large. Something built to withstand constant pressure without breaking — not momentary resistance, but process resistance, of something that had been developed to exist under adverse conditions for long enough that the moment became irrelevant as a measure. And that ideally had some kind of magical recovery capability that compensated for what was being withdrawn before what was being withdrawn reached the limit.
And then I remembered.
There was something I had left behind without checking. Something from the Colosseum — a prize I had forgotten in the chaos of what had happened afterward, that had remained as an uncollected item while I had processed what it had cost to get there.
I wasn't sure I deserved it — with the doubt that existed when what had been won had been won by a path I hadn't yet finished completely processing. I wasn't sure it was still there, whether there was a deadline I had missed, whether there was a condition that had expired.
But I needed to find out — with the specific urgency of data that had become relevant and that couldn't be confirmed without going to the place where the confirmation existed.
I got up before finishing the thought.
✦
"My Lord… Did you discover something?"
"Lord, those dark circles. You need to rest, yesterday."
"Girls, don't worry. I found it. But we need to leave now."
Their reaction was immediate.
I understood why. From an external point of view — from those who had watched the last seven days and had observed the progressive state of someone who had slept the minimum and read the maximum — what I was saying sounded like madness in a specific way: the madness of someone who had reached the limit of exhaustion and had started finding patterns that were the product of exhaustion and not of the text. It was the kind of conclusion I myself would have arrived at if I had been observing from the outside.
But it was what it was. I had the hypothesis — with the solidity that came from each piece having found the right place rather than having been forced into a place that wasn't its own. I just needed to test it.
"Where are we going, Lord?"
"To the Colosseum."
Morgana froze.
I saw something the Colosseum had left in her that she hadn't yet fully processed, that existed as pending data that time was working on without her having asked it to work.
But this wasn't the moment — with the clarity of someone who had learned to distinguish between what needed to be addressed now and what needed space before it could be addressed.
"I'm ready."
Livina stepped forward.
"But you need to rest. You're a wreck." — Morgana said, with the tone of someone being honest and knowing that the honesty wouldn't change what had been decided but that needed to be said regardless.
"Don't worry. We're only going to try to collect a prize."
Morgana's eyes opened.
She had understood — with the recognition of someone who had been present at the moment the prize had existed as a possibility and who had connected what I was saying with what had been pending since then.
✦
The Colosseum was familiar in a strange way.
I had been there few times. The kind of place that challenges you that way leaves a mark — you learn every crack, every wall, every detail that your brain registers without your asking, because in extreme stress situations the brain registers everything as potentially relevant and archives without asking whether you wanted it archived.
The familiarity was of that kind — not of a place I had frequented, but of a place that had been significant enough for the memory to have done the work without being instructed to do it.
The walls were empty with the absence of people that made the space more visible than it would be full. The board with scrolls pinned still there — with the consistency of something that had been built to last longer than the individual reasons that brought each person to it. The jar full to the brim, resisting time with the stubbornness of things that aren't in a hurry.
I didn't even look at the jar — with the choice of someone who had arrived with a specific objective and who didn't want attention divided before the objective was verified.
"Lord… The scroll. It's—"
Morgana was the first to see it.
Among several open scrolls laid out in the arrangement of things that had been left where they had been used, a golden one stood out — glowing with an intensity that didn't need light to exist, that had been designed to be found by the recipient regardless of lighting conditions.
I had won. The first time I finished a mission, I had believed the prize was delivered automatically upon leaving. But I had probably been wrong — someone from the group had touched the board and collected it without realizing, with the specific distraction of someone who had survived something but wasn't yet far from the danger or the trauma.
Probably Sabina, who had been leaning against the wall near the mission board at that time — with the positioning that had stayed in memory not because it had been significant at the moment, but because it had been the last positioning before what had happened afterward. And with everything that had come after, I had buried the event at the back of my mind — the way the mind buried things it wasn't yet ready to process, that it filed away for when the context was different and the processing capacity was greater.
No more.
Morgana advanced and took the scroll.
"Lord, it says here that—"
"Don't worry, Morgana. I'm being notified."
The screen appeared before me — with the usual interface, with the clinical objectivity of a system that didn't distinguish between moments of more or less weight, that treated every result with the same neutrality.
[ Congratulations — The prize for the arena winner is available. Do you wish to receive it in stable 1 or 2? Do you wish to register the victory? ]
"Deliver to stable 2. No need to register the victory."
I soon felt an energy fill my body — with the specific quality of a new connection I had learned to recognize over the months in the Oasis, that arrived before consciousness finished processing what had been received. A new connection. I recognized it immediately.
He had arrived.
I left the Colosseum quickly, with Morgana and Livina following my steps with the speed of those who had understood there was something I needed to see and who had decided that seeing it together was what they wanted to do.
✦
When I arrived at the stable, the Urskra were restless.
Not with the restlessness of threat — which I had learned to distinguish by the type of movement and the direction of attention. With the restlessness of presence — of something that had arrived that was significant enough to alter the state of the environment before being seen, that had communicated its arrival through the effect it produced on those already there before any direct observation was possible.
Even Pegasus — who rarely showed interest in anything beyond its own space, who had developed the indifference of a creature that had arrived at the conclusion that most things weren't sufficiently interesting to merit the cost of showing interest — was alert, with eyes fixed on the back of the stable with an expression I had never seen in it before. An expression that wasn't fear and wasn't curiosity — it was recognition of scale, the kind that appeared when something had arrived that was categorically different from what had been there before.
That made sense.
We were talking about a creature at the peak of level B, almost entering the leagues of creatures that existed in their own category, that had surpassed what level B had been created to contain. The kind of presence that other creatures felt before seeing.
I advanced to the back of the stable.
It was small. Smaller than I expected for everything it represented — with the specific difference between presence and size that some creatures demonstrated and that made expectation based on size inadequate as preparation for what was there.
Snow-white fur — with the whiteness that wasn't the absence of color but was color in itself, that had been developed to the point where any comparison with what was white in other creatures was a comparison of scale and not of kind. Without a single mark. Without a shadow. The kind of absence of imperfection that communicated intent before communicating origin — that had been that way from the beginning and hadn't come to be that way through a process.
It had its back to me.
Then it turned its head — nearly one hundred and eighty degrees, with the naturalness of someone who had always done that, for whom that angle was a normal angle that hadn't required adaptation. And looked at me with eyes I was trying to categorize before I had finished receiving them.
"Welcome."
* The Voynich Manuscript is a 15th-century handwritten book written in an unknown language that nobody has ever managed to decipher — not historians, linguists, or modern computers. After 600 years, it remains the most mysterious book in the world.