The wyvern was angry, absolutely livid, even. He simply had to be mad, if the Creator was as livid as They were then there must be good reason to rage, and the wyvern had done his part to quell his Master’s temper. But even after he’d rendered away the invading stain on his home, the Creator wasn’t appeased. In fact, it seemed like Their wrath only grew, reaching a boiling point as the wyvern bore witness to the single most awesome and terrifying moment of his life.

His race to the waters-cursed-to-have-no-heat seemed unreal, as though the Creator’s entire domain had been turned into a weapon. This weapon was different from the wyvern’s, while he prided himself on his teeth and tail and impossibly sharp nails, he knew he’d never match up, not against the raw might of undistilled power. He’d seen the water itself thrum with the Creator’s strength, seen life born and death brought by magic, and his own body felt slightly twisted by the mana that had been compressed into a relatively tiny space, to say nothing of the lesser beings who’d been forced to simmer in it all with no experience using mana.

But none of it, neither the buildup nor the aftermath quite compared to the split second that his entire world was nothing but a total blue, where all that existed was water. Some of it was bitingly cold, some of it too outrageously hot for even him, he’d even felt the crushing darkness of the very bottom of the ocean despite having never even conceived of such a place, but it was all just added flavors to the endless ocean his Master’s display had shown him a glimpse of.

He’d only been in that ocean elsewhere for a brief moment, but it was enough to realize how small he was, how small the Creator was, but it also showed him how much bigger They would become in time. He reaffirmed that he would do everything in his still-meagre power to see his Master’s domain grow and even dwarf that of the sea he’d been submerged in, and when that day came, he would rule every millimeter the Creator granted him.

However, his barely formed plans were worth little in the aftermath of that moment, when he realized that the Master’s ire had abated, immediately replaced with a crushing exhaustion, the sort he’d never felt himself, nor even considered that the Creator could experience at all. For a moment, he was nearly swept up in the feeling, just as he had been with the anger before it, but then the sensation passed. But that was hardly cause for celebration.

Worryingly, every sensation passed, all of the myriad thoughts and feelings that the wyvern had experienced since his very first moments were simply cut off, and he was left so terribly, anxiously alone. For a terribly long moment, the wyvern’s entire world ground to a halt. Everything around him must have felt exactly the same, whether they were overcome by the Creator’s fatigue or astonished by Their disappearance he could not say, not when everyone and everything went still at the same moment.

He dug deep into his own mind, a surprisingly difficult prospect, looking for any signs that the Creator hadn’t simply forsaken them all as a result of their apparent failure, that They weren’t gravely injured by an attack he hadn’t seen nor stopped, anything at all that would reassure him, reassure them all that they still belonged within these waters.

It took him minutes, long, agonizingly empty and scared minutes, to realize that he wasn’t disowned, and his proof came in a frustrating and roundabout way. His thoughts had just started to turn darker, more spiteful and angry as he felt no trace of the bond he’d shared, when he’d finally imagined turning his claws on the rest of the denizens, that he’d felt a foreign, familiar feeling. More specifically, the mere idea of permanently settling his long-standing feud with the wyrm resulted in a thought shoved into his head, an echo of the first time he’d been denied and an irrefutable order he’d lived with ever since.

His orders remained, he wasn’t to kill the wyrm, nor to kill any other of the ‘favored’ of the Creator, even if They were absent. There was a comfort to be had in the fact that his orders were still standing, even if he’d been given practically none, and he felt the familiar revulsion well up at the mere idea of leaving the myriad caves and caverns that were his home. All of these feelings were still as strong as ever, even without the constant, comforting companionship he’d been granted by the Creator.

Which, in his mind, could only mean that they weren’t forsaken for their failings. This, in turn, brought forth equal measures of relief and grief, the latter born of the wyvern’s inability to fully protect the Creator from whatever it was that attacked Them in Their vulnerability. It was that feeling that pulled the young wyvern out of his own mind, putting an end to his brooding, at least for the moment, so he could take a look at the damage caused by himself and the others during the invasion.

And, to his delight, they were quite thorough. He’d never been fond of the floor, evidenced by the fact that he never visited to begin with, so seeing the massive space rendered unrecognizable gave him a small amount of amusement through the lingering dread. The entire floor, once a bleached white, was thoroughly discolored. Vast swathes of corals the floor over had rotted, no doubt thanks to the thoroughly toxic wyrm, and the limestone skeletons beneath were partially showing through what few polyps remained alive.

Meanwhile, there was a straight line from the bottom entrance of the floor to where the wyvern had dispatched the intruder that was thoroughly cooked, broken and rendered sterile between the amount of force his passing produced and the flash-boiling of the water, another blemish on the lesser dragon-man’s tiny territory. The man himself seemed different, now, apparently since the wyvern had last seen him, he’d become a mite stronger, though the wyvern was still assured of his superiority.

The man’s companion, the once-eel, had gone through a much more radical change, becoming something that felt vaguely like a dragon and looked vaguely like a snake, and its very presence seemed like an offense to both. He gave it a small growl, mostly an unconscious reaction, then turned his attention to the most glaringly obvious change, beyond even the rot and char he and the wyrm had brought through their very presence.

The cavern was still blue, the walls were smooth and an exceptionally rich shade of light blue instead of their former white-frosted pockmarked limestone, most the coral that remained alive was no longer iced and sharp, it stopped releasing flecks of snow towards the surface of the water in the serene dance the wyvern was opposed to on principal. Instead, it had all been kissed by the water mana, razor edges became sweeping curves and thin, delicate branches half-melted into stalks of liquid, and their snow rising to the surface had become a pale, viscous slush that rolled out over the floor.

The wyvern used the tip of his tail, steam still bubbling off the bladed appendage, to poke at the gelatinous substance, and recoiled as it flash-froze into a solid mass that held fast to him. He violently shook his tail while forcing even more heat down his spine and into the block of ice. Finally, after a second or two of effort that he considered entirely too much time, the glassy lump melted enough to slide off, getting flung a few meters in the process, and he was left with a sense of numb chill that faded far too slowly.

That was about the time he decided that there was nothing left for him in those terrible waters, but before he disappeared back to his wonderfully searing perch, he realized something. Without the Creator’s constant presence, there was little doubt that the creatures lesser than he, of which there were many, would be in complete disarray when they started waking up. He wasn’t worried about disloyalty, and knew that even the lowliest jellyfish wouldn’t even humor the idea of trying to leave, but jellyfish could hardly mount a defense, and the wyvern knew the only reason he so rarely fought was because the Creator was too powerful for all but the most foolishly lucky to make it to his boiling territory.

But, with Them indisposed after that grand show of strength, the wyvern knew that one among them needed to protect Them while They rested, and it was obvious who was best equipped to take up that role. He’d be leaving behind the liquid fire that he’d grown so comfortable in, but he assured himself that it would only be temporary, and he would hardly trust anyone else to do… just about anything, so it was for the best that he took up the position of bulwark.

With his decision made, it took just a flap of his wings, flick of his tail, and heady expulsion of superheated mana from both to send him rocketing upwards, to the hole in the ceiling of the far-too-cold-waters. He used the split-second before departure to take one lingering look at the others on the floor, the many fish dealing with their overdose of potential and power, the dragon-man and his dragon-eel, both steeping in the absurd chill the Creator’s power had brought, and the wyrm, still infuriatingly there and agitating him in ways he couldn’t even understand just by having the wrong blood. Knowing that he’d need to trust her to guard the depths from anything that may have the fortune of escaping him, no matter how unlikely that happening was, made a special sort of frustration well up inside him.

However, the wyvern was very aware that brooding was for mothers, and so he ripped his gaze off the blemish on the Creator’s judgement hardly a split-second after he’d even turned to look and, still shooting upwards, tucked his wings in, keeping them tight beside his body as he shot into the wide expanse of the ninth floor and, frustratingly, face-first into a swarm of snakes larger than he’d ever seen, some just beginning to disperse throughout the floor, some crowding around the exit as though waiting for something.

He spread his wings again, forcing himself to a stop in the center of the horde, and glared around at the lesser reptiles. Unlike the wyrm, none of these snakes felt vile and wrong to his senses, not like waste and lies trying to parade as a queen, but there were more than a few who still seemed entirely too refined for his liking and, unlike the wyrm, he wasn’t forbidden from removing perhaps one or two, before he returned to the top floors to guard them from any unwanted intrusions.

And so, he did. He exploded into motion, almost literally, as he launched himself at a particularly bothersome cluster on a plume of steam, and he was upon them well before any of the serpents could even register that he’d moved. His tail lashed out, with smooth, metallic scales glinting in the light of a small watery inferno that he’d lit behind it, and there was a small crack as the flexible appendage sliced through the water and launched forward, the tip moving even faster than the sound around it.

The blade went clean through the first snake he’d seen, a longer one, nearly half his four-meter length, that was an orange-red that almost reminded him of his former ruby luster. From there, his jaws opened wide and slammed shut on the head of the creature, the crunch that sounded out was the only evidence that there was a skull there at all, that and the blood. He’d already finished moving towards a second serpent, shredding it with his needle-like teeth, before the rest of the group even acted.

And wisely, the vast majority chose to scatter. He was plenty capable of chasing down a dozen at least of the runners, but he was hardly that invested in individual slaughter, only in reminding the limbless worms who was really in charge. He struck out at a pair of emerald snakes that were too slow, staining the waters further red, before the crowd thinned enough for him to take a look at the floor around him.

It had changed, not a lot but still recognizably, since last he’d swam through. The first, most striking difference, like the floor beneath, was how blue everything was. The walls were blue, the floor, the few scattered corals all took on a subtle sapphire hue that radiated out, and the artificial light streaming in above and illuminating the waters was very different than the pale yellow he’d last seen it.

Now, the omnipresent blue bleeding into the waters served to remind him of the Ocean he’d experienced just moments earlier but, he realized as he pushed heat and steam into the water beneath his wings and behind his tail, seemed a fair bit more inviting than that first experience. Once more, his lithe body turned into a streak of charred white and grey, cutting through that all-encompassing blue with a line of heat as he continued up, no longer bothering with the cowardly snakes.

Aside from a single errant fish that swam before him, the rest of his split-second swim to the eighth was entirely uneventful, and he burst forth into the massive arena that he used to call home with all the fanfare of a sudden and unexpected bonfire. He attracted plenty of attention, and most of it was from fear at the sudden arrival of what the sharks knew to be something that could easily hunt them. It was therefore incredibly fortunate that the wyvern simply didn’t want to, instead just taking a fraction of a moment to enjoy the slight nostalgia of returning to a place he’d called home for a significant portion of his life, this time almost completely unchanged beyond a few larger, more menacing looking fish.

Then the mood passed, and he was left lamenting just how lukewarm his life used to be, and would be for however long it took the Creator to awaken once more. The wyvern hoped that wasn’t too long, but he needed to prepare himself to be away from his coral and his delightful heat for as long as it took. The Creator and the Lady needed someone to stand guard and as he raced through halls he hadn’t seen in many long months, he reaffirmed his belief that he was the best one suited for that task, aside from the Creator Themselves. And if he was lucky, maybe he’d find a piece of coral comfortable enough to curl up on at the top floors.