Fallen From The Heavens

The wind in the Plains of the Lion had long since stilled. A moment of silence came after the death of the manticore, and from that silence, something called to them—a pulse beneath the ground, rhythmic like a heartbeat, guiding them away from the battlefield. Kazin said nothing at first, only motioned with his staff. His eyes, sharp as ever, glinted under the heavy clouds.

"Your next trial lies below," Kazin finally said. His voice carried a weight it hadn't before. "The Second Key of Nature: water, reflection, deception. You will not breathe as you've known. You will not see what is real. You will not be the same when you return."

Rain and Oni no longer dreamed in color.

Somewhere between the world above and the abyssal realm below, their minds had begun to mirror the silence around them. Gone were the warm sunsets of the Plains of the Lion. Here, they awoke to shadow—dense, muted, constant. Time passed not by sun or moon, but by the thrum of their hearts and the tolling of an ancient bell, deep beneath the seabed, its echo unnatural and mournful.

[The First Week: Drowning the Breath]

The training began not with motion, but with stillness.

Kazin led them each morning into a shallow cove within the Abyss of Reflection. There, stone pillars jutted upward like broken ribs from the seafloor, forming a circle of protection and resonance. Within this ring, Kazin removed his robe, revealing a body etched not just with age, but with scars shaped like symbols—glyphs from a time before words. His chest bore a spiral carved in old runes. Oni recognized one of the symbols as belonging to the gargoyle sigil. Rain, another that matched the markings on Vermillion when in "Aureus."

"This is not a place you conquer," Kazin began. "This abyss holds no crown. It devours false kings and swallows borrowed power."

He placed his staff in the center of the circle, then motioned for them to kneel.

"You will not swim. You will become the current. You will not resist pressure. You will live inside it. Every resistance is death. Every illusion of control is your drowning."

He instructed them to close their eyes and place both palms flat against the seafloor. Then came the breathing.

"In through the mind—not the mouth."

"Out through the body—not the nose."

"Let the heartbeat guide the lungs."

"Anchor yourself in silence."

The ritual began.

For five hours each day, they did nothing but breathe. But "breathing" here had become something alien. There was no inhale as they'd known. The gills Kazin temporarily etched behind their ears—translucent membranes crafted from pressed magic and animal instinct—did not function like lungs. They pulsed. Filtered. Fought the current.

It was Rain who first cracked.

He stood suddenly, gasping, eyes wide, and grabbed his neck. His Uzuka sword began to glow crimson in protest, pulsing erratically, shifting between shades uncontrollably.

Kazin did not help him.

"Your fear has weight," he said, watching Rain stumble backward. "And you carry it like a sword you don't understand."

Rain collapsed. Oni moved to help but was stopped by a current Kazin summoned with one glance. It whipped the water like a storm, holding them all in place.

"This place will either hollow you—or make you deeper."

[The Second Week: The Body as Anchor]

By the second week, their bodies began to adapt.

Muscles tightened differently underwater. Breath no longer refreshed—they learned instead to store and release energy through their limbs. Every movement became a message. Every twitch of the foot could redirect water. Every blink a way to shift focus in the dark.

Kazin began posture training in complete silence. No instructions. No words. Only gestures.

He would take them to places where bioluminescent currents moved in slow spirals and force them to mimic them perfectly—hours at a time, arms extended, spinning silently with the water's spiral.

If one limb moved out of sync, the current would tear at their skin with needle-like pricks of pressure.

"All life down here is patient," Kazin finally said after one of their sessions. "Even death waits for the right moment. You must learn not to fight the rhythm—but to hide within it."

Rain began experimenting with spell weaving during this phase. He took Vermillion and whispered the names of the colors—not as weapons, but as prayers.

Caeruleum for precision—used to direct thin currents through fingers like invisible blades.

Aureus for weight—used to ground himself during the long meditation cycles.

Niger for spell shaping—allowing him to create hollow bubbles of sound or silence, bending sonar and vibrations around him.

He couldn't use triple casting yet—not without collapsing. But each failed attempt taught him more than the successes. His body pulsed with rejection each time he forced too much energy. His skin would tear from the inside. Blood would cloud around his ears and nose.

Oni, meanwhile, trained to suppress his own power.

The Pegasus abilities threatened to make him too light, too fast. Speed became a danger underwater. So Kazin forced him to train in magnetic pull. He'd attach massive stones to Oni's back and make him walk across the seabed with bent knees, shifting gravity to keep balance.

One slip, and the stones would crush him.

When Kazin finally allowed him to use the Gargoyle's grip again, he made him use it not in battle—but to dig. Each day, Oni tore new tunnels into the rock walls by hand—constructing breathing channels through sheer will.

"You build discipline like stone," Kazin told him. "With pain. With pressure. One fracture at a time."

[The Third and Fourth Weeks: Eyes Without Sight]

Kazin blindfolded them.

"We see too much. Now you must feel."

A new set of drills began. Without vision, Rain and Oni were made to navigate vast labyrinths of coral tunnels, filled with deceptive currents and collapsing walls. The Abyss of Reflection was not empty—it was alive, and it hated intruders.

Sharp clams snapped at their limbs.

Kelp twisted with willpower of its own.

Illusions began—not from Sirens, but from the water itself. It reflected not light, but memory.

Rain saw his mother. Smiling. Reaching.

Oni saw fire—his village burning. The scent of ash, somehow carried in salt.

These were hallucinations formed from memory-salt: ancient particles of grief held in water older than time.

Kazin warned them: "The sea never forgets. And it will never let you forget either. Train not to forget what is real—but to know the difference."

By the start of the second month, their physiology had changed. Gills adapted. Reflexes slowed above water, but below—they were monsters.

Kazin had them build entire defensive structures from coral and bone, using only their bare hands and subtle spellcasting.

Rain created light traps—using fragments of Cristilian crystals to disorient anything that approached with sonar.

Oni designed impact tunnels—pathways lined with explosive stone pods that could redirect predators into dead ends.

"You are not here to survive," Kazin said. "You are here to dominate without disturbing."

They were taught how to absorb currents into their bones.

How to slow their heart rate to near-death and use silence as a weapon.

How to steal the oxygen from a coral bed and ignite it into temporary combustion—turning stillness into chaos.

Rain eventually succeeded at triple casting underwater without bleeding out. When he chanted the three words together—Niger, Caeruleum, Aureus—his blade struck like lightning trapped in water. Vermillion's red hue flickered to a purple-black, and the surrounding sea split for a heartbeat.

Oni mastered the Gargoyle's "Grip of Weight" underwater—enabling him to create anchor points in shifting currents. He could stop an incoming tide with a single touch to the floor, his body turning into a fortress of immovable strength.

[Fifth Week: Voice of the Abyss]

The currents began to hum.

Not from Kazin's will, but from them. Rain and Oni had begun to imprint themselves into the water around them. Each movement, each breath, each vibration they released now lingered longer than it should, echoing subtly through the abyss. Kazin called it their Voices of the Deep.

"You are no longer guests," he said. "You are being remembered."

Kazin taught them how to whisper magic into the currents—not with incantations, but with intention.

Rain submerged himself in complete stillness and focused on Caeruleum. He visualized sharpness—not in his blade, but in concept: the sharpness of regret, of clarity, of a scream muffled by water. That vibration traveled, and ten meters away, a school of razorfish scattered in terror without seeing him.

Oni trained in sound nullification. By matching his internal resonance to the exact opposite frequency of a natural current, he could cancel sound. He walked the seabed without causing even a ripple of noise. Predators ignored him. Even the abyss forgot him.

Kazin said little during this time. His role was no longer to push—but to observe.

"They're slipping into it," he whispered to himself. "Becoming less man. More nature."

[Sixth Week: Mirror Blood]

It started with the cuts.

Rain gashed his leg on a jagged coral spine during a low-light pressure test. Oni tore a layer of skin from his knuckle while building a resonance tunnel. Both bled into the water.

But their blood didn't drift normally—it mirrored.

Tiny reflections of their own faces shimmered inside the blood trails. Not illusions. Not hallucinations. Fractured memories reacting to the abyss's magic.

Kazin pulled them aside. "The Second Key is not just water. It is reflection. And now, the water is beginning to know you."

He brought them to the Hall of the Still Mirror, a submerged chamber carved into the cliffside—a place where the water never moved. Suspended in its center was a mirror made of liquid, impossible and precise. It showed not the body, but the soul.

"You will bleed willingly here," Kazin said.

Rain cut his palm. Oni followed. The water held their blood in place, forming twin streaks that curved around the mirror and merged at its center.

Their reflections changed.

Rain saw his past self—the boy who hesitated. He saw the moment his mother screamed, the instant he froze. The guilt tore through him, more violent than blades.

Oni saw his future. A throne. But he was alone. Surrounded by statues of people he'd loved—and failed.

"You must anchor yourself to this," Kazin said. "You will fight monsters. But your true opponent will always be the version of yourself that fails."

They meditated in the Hall for days.

And when they left, their reflections no longer mimicked perfectly. They moved slightly behind—a delay, a warning, a sign that the abyss was always watching.

[Seventh Week: The Spine Ritual]

Kazin returned with a gift: a spine.

Not human. Not known. A long, curled vertebrae of some abyssal creature—black and glimmering with veins of crimson algae.

"This belonged to something that lived without fear," Kazin said. "You will make armor from it."

They carved the bone with magic-infused coral tools. Each etching a symbol of their identity, each vertebrae layered with a purpose:

Rain's armor was fluid, reactive. Built to move, not defend. It amplified spell channeling, with grooves that redirected aura into his arms and out through Vermillion.

Oni's armor was dense, silent. He layered it over his spine like a second skeleton. Each segment was charged with shock absorption, allowing him to withstand strikes that would break lesser warriors.

The ritual of bonding the armor to their nervous systems took hours. Painful. Necessary.

When complete, their backs were no longer wholly human. Their movements—no longer predictable.

They were becoming beasts of this realm.

[Eighth Week: Ritual of the Current Tongue]

The Abyss began speaking back.

It started subtly—Oni felt vibrations in the rocks beneath his palms during tunnel runs. Rain heard high-pitched frequencies when meditating in the resonance fields—words without words, meanings without language.

Kazin taught them to listen with their bones.

He instructed them to drink the Waters of Hekka—an ancient trench fluid that thinned the barrier between conscious and subconscious. It made them dream without sleep. And in those dreams, the abyss taught.

Rain dreamed of a creature with no skin, only nerves. It sang to him in pulses of pain. It taught him how to bend water into living tendrils—not summoned, but grown.

Oni dreamed of a mountain beneath the sea that breathed. It gave him the ability to sense intentions through the temperature of a current—to feel lies, aggression, sorrow, in water alone.

Their minds changed.

They no longer heard in words—but in meaning.

[Ninth Week: Forging the Abyssal Sign]

"You are nearly ready," Kazin said one day, and they both tensed. His voice carried an undertone of mourning.

"This next part, I cannot follow."

He brought them to a trench at the edge of the Abyss. The ground fell away into blackness, infinite and terrible. Kazin handed each of them a shard of obsidian, cut from the stone at the bottom of the world.

"You must forge your Abyssal Sign."

"What does that mean?" Rain asked, already feeling the obsidian's hum in his bones.

"It means," Kazin said, "you will give the abyss a part of yourself you do not want to lose."

Rain and Oni did not ask more.

They dove.

In the darkness of the trench, surrounded by silence and death-pressure, each was visited by a hallucination of their worst self.

Rain was offered the chance to forget his past. To become something new. To let go of guilt.

He refused.

Oni was offered a vision of ultimate control—a throne where no one could betray him.

He broke the vision's neck with his bare hands.

When they emerged, each held a symbol carved into the obsidian—a reflection of what they had denied the abyss.

Rain's was a spiral, breaking inward: He would never forget.

Oni's was a vertical slash: He would never be ruled.

Kazin wept when he saw them. Silently.

[Tenth Week: Return to the Outer Flow]

With their signs carved, armor bonded, minds adapted, and magic tuned to the abyss, they returned to the outer chambers—where Kazin tested them against constructs of water and memory.

Not illusions. Sentience given shape.

Rain fought a specter of his mother's final scream.

He did not cry.

He rewrote the scream into silence, wove it into the folds of his Caeruleum spell, and turned the sound into a lance that shattered the specter's core.

Oni faced a construct of his own ambition.

It fought like him. Thought like him. Used his weaknesses.

Oni crushed it with weight alone—his new anchor-grip cracked the floor beneath it and collapsed the chamber.

"You are not finished," Kazin said as they stood, victorious and bloodied. "But you are no longer prey."

[Eleventh and Twelfth Weeks: Stillness Before the Storm]

Now Kazin gave them freedom.

The final two weeks were theirs.

No lessons.

Only the sea.

Rain swam for miles, wordless, mapping new trenches with Vermillion as his compass. He practiced triple casting with silence as his fourth element—learning to erase sound before striking.

Oni built a fortress in the dead coral fields—his own sanctum. A place where he trained weight and stillness until he could disappear entirely from magical detection.

They met at dusk each day—though here, dusk was only a slightly darker silence. They sparred without words, testing everything they had become. Fights that once took minutes now ended in a heartbeat.

And then one day, the bell tolled again.

The same mournful, ancient tone from the seabed that had greeted them when they arrived.

This time, Kazin stood beneath it.

"They know you now," he said. "The Sirens. The Serpent. Tidus. They've felt your presence. Felt you change the flow of the abyss."

He looked at them—not as teacher to student—but as equal to equal.

"You are ready. But the Key is not yet yours."

Rain and Oni glanced at each other.

Rain's eyes were black with streaks of crimson. Oni's irises glowed faintly like magma cooled in water.

They nodded once.

Together.

"We're ready to take it."

[End of the Second Key: Three Months Complete]

The Trials of the Deep—The Sirens, the Serpent, and Tidus await.

But not until the Key decides if they are worthy.