Version 7

WARNING!!! THIS PAGE HAS SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS FOR VERSION 7, CURRENTLY SET TO LAUNCH IN DECEMBER 2025. INFORMATION LISTED HERE IS NOT CANON AND SHOULD NOT BE USED IN CURRENT THREADS OR FOR PLOTTING PURPOSES QUITE YET [MAY BE SUBJECT TO SIGNIFICANT CHANGES!]

The Battle Begins

Five Gatekeepers, twenty-five fragments. We had risked life, body, and sanity to close each rift, to restore these fractured heroes for one purpose: to stand against the all-devouring glory of the Dreadnought. In the days that followed, a fragile quiet settled over us, but we were not fools -- we knew better than to mistake silence for peace.

Life persisted, as it must, but every heartbeat thrummed with the anticipation of a turning point. We were waiting for the sign that our sacrifices had meant something. The moment we would stand together or fall apart against a hunger that wanted to devour not just our island, but the entire world beyond. We did not have to wait long.

The anomalies began within the week. Subtle at first: shifts in the light that had no source, water beading upside down on leaves, a chill in the shadows that had nothing to do with the wind. The animals felt it first -- retreated into their burrows or fled in a panic as far as their legs could take them; birds would fall silent mid-song, then erupt into frantic, discordant choruses all over the island.

The first tremor struck on the eighth day. A deep, groaning shudder that rattled the foundations of New Ognos. Another followed half a day later, stronger, violent enough to spill provisions from their sacks and send tools clattering across workshop floors. But the third tremor brought something worse than shaking ground. It tore the sky.

Above our island, the heavens split open -- a gaping, vicious wound of ever-shifting color. It was a wrongness, a scar on reality itself. No matter how far we traveled, the wound in the sky remained, fixed overhead like a malevolent eye. Hungry. Patient. Waiting for the end.

The Dreadnought appeared on the edge of our sensor range on the tenth day. A blip of impossible energy, cold and relentless. Its shadow reached us on the twelfth, a palpable gloom that seeped into the land long before the beast itself was visible. Those with courage enough to look gathered on the obsidian walls, their eyes straining toward the northeast.

It crested the horizon like a moving mountain. Crystalline spines, jagged and cruel, rose high above the tallest trees. Its body was a nightmare of refracted growths, sharp angles and pulsing seams that defied natural law. The terrain behind it was not simply destroyed; it was unmade. Whole sections of forest were folded into the earth, hills rippled like water, and pools of water rotated in perfect, impossible spheres. Small buildings sagged into nonsense shapes. The very air grew thick and heavy, reducing visibility without the courtesy of fog or mist. A wave of panic preceded it -- every creature that could run fled in a blind, desperate exodus from something ancient, incomprehensible, and hungry.

A relay station in the northeast hills managed a partial transmission. It was six seconds of scrambled audio, a burst of static, and what might have been a human scream stretched and distorted into mechanical feedback. Then, silence. When a secondary team reached the outpost two hours later, they found nothing to recover. The walls had warped inward, the tower collapsed into itself. There was no sign of heat, no impact crater. No bodies. No spirits to commune with. The Dreadnought had devoured everything without even diverting from its path.

We had done all we could. Now, there was only the wait. Our messages to the neighboring kingdoms had gone unanswered, our pleas met with silence. We believed them shortsighted, perhaps even cowardly. We prepared to stand alone against the end, a final, defiant gesture in the face of oblivion.

We were wrong.

The first sign that we were not abandoned was not a ship on the horizon or a cry from the watchtowers. It was a change in the air itself. A fresh, salt-tanged wind cut through the oppressive stillness, carrying the scent of open sea and clean sails. Then from the west, cutting through the waves with impossible grace, came the fleet of The Scepter of Zephyrs. Their sleek cutters, sails emblazoned with intricate wind-glyphs, moved with a collective purpose. Admiral Serah’s Windward Fleet secured the harbor entrance with a practiced, silent efficiency. Above them, Zephfluffs darted between the masts, their squirrel-like forms tracing agile patterns against the bruised sky, scouting the advancing gloom.

Then, from the east, a different silhouette emerged -- darker, heavier. The ships of The Mountain Kingdom slid into the bay, silent as glacial ice. The Rockfolk disembarked, their movements slow, deliberate, and heavy with finality. Their polished armor, tempered with earth enchantments, reflected the grim light of the fractured sky. Without ceremony, they moved to the landward approaches, their stoic presence a bulwark against the coming storm. Great, shaggy Sentinels took up positions at key archways, and as the Rockfolk chanted, defensive runes flared to life along the natural choke points, etching lines of unwavering power into the very stone.

The forces of Vel’Kora simply appeared. One moment, the inner defenses were manned by our people alone, and the next, Mirajin warriors stood among them, emerging from shimmering mirages that faded like heat haze. Their layered wraps shifted in color and pattern, mimicking the desert sands they called home as they moved with a silent purpose, marking the ground with mirrored sigils that seemed to swallow the light. At the edges of our formations, their Sohlash companions flickered, semi-corporeal forms wreathed in smoke, sharpening the air with latent power and layered intent.

From the south, the harbor waters brightened with the vibrant sails of Asteria. The Volari troops moved with a relaxed, fluid grace that belied their discipline. They assembled shield structures of woven, resilient bioplastic, creating defensive perimeters with a speed that spoke of countless drills. Their Tidewings slipped beneath the waves, forming a living, defensive ring in the deeper coastal waters. The air itself lightened slightly, carrying the faint, hopeful scent of salt and citrus.

Pelagornis came with the tide. There was no fanfare -- only a rising, unnatural swell that revealed a line of Delvyn fighters cresting the surf. They gleamed in armor of pressure-tempered reef metal and coral-dyed oils, moving with an abyssal fluidity that was both beautiful and alien. Their Neravex companions coiled along the seawalls, securing the vital, liminal space where land met sea.

A soft, pervasive light then grew from the northern tree line, accompanied by the rich scent of damp earth and blooming night-flowers. The Auren of The Sanctuary had arrived. High Druid Elira and her Circle moved not upon the land, but with it. Where they passed, flora twisted and grew with accelerated purpose, weaving into formidable, living barricades. In the canopy above, Verdelisks chittered, their shimmering dust falling like a protective mist.

Pyraheim came last, their arrival announced by a wave of dry heat and a faint ashfall on the wind. Pyropterascrossed overhead, their riders releasing signal bursts in intricate, flame-coded glyphs. On the ground, the Emberclad warriors deployed with a grim, wordless efficiency. They reinforced existing structures with controlled burn nodes and pillar bracers, their armored plates hissing as they settled into place. They did not seek glory; they sought a furnace, and they had found it in our collective resolve.

Alone, we had prepared for a final stand. Together, surrounded by the gathered strength of the Kingdoms, we braced not for an end, but for a beginning. The battle was finally to commence.

It was only then, at long last, that the Gatekeepers made their entrance.

Kaemor was the first to arrive. He did not emerge from the trees or the sky, but seemed to condense from the very air to the west, his glacial antlers cresting the ridge like a frozen dawn. A wave of deep, penetrating cold rolled ahead of him, and with each deliberate step, the ground froze solid with the permanent, profound ice of a deep winter that would never thaw. The sea-wind that clung to him smelled of ancient depths and forgotten battles.

Sylthis followed not with silence, but with a shattering of it. The pressure around the northeastern front dropped precipitously, a vacuum formed, and then the wind roared in to fill it, screaming from every direction at once. They descended through the clouds as the eye of a storm -- a massive feline form of crackling lightning and overgrown vines. Their landing was an impact, tearing apart a vast wedge of terrain the Dreadnought had just stepped upon. A visible, spider-webbing crack spread audibly across the titan’s outer crystalline plating, a sound like a mountain breaking.

Veyrith spiraled into existence high above the battlefield. Her vast, owl-like form was barely solid, her mist-feathered wings stretching to distort the light around her. The air currents below her writhed and corrected themselves; gravity bent in her presence and for a moment, loose stones and weapons floated weightlessly. The movements of allied forces slowed to a dreamlike crawl before snapping back to terrifying speed as her influence passed.

Torran erupted from the east, a volcano given legs and wrath. His arrival was an explosion of heat and fury, his obsidian-black armor cracked with veins of molten rage. Each step left the earth smoldering, fire spreading in his wake. The Dreadnought, for the first time, halted its inexorable advance and turned its immense bulk to face this new, searing threat. Torran’s molten eyes met the titan’s gaze, and the air between them shimmered with incipient violence.

Finally, Ixthia shimmered into being above the central watch platform. She was the least definable, the most unsettling. Her many-eyed, fox-like form flickered between states -- solid, translucent, decayed, resplendent. She did not look at the Dreadnought, or the armies, or the other Gatekeepers. Her eyes tracked nothing and everything, seeing possibilities and deceptions invisible to all others. Her breath had no rhythm, syncing with no heartbeat, no wind. A cascade of overlapping whispers -- harmonious, discordant, reassuring, mocking -- drifted down to those below.

The Dreadnought stopped. Its immense, deliberate momentum ceased completely, and the unnatural warping of the land behind it seemed to pause, holding its breath. The beast stood as a terrible silence at the center of the gathered storm of power, its jagged Shards pulsing with that eerie, otherworldly light. The calculated pause of a hunter reassessing a prey that had suddenly grown fangs. In that silence, the hope of thousands flared, fragile and fierce.

It was then that the Paragon’s light returned. All at once it was simply there, high above the battlefield, as if it had been there always, waiting, and had only now allowed itself to be seen. A breathtaking fusion of lion and horse, its powerful frame shimmered with golden crystalline Shards that captured not the grim light of the torn sky, but the light of distant, hopeful stars. A spiraling horn rose from its forehead, a symbol of piercing clarity. Its mane flowed like molten gold, and where that light fell upon the ground, the shattered earth began to subtly mend, the cracks sealing as if healing a wound. The oppressive gloom lifted, if only by a degree. The sky seemed just a little brighter.

The Paragon's vast, star-filled eyes were fixed solely on the Dreadnought. It was a crucible made manifest, a force that forges warriors. Its presence was not a shield, but a demand: Rise.

The Dreadnought responded with a roar at a frequency that vibrated in the bones, not the ears. The air around it congealed. The mirrored sigils of the Mirajin darkened, their surfaces clouding over. The defensive runes of the Rockfolk flickered, the stone beneath them groaning as if under immense pressure. An unnatural silence shattered as the titan took its first step forward since stopping, and the ground did not just shake; it rippled, throwing defenders from their feet.

The battle had finally begun. The Dreadnought’s crystalline spines glowed with a malevolent intensity, and a wave of distorting energy pulsed outwards. Where it passed, reality softened. A Volari shield wall of bioplastic suddenly twisted, the material flowing like liquid before hardening into a useless, abstract sculpture. A section of the Auren’s living barricades writhed, the plants mutating into thorny, aggressive forms that lashed out at the nearest soldiers. The air itself became a weapon, thickening into invisible barriers that slowed movements to a crawl or snapped forward with the force of a tidal wave.

The allied lines held, but at a cost. The Kingdoms fought not as a single unit, but as a symphony of distinct powers, each meeting the surreal assault with their own strengths as the Gatekeepers moved in.

Kaemor advanced, meeting the Dreadnought’s reality-warping pulse with a wall of absolute zero that flash-froze the effect solid, leaving a standing wave of frozen light and distorted space in the air before him, which then shattered into a million glittering fragments.

Sylthis became a whirlwind of pure chaos, leaping onto the Dreadnought’s flank. Lightning arced from their claws, grounding into the titan’s body, while vines sprouted from their fur, latching onto the crystalline spines and pulling with immense force, seeking to pry them loose.

Veyrith drifted above the fray, her unblinking eyes observing the flow of the battle. She would shift gravity around a group of soldiers a heartbeat before a shockwave would have crushed them, or slow time around a section of the Dreadnought’s armor just as Torran’s molten claws struck, amplifying the impact.

Torran himself was a blaze of focused fury, a comet of wrath slamming into the Dreadnought’s front. He ignored the smaller distortions, his hide smoking as he tore at the titan’s leg, his fire searing deep cracks into the celestial shield that protected the beast.

Ixthia... flickered. At one moment, she was a beacon, her shifting form emitting a light that clarified the Dreadnought’s illusions, revealing safe paths through the chaos. In the next, she was a weapon, refracting the titan’s own corrupting energy back upon itself, turning its power into a tangled knot of conflicting possibilities that caused the beast to momentarily recoil.

The Paragon did not yet engage directly. It circled high above, its golden light a constant, stabilizing force. Where its illumination fell, the worst of the Dreadnought’s corrupting influence receded, the ground firming and allies finding a second wind. It was waiting, measuring, preparing for the moment to strike at the heart of the shield.

For some of us, the cacophony of the war faded into the background, replaced by a single, crystal-clear objective. The plan relied not on a single army, but on a series of crucial, individual strikes, and our part was about to begin.

Participant Account: Mako

This entry was crafted by Mako's player, NEWT. Thank you for your contribution!

Atlas' Finale Prompt

The Gatekeepers occupy the Dreadnought directly, drawing its immense attention in a desperate, coordinated clash. Yet around them, chaos reigns: its lieutenants and corrupted beasts strike with relentless force, slowing the advance of any who dare approach. Defensive forces fight tooth and nail for every step gained. Amid the fray, Atlas tears through his latest opponent. Just then, a streak of gold rushes past, The Paragon, radiant and fast as lightning. In that fleeting instant their eyes meet, and something clicks. A vision sears into Atlas’ mind: the image of a glowing shard, buried deep beneath plated armor near the Dreadnought’s left arm. A core, pulsing, volatile, exposed just enough. The Paragon's voice rings in his mind: Destroy the shard. Create an opening.

Due: Dec 15th, 2025

Length: 2+ Paragraphs

Participant Account: Aevis Clorance, played by Renny

This entry was crafted by Aevis' player, Renny. Thank you for your contribution!

Aevis’ Finale Prompt

The Gatekeepers engage the Dreadnought directly, but its lieutenants surge outward like tidal waves of corruption, hammering the frontlines. Aevis has already seen her share -- her side is bandaged, her movements slowed -- and she’s been pulled back to the sprawling medic tent where triage is chaos and pain hangs thick in the air.

She’s barely seated when a dust-covered runner stumbles in, shoving a blood-marked missive into the head healer’s hands. The healer reads, pales, and immediately begins shouting orders -- "Start evacuation protocols! All of them need to get out now!" And then: “Clorance.” It settles directly in Aevis’s skull. A voice she doesn’t recognize, but full of slow hatred, cracked like bone left to rot. She staggers upright as a sudden vision floods her senses -- of a creature waiting just beyond the tent’s edge. A twisted thing in decayed Royal livery, dragging behind it a tattered banner older than Aevis herself. It was tortured. Corrupted. And finally, abandoned by the grandfather whose blood runs in her veins. Now, it’s come to finish the line. And it doesn’t care how many innocents it tears through to get to her.

Aevis must choose to stand -- still wounded, still bleeding -- and meet it head-on. No rank. No crown. No backup. Just a girl in the ruins of her family’s legacy, fighting to hold the line.

Due: Dec 15th, 2025

Length: 2+ Paragraphs

The Grand Finale

[TW: contains some body horror, violent death, insanity]

The tide was turning. The Dreadnought’s steps, once earth-shattering and rhythmic, were now a stumbling, uneven drag. A deep fracture spiderwebbed along its forelimb, scattering shards of crystal with every lurch. Its immense weight listed heavily to one side, and the light pulsing beneath its armor flickered erratically. Though the core in its chest still burned, the power building between movements was gone -- now it was a desperate effort just to stay upright. As it turned, a section of plating at the base of its spine sheared away and clattered to the ground, with no effort to regenerate.

Across the battle line, the shift was instinctive, a wave of released pressure. The Freeborn forces surged forward. Through the haze, a pair of Mirajin Sohlash darted to seal a breach between faltering barricades. A spear hurled by a mountain guardian found its mark, biting deep into the creature’s damaged flank and exploding a shower of crystalline fragments into the air. Sylthis crashed into the earth before the Dreadnought’s front leg, the impact scattering rubble and arcing lightning.

The creature reeled. Its injured leg buckled, plunging too deep into the broken ground and throwing its colossal frame into a forward tilt it couldn’t correct. A back leg kicked out, sending a chunk of the hillside spinning wildly across the field. Its left eye flickered, died, then sputtered back to life. The inner glow surged in one last, defiant pulse before dimming to an uneven, sickly beat across its seams.

But it began to rise again. And then… everything stopped.

A man froze mid-stride, his foot hovering above the ground. A scout’s fingers halted just above her belt pouch. A Mirajin Commander was suspended, arms outstretched, her signal frozen in the air, her expression caught between one moment and the next.

The Gatekeepers were petrified. Veyrith’s wings were locked at the apex of a beat, defying the air. Torran was braced mid-step, talons half-buried in soil. Kaemor was a statue carved from glacial ice and abyssal dark. Ixthia’s every eye was fixed, her ears rigid. Even the Paragon’s glow steadied into a solid, unwavering pulse as if time itself had seized.

At the center of the stillness, she appeared. The Oracle. Untouched by the grime of battle, her snowy gown and crimson hair were a shocking wound of color. Her wide, unblinking eyes were pinned on the Dreadnought. A woman fell to her knees. A blade clattered to the stone. We waited for a prophecy, for hope -- but she offered only silence.

Then, a subtle wrongness. Her left shoulder hitched up, then jerked back too far. Her elbow bent at an unnatural angle, one hand curling into a claw. Her neck tilted without the rest of her body following, and a ripple distorted the skin along her ribs. A sound escaped her chest -- not a breath or a word, but a hollow, structural groan. The back of her gown began to tear at the seams. Her jaw unhinged, mouth gaping wide. Her spine arched inward violently while her shoulders wrenched back. A single rib pressed outward against her skin, then another. Her circlet cracked with a sound like ice breaking. Something swelled beneath her breastbone and dropped.

A clean, bloodless split opened from her clavicle to her sternum as her body began to unmake itself. From the cavity within, something began to move -- a formless presence with edges that blurred and shifted, as if it had forgotten what shape it was meant to hold. Strips of fabric dissolved. Her arms splayed open, bones yielding to impossible angles. The thing extended from the ruin of her chest, widening, crawling out like it had only been wearing her skin. There were colors that swallowed the light. A dozen eyes swam through a single form. Her crown liquefied and ran like mercury down her cheek. The face of the Oracle stretched, split, and sloughed away into the void behind it. What replaced it was never meant to be seen.

The Gatekeepers remained frozen.

A pulse spread from the Oracle’s remains. The world shimmered, its lines doubling and misaligning before snapping back into a focus that felt thin and fragile. In that moment of wrongness, the Dreadnought was reborn. The spines along its back blazed. Plating sealed over its wounds. Scattered crystal fragments lifted from the ground and flew back to their source as if time itself were reversing. Its stance solidified, a shattered limb reforging itself. It rose, larger and more terrible than before, the glow in its chest burning with a cold, white star’s intensity.

The Gatekeepers stirred from their stasis, but they moved through water-thick air. Sylthis’s strike veered off-course, bent by an invisible haze. Torran struggled for footing on warping ground. Veyrith climbed, but the sky offered no purchase. Our momentum, so fiercely won, was simply... gone.

The allied lines faltered, their rhythm broken. Arrows went wide. Shields dropped a fatal second too late. The thing that had been the Oracle -- the Echo -- did not attack. It simply was, and its passive presence was a weight that crushed initiative and hope. The Dreadnought advanced, the very earth melting and reforming beneath its steps.

Then the world broke. A deep, vibrational groan rose from the seabed itself, and the ocean answered. The entire sea lurched inland, a single, monolithic movement that defied tide and wave. The air cracked, thickening into a suffocating blanket as the heat ripped from it, leaving a cold that seized the lungs.

The water tore apart, and Linor rose.

A leviathan of living ocean, a towering form with deep-blue skin that glistened with the abyssal dark. Her hair was a cascading torrent, a relentless flood woven with strands of kelp and the ghostly gleam of drowned pearls. Her eyes were fathomless pits, windows to a crushing, lightless silence. A flowing mantle of water, constantly in motion, crashed and whispered around her form with the thunder of tidal forces. Her presence was a physical weight, an assault on reason. To behold Linor was to stare into the ocean's heart and feel your own sanity dissolve in the pressure.

But our goddess was not here for us: Linor’s attention was fixed ahead. The Echo flickered, splitting into phantom shapes, appearing on the ridge, in the sky -- a desperate, chaotic dance. Linor’s response was a study in terrible efficiency. She reached across the distance, her hand closing around a fragment of its being. It screamed soundlessly as she pulled it apart at the seams. It reformed elsewhere. She turned and caught it again. An inexorable, repetitive correction.

As she contained the Echo, the Paragon moved. The Dreadnought’s chest flared for a final surge, the Paragon was simply within it, her blade already drawn. A light pulsed inward, not out, and the core of the titan splintered with a sound that was universe cracking. The Paragon erupted from its chest in a silent flood of radiance, and the Dreadnought dissolved mid-collapse, its form turning to inert, scorched crystal before it could hit the ground.

Linor raised a hand and the sea retreated, its job done. The field that remained was... changed. The ground held a permanent dampness. Scorched grass stood upright, bleached and soft. A crater marred the center, its edges unnaturally smooth. The crystal shards that littered the ground were hollow, bleeding a faint, dying warmth. The Paragon and the Gatekeepers were gone, and Linor’s absence was as immediate as her arrival, the crushing pressure lifting so suddenly it left a void.

Soldiers moved among the fallen with a numb, purposeless air. The battle was over, but the word victory felt hollow, blasphemous even. In the confusion that followed, something moved in the middle of the battlefield. A shadow, a shape -- no one saw where it went.

Then with a mighty crash the ice wall of the Tangled Deeps broke apart. The path to the island beyond is open now, and the Dreadnought no longer roams. At long last, we can expand our borders.