NARAK: The Blood Covenant

"You opened the page, little Archivist. Now read what comes next."

The voice had echoed inside Nayla's skull, but it didn't fade.

It multiplied.

The light bulbs in the diner burst one by one, slowly, rhythmically. Cracks spidered across the tiled walls.

Customers froze mid-movement, mid-sentence. Some blinked out. Others stared at nothing. One man kept chewing, even though his food had vanished.

The creature on the street didn't walk. It slid. Across the ground. Over logic.

And with each movement, reality peeled backward, like a book page being turned in reverse.

Raka stood first, reaching for a weapon he didn't carry.

"What the hell is that?"

Vicki's eyes burned faintly, Avici's presence already coiling.

"It's... a hole in what's supposed to be there."

Daramahesa leapt to the edge of the table, fur bristling.

"It's a fragment. Not a ghost. Not an Oathbound. Just... a rupture that thinks it's alive."

Nayla's fingers hovered over the Archive. It was trembling.

"This isn't recorded."

"Because it's not meant to be," Arkana's calm voice echoed, frost layered with dread.

"This creature is between words."

Then—it turned its face. Not toward Vicki. Not toward Raka.

Toward Nayla.

"You heard me," it hissed in a voice made of static and scream. "You opened the Archive."

It lunged.

Reality screamed.

But just as its hand reached the glass, time folded.

Not stopped—folded.

The windows became mirrors. The floor became ocean. Everything shifted. Just for a blink. Just long enough.

And then—It was gone.

The food stall snapped back.

No shattered lights.

No customers missing.

No entity outside.

The menu boards flickered like nothing had happened.

But Nayla, Raka, and Vicki weren't fooled.

They had felt it. And they had heard it.

"A name that cannot be named," Daramahesa whispered.

"That was a test. Or a warning."

"From what?" Raka asked.

Daramahesa didn't answer. Not immediately.

"From something older than the Archive. Older than the Oathbound. Something that speaks in absence."

Later that night — back at Naraya Dharma's inner dormitory wing.

The trio gathered again in the Archive Room, deeper underground, lit only by shifting scripts and Archive Light.

Outside the glass walls, memory-locked glyphs rotated like orbiting moons.

Vicki leaned on the railing.

"So if that thing wasn't a ghost, wasn't an Oathbound, wasn't even real... then what do we call it?"

Nayla turned a page in the Archive. It was blank.

And yet, her pen moved.

Writing not from memory, but instinct.

"A name that was erased before it was born."

"Great," Vicki muttered. "Sounds like the kind of thing that eats universes for breakfast."

"Or summons worse," Daramahesa said.

Then—the air shifted.

The glyphs dimmed.

The Archive lights turned blue.

A new presence stirred in the Archive Room.

Soft at first. Like ocean foam against stone.

"We are not alone," Arkana said suddenly.

The air smelled like sea salt.

Like jasmine.

Like power carved from silence and water.

A figure began to form in the reflection of the Archive glass—

Graceful. Draped in green silk. Eyes as deep as the Southern Sea.

She did not speak.

Not yet.

But every instinct in their bodies screamed:

"Bow."

And when she stepped through the glass, not shattering it, but slipping through it, the entire Archive Room fell into an unnatural stillness.

No glyphs moved.

No pages turned.

Even Daramahesa stopped grooming his paw.

"You…" Nayla breathed.

The woman smiled, and it was not kind, but it was true.

"You may call me what your ancestors feared most," she said, voice laced with thunder and grace.

"But I prefer simply: Ratu Kidul."

Raka swallowed. "Like... the Nyi Roro Kidul?"

"I see my branding survived the centuries," she said dryly. "That's refreshing."

Suddenly, a heat pulsed through the room. From within Vicki.

"Of course it's her," came Avici's voice, sharp and unmistakably bitter.

"Should've known the ocean would slither into our affairs eventually."

"Peace, Avici," Arkana murmured from within Raka's mind. "You've tried to drown her before. Let's not revisit that."

"She provoked me."

"Her soldier insulted your haircut."

"It was a sacred flame crest!"

Nyi Roro Kidul turned toward Vicki and Raka, eyes narrowing slightly.

"Ah… so the Brothers of Flame and Frost live on in teenage hosts now. How humbling."

Vicki tilted his head. "You know them?"

She smiled, tilting her chin.

"Let's just say… your 'Oathbound' once attempted to turn my underwater palace into a bonfire because one of my advisors called him a 'glowing marshmallow with anger issues.'"

Raka choked back a laugh.

"I stand by that decision," Avici hissed.

"You were going to incinerate the sea," Arkana replied, ever unbothered.

"If the ocean didn't want to burn, it shouldn't have mocked me."

Nyi Roro Kidul raised a hand, brushing off the old tension like dust from silk.

"I am not here to reignite your petty flame-frost sibling drama."

"I came because something has begun to stir… and I no longer trust the deep to stay quiet."

She looked directly at Nayla.

"You opened the Forbidden Layer. That was no accident. The thing that spoke to you… was not one of us."

"Then what is it?" Nayla asked. "A ghost? A god?"

"No," the Queen said. "It is something else. A voice from the outer fringe of myth. A tale that was erased before it was born."

"The Untold," Arkana whispered.

Nyi Roro Kidul nodded.

"Precisely."

She stepped forward. With every movement, the Archive room seemed to bend slightly, as if space respected her arrival more than the law of physics.

"Three days ago, a rift opened off the southern coast. A fisherman sailed through fog… and came back mad."

"He kept screaming about a woman with no face who asked him his true name, then erased his voice."

"He died yesterday. Not from the curse. But because no one remembered how to speak to him."

Silence.

Daramahesa looked up slowly.

"The Untold are hunting anchors. That's... new."

Nyi Roro Kidul turned to all three of them now—eyes ancient, voice softer.

"If they're targeting names, bloodlines, memories… then soon, even you may not be safe.""You must come with me. There's something you need to see. Something the sea has tried to hide."

"And if we don't?" Vicki asked.

Her smile didn't reach her eyes.

"Then I hope you enjoy having your soul rewritten mid-sentence."

The sea didn't feel like water.

It felt like memory.

The moment they crossed into Nyi Roro Kidul's domain, through a shimmering portal formed by the twisting Archive glyphs and her own oceanic sigils, the world above dimmed like an old light being turned off.

The descent was slow.

Not through swimming.

Not walking.

But... sinking through layers of forgotten stories.

Each pulse of light in the deep flickered with a different face that no longer had a name.

The Sea Castle wasn't made of coral or stone.

It was carved from compressed memory threads of broken myths, collapsed oaths, forgotten songs.

Towers reached up like grasping hands.

Windows shimmered with whispers.

The gates were sealed by a language none of them could pronounce but somehow understood.

As they stepped through, the ocean around them shifted. They could breathe. They could walk.

But none of them could speak, until she allowed it.

Nyi Roro Kidul led the way, robes trailing behind her like sea foam cut from shadow.

Her presence pushed the water aside like royalty pushing through silk curtains.

"This castle," she finally said, voice echoing without sound, "was once part of the Original Archive. Before it split into what you call your 'Echo Core.'"

"You're telling me we're inside a pre-Archive structure?" Nayla whispered.

"Older than the Oathbound system. Older than my crown."

Daramahesa, perched on Nayla's shoulder now, looked visibly uncomfortable.

"Even I wasn't allowed here before. So congrats. You're all officially doomed."

"Wonderful," came Avici's dry, molten voice. "Another ancient place full of dead things and trauma."

"Sounds like your dating profile," Daramahesa muttered back.

"Flame me one more time, furball—"

"Please," Arkana interrupted, "Can we focus on the castle before someone combusts underwater."

Nyi Roro Kidul led them to a chamber deep in the heart of the castle.

It pulsed.

Not with light, with grief.

At the center of the room stood a pedestal.

Upon it, a void. A hollow. Not broken, removed. Like something had once stood there that reality refused to remember.

"This is where the Nameless Balance once anchored part of the ocean's will," she said. "It held the fabric of dream and tide in perfect silence."

"And now?" Vicki asked.

She looked him dead in the eye.

"Now it's being watched."

A sudden sound, like a name trying to form but choking on itself, rippled through the chamber.

The walls bent.

For a moment, the castle trembled with otherness.

Nayla turned to the Archive at her side.

It was bleeding ink.

Writing symbols in reverse.

One of them whispered.

"He's close."

"Who?" Raka asked.

"Not a ghost," Nayla said.

"Not a god. Just… something that shouldn't be here."

As they turned to leave, climbing the memory-threaded staircases, escorted back through the coral arches, the water behind them flickered.

From the deepest trench, past the Sea Castle's barrier, something moved.

A figure, barely visible.

Human in outline.

But wrong.

Its arms were too long.

Its neck tilted as if remembering pain it didn't experience.

No face. Just a mask of fractured glass.

Around its body, unreadable script curled like smoke—burning itself into nonexistence the moment you tried to see it.

It watched.

From far below.

It tilted its head as the trio vanished into the Archive gate.

Then—slowly—lifted a hand.

The Sea Castle groaned.

The glyphs on its outer walls rearranged themselves.

Into one word:

"SEEN."