They met where distance had no opinion—inside the vision hall woven from dragon-breath, a circle of seven kinds of weather for light.
Vera of the Storm Heights arrived like clipped thunder, Tempest looming, her words pressure-systems. Kael of the Obsidian School made the floor heavy with Stonejaw's weight. Saphira of the Deep Reefs let Seawing's tide ripple the edges. Rashan of the Ember Marches burned his seat into shape; Flarefang's molten claws tapped unseen stone. Nyra of the Dusk City was already there, Nightshade draping feathers of shadow. Lira of the Crystal Spire entered as geometry, Sunscale's prisms cutting glare into meaning. Joren of the Thunder Plains came last, Thundermaw's scarred breath rolling once like dice on stone.
"Order," Vera said. Storms love rules until they must be the rule.
Reports threaded the circle. A red flicker refusing gravity by inches. Mist behaving like a maze, then a hand. A sovereign serpent broken; a swarm scattered. Bubbles where none should hold. Frost where no phoenix stood. Bond-signatures knitting and unknitting. Improvisations that repeated until they looked like design.
"The world corrects errors," Vera said, glass-hard. "A koi that forgot to be prey will be erased, as all mistakes are."
"Not a carp," Saphira corrected, voice hooked with amusement. "A koi. The flavor matters."
"Soup-fish luck," Rashan grunted. "It climbed higher than it should. The mountain will remind it."
"Illusion," Kael said, stone on stone. "Tampered scrying. Witnesses lied. A Tier One defeat is impossible."
"Impossible," Vera echoed.
"Delicious when it isn't," Saphira purred.
"Patterns," Nyra breathed. Warning, or promise.
"Observed anomalies," Lira said. "Real-time hybridization. Non-scaffolded learning. Recurring improvisation consistent with pattern."
"Improvisation is error repeated twice," Kael rumbled.
Rashan flexed heat. "Give me numbers. Bees left. Breaths left in the Tamer. Distance to failure."
"Conclusion," Vera said, the circle happy to be told what it already wanted. "Observe. Do not intervene. A doomed but instructive ascent."
"Deliciously absurd," Saphira added.
"Impossible," Kael repeated, satisfied.
"Soup-fish luck," Rashan agreed.
"Impossible now," Lira recorded, ledgers preferring pillars.
"And not never," Joren said lazily—like a coin flipped for the sound, not the face.
The link dimmed. Dragons turned away. Presence faded.
—
Joren stayed. Silence has tells, and this one said two seats had hidden weight. He didn't ask politely.
To Lira: No omissions. Bring what you have. Now.
To Nyra: No shadows. If you're hiding one, I'll drag it up.
Nyra answered first, dusk sliding into his skull: Come where thoughts don't echo.
Lira followed with a mark. With her, punctuation was a contract.
They met in a smaller hall: three chairs, a bare table, light that showed hands without flattering faces. Joren didn't sit. Thundermaw's presence made the floor honest.
"Show me," he said.
Nyra set down a smoke-colored book bound with hair-thread. Lira's hand already claimed it.
"Pre-human," she said. "Legend, not history. But authentic."
"Legends are noise unless aimed," Joren growled. "Aim it."
Pages opened. Script that argued with itself bent under Sunscale's prism. Nyra's translation slid across.
⟦ …path to the Origin Temple… ⟧
⟦ …the Five will awaken and reset the world… ⟧
⟦ …only the— ⟧
The ink fractured. The sentence broke.
"And the drawing?" Joren demanded.
A gate rising from water. Something small leaping. Wrong-proportioned. Insistent.
"A fish," he said, aloud enough to be dangerous.
"In dragon lore, fish do not exist," Lira said. "Not in walls. Not in lullabies. Not even in jokes. If this glyph is a fish, it's an anomaly."
"Which makes it valuable," Nyra whispered. "Anomalies are how reality knocks."
More pages. Another translation:
⟦ The Five and the Origin are not beasts but god-like existence. ⟧
⟦ They are seeds of the world. From them dragons multiplied. ⟧
⟦ No record of them tamed is true. ⟧
The room did the polite thing and didn't move. Thundermaw's breath rolled once, then denied it.
"You sat on this," Joren said.
"We let it breathe," Nyra answered. "If shown, Vera erases, Kael buries, Rashan fights gods, Saphira gossips. You gamble."
"Not wrong," Joren admitted. "So: conditions. Triggers. When do you bring this to the Seven?"
They named them. A third hybrid in real time. Contact with a rule-boundary. Recovery of the missing phrase. Evidence of Elemental will. Another creature leaping laws.
"Until then," Joren said, "we watch the method, not the pet."
Lira turned more pages. Along a margin, faint sketches—leapers in sequence, arcs varied, the same gate thinner each time.
"Not prophecy," she said. "Technique."
"Not chosen," Nyra breathed. "A class of motion. Fish-logic. Refusing down long enough to cross law."
Joren leaned closer. One sketch's curve looked like Levitate. Another like interlocked scales. A third like Bounce.
"Plural," he said. "Not a hero. A method."
They closed the book like a larva-box. Joren walked out with triggers in his pocket and a storm that couldn't decide if it was weather or grammar.
He didn't believe in omens. He believed in slopes that tell your bones when a cliff is near. The koi had made the ground feel different. Now the method said the ground might accept more than one kind of foot.
Back in the dark, he held a single picture: fish-like bodies leaping toward a gate drawn as law.
"Interesting," he said—not a shrug, but an order.
And high above, the mountain listened under its cloud. Impossible, the circle had said. The silence after learned a second word and kept it under its tongue:
Not never.