Journeying across the large Bull Kingdom was something that Naiad could do quite effortlessly. The Naga River and all of its branches and tributaries ran up and down its length, from the farthest reaches of the Northern Territories down to the coast of the Gulf of Discord. If she wanted to, she could go from the Bull Kingdom’s capital back to her cave in the western marches of the Talfar Kingdom in a matter of three or four days, whereas it might take Leon two weeks if he were in a spectacular hurry.

However, once she left Leon’s villa, she didn’t move all that fast. He had sprung quite the conundrum upon her, and she needed some time to think before anything. And so, after leaving the villa, she simply melted down into the Naga River and let the water carry her southward.

Ultimately, she had left to seek out her mother back in Saron, the city that all river nymphs had come from, but for now, she needed her space.

The most important issue on her mind was that of Leon himself. Over the year that she had been with him and Elise, the two had made a serious effort to make her feel welcome and a part of their family. They slept together a lot, and Leon in particular made her feel wanted, even if he rarely said much.

His silence wasn’t something that bothered her; their physical relationship was all that she wanted or even needed to feel loved, and everything else was just a bonus. And yet, she had to admit that on those times when they did talk—rarely was it about anything more consequential than what food they were going to eat or what they had seen during the day—that she enjoyed it far more than she could have ever guessed she would.

She didn’t want to leave him, that much Naiad knew. However, to be a part of his family wasn’t something that she felt ready for, she didn’t even know what all that might mean. She didn’t even know if she would want to stick around once she was pregnant.

If she were corporeal, she might’ve run her hands down her toned belly, wistfully wondering what their future child might look like, but alas, her body was now water. She wasn’t yet with child, but already she knew that she wanted no one’s seed save for Leon’s. Whether or not that qualified as wanting to be a part of his family wasn’t something she could say, and as she drifted down the Naga River, she wasn’t able to come to a decision.

She wanted Leon’s child, but she wasn’t sure if she wanted to be a part of his family. She didn’t know how she felt about him. That was as succinctly as she could put her situation.

Unable to come to a conclusion, Naiad began to move in earnest about two weeks after leaving Leon’s home. She drifted quite the distance from the capital, but she was still in the northern reaches of the Southern Territories and had a long way to go.

A few times on her journey, it occurred to her that she didn’t leave Leon at the best of times, but every time that she thought about returning, she couldn’t quite bring herself to turn around. She knew that Leon was in a bad way right now, but he still had Elise there with him, and she didn’t think he would want her by his side until she was ready to commit to the two of them. Until she was ready to make that commitment, she wasn’t going to go back.

To that end, she slowly meandered her way back to her cave, eventually walking out of the water and onto the beach of the small island in the middle of the underground lake where she had spent so much of her life. It had only been a little over a year since she had left, but so much had changed since then. Not only had she gotten together with Leon and Elise, but she had introduced herself to human culture, and now, compared to the capital and its constant hustle and bustle, her island felt small, isolated, and dark.

A deep melancholy settled into the pit of her stomach as she walked back to the center of the island toward the pond that had been her home, where she had almost forced herself upon Leon during their first meeting. She quite enjoyed her solitude, but right now, sitting in the clearing illuminated by the light shed by the glowing leaves of nearby trees, she couldn’t help but shiver. She had long ago shed the clothes she had taken to wearing in the Bull Kingdom, and she missed them now more than ever. The only accessory that still adorned her was the invisibility ring that Leon had given her after he killed Tiberias, its emerald seeming dark and lusterless within the grotto.

And yet, the ring also felt warm on her finger. She could almost feel Leon’s presence there with her as she slowly twisted the ring around her finger.

‘I will never return to my old life,’ Naiad suddenly realized. No matter if she stayed with Leon or not, living the hermit life was no longer in her future. A temporary respite in a quiet place like this, perhaps… But living in it permanently? No, she couldn’t go back to it.

‘Or maybe if Leon…’ she thought, thinking the place wouldn’t be so bad with Leon around. Or Elise, for that matter. Leon took up the majority of her thoughts when she thought about what she left behind, but that was almost entirely because of the two of them, Naiad would be bearing Leon’s child. But that wasn’t to undersell the depths to which Naiad missed Elise, too; Naiad greatly missed the feel of Elise’s hands and lips on her body, and if she decided to return to the two, then Elise would be a huge reason why.

For now, Naiad did her best to push thoughts of Leon and Elise out of her mind. If she was going to speak with the teasing, yet often wrathful goddess that was her mother, then she had to be completely centered and ready for anything. She was a Queen of river nymphs, and even if she had long since given away her lesser nymphs, she still had to act with the dignity and grace expected of one of her station.

Naiad knelt in her pond, her head just barely rising above the surface of the water as her legs rested in the sand below. She didn’t turn her body into water, keeping herself flesh and blood to help maintain her discipline and drive thoughts of what might await her back in the capital from her mind.

It took five days of meditation, during which Naiad rose from her pond three times to walk to the beach and prepare to head for Saron, only for her nerve to fail and force her to return to the pond for more meditation. But the fourth time was the charm, it seemed, for she entered the lake, allowed her body to merge with the water, and departed the island for Saron without a single glance backward.

It was a quick journey, far more so than the journey from the capital back to the lake; Saron was not far by any stretch of the imagination, perhaps ten miles at the most depending on the interpretation of where Saron began.

Naiad defined it as beginning when she entered its gates.

The ‘road’ to Saron was an underground river, one of the three that supplied her lake with water, and as it approached the gates, it narrowed into more of a flooded fissure, many dozens of feet high but barely wide enough to fit half a dozen people shoulder-to-shoulder. Despite being the realm of river nymphs, there wasn’t a single nymph in sight, even made one with the water. Naiad wasn’t too surprised—most nymphs didn’t exactly reach human levels of cognition, though they had intelligence that elevated them above animals, and Saron was the holiest of their homes—if anything could even be considered holy in river nymph society. It was not a place for the lesser nymphs to loiter absent their Queens.

The gates of the city in the deep, flooded, lightless tunnel were more of an intricately carved archway, not unlike the triumphal arches in the Bull Kingdom’s capital. However, the arch’s complete architectural dissonance with what lay beyond showed it for what it truly was: a stolen relic that had been taken from a flooded city far to the south and stuck into the bare rock of the fissure to pretty it up a bit. It didn’t even have proper gates—or guards, for that matter, for who could find such a place, far from human civilization and hidden below millions of tons of rock and water?

The fissure was dark and claustrophobic, pressing in on Naiad even in her intangible watery state, but the immense cavern beyond the archway was anything but. However, to call it merely ‘immense’ was to do an indescribable disservice to the true scale of the place. It was large enough to contain a city of tremendous size. All of the Bull Kingdom’s capital, Teira, and Ariminium could be fit inside at once with room to spare, and even the tallest man-made building that Naiad had ever seen wouldn’t have come close to reaching the ceiling from the floor.

But the cavern was already full of structures, leaving no room for any new buildings without tunneling into the rock walls.

From wall to wall, the entire floor of the underwater cavern had been filled with pyramids of varying sizes, each made of inky black stone and with enough absorbable magic power emanating from them to make even Naiad shudder in pleasure as she entered their collective aura. They were laid out with seemingly no rhyme or reason, without even the slightest hint of a grid or other planned layout. Those pyramids furthest from the center were the smallest, with some human single-room huts being larger, while those closer to the center grew in size, culminating in a pyramid of massive proportions made of stone bricks each larger than the smallest of the pyramids. The entire structure was about a mile tall, with its tallest brick reaching a little under halfway to the cavern ceiling. At its zenith was a flat platform with a strange altar—or something that Naiad could only identify as an altar—in the center.

But, perhaps even more spectacular, an identical pyramid extended from the ceiling directly over its massive counterpart, forming a kind of hourglass shape in the cavern. The two pyramids almost touched at the top, separated by no more than twenty feet. A beam of blue light connected the two altars and surrounding this beam for thirty feet was what Naiad could only describe as a halo of blue light so bright that it shone like a tiny bright blue sun deep in the center of the plane. A few other pyramids had similar spheres of blue light at their peaks, but they were as candles next to a roaring bonfire, and the light they emitted was almost completely blocked by the light of the main pair of pyramids.

Naiad took a moment to take in the splendor of the cavern. She marveled at how much force would’ve been required to construct such monolithic structures and the magic power that, even now, uncountable years after the creation of these structures, continued to maintain whatever magic spells had been worked into their bricks.

After a couple of seconds, Naiad got back to the task at hand, reformed her physical body with the emerald ring still on her finger, and began dropping through the water toward the floor of the cavern. Here, in this place, only the highest of river nymphs, their Empress, could move as she pleased. All others, even the Queens, had to adhere to ancient rituals.

At one end of the cavern a few miles from where Naiad entered was what could be described as a hallway—or perhaps a walled road at that scale—that cut through the throngs of pyramids and led to the base of the Great Pyramid. The long walls of this road were covered in carved reliefs, leaving hardly any bare stone to be seen.

Naiad swam around the edge of the cavern just above the floor, not stopping until her feet touched the paved floor of this road. Once she landed on the bricks, she began to walk along the path as if it were a city open to the sky rather than completely submerged. She walked slowly, respectfully, taking her time to calmly observe her surroundings.

Behind her was the main entrance to Saron, a huge pitch-black abyss in the wall that led north toward the Endless Ocean. The road she walked began at the mouth of this tunnel.

It was only after she had walked about a quarter of a mile that she finally began to take notice of the other river nymphs in Saron. They were gathered around the brightest of lights at the top of the pyramids, swimming around them like schools of fish. Nearly all were lesser nymphs, while their Queens made their statuses known by sitting at the tops of these tallest pyramids. The Queens themselves were small in number, only a small handful compared to the thousands of lesser nymphs that surrounded them, and all were just as nude as Naiad.

A few resembled Naiad, with bronze skin, heart-shaped faces, and buxom figures, but most were pale and more slender, their looks showcasing their lives spent in the underwater caves and their usual choice of mates—the pale-skinned men of the Talfar Kingdom. Some were blond, a few were red-haired, but most were dark-haired, and all had eyes as blue as the water that surrounded them and the light they gathered around.

Naiad didn’t stop to watch or greet any of them. They were far away from the hallway, and she had other things on her mind. But they all took great notice of her, with not a single one missing her arrival. Many even had their groups of lesser nymphs part so that they could watch Naiad’s advance with their own eyes.

It was a quiet journey, but Naiad’s blood rushed through her ears with a deafening roar, and her heart felt like it was trying to escape her chest with how intensely it was beating. All thirty river nymph Queens—each of comparable power to her—were focusing their attention on her, but it was the prospect of facing her mother that had Naiad so nervous.

But she did as was expected. She wasn’t going to give any of her contemporaries reason to attack her, as she was sure they were all contemplating doing so. Instead, she almost made a show of examining the endless carvings that decorated the walls of the road she walked. They hadn’t been carved by river nymphs, of that she was certain—the entire cavern hadn’t been built by her people, they simply lived within it.

The reliefs depicted a story, but it was one that Naiad was generally unfamiliar with beyond the obvious. On her left were depicted various creatures so finely detailed and lively as to be almost lifelike, but she couldn’t identify even a quarter of the beasts depicted upon the wall. There were horned beasts, winged things, and creatures with altogether far too many legs. Some were insectoid, others with fur, feathers, or both, and still others covered in scales, spikes, stingers, and all manner of other strange and alien appendages.

On her right, the carvings were less eclectic, only showing two different kinds of beings. One of these beings seemed, to Naiad at least, formless, vaguely human but twisted in ways that no flesh or bone could ever manage. In the center of the shapeless bumps that were these beings’ heads were a single blood-red ruby. The second kind of being were quadrupeds; Naiad might’ve called them centaurs with huge curved horns made of silver that merged with their pronounced brows.

Various scenes were depicted on both sides of Naiad. Some were of the creatures fighting, others were of peace, but most of these scenes Naiad hadn’t a clue what was going on.

It wasn’t until she reached about halfway to the Great Pyramid that humans made their appearance in these carvings. They were tiny compared to the rest, but as Naiad continued onward, they quickly began to outnumber the others. As she drew ever closer to the Great Pyramid, the scenes became solely those of war and battle, with all of the bizarre and terrible monsters on both sides falling to the blades of humanity—or so it seemed to her.

It seemed to be a history or a legend of some sort, but Naiad hadn’t the cultural knowledge to know, nor did she much care about whatever the people who built this place believed. The stories of the dead had little bearing on her life as it was, nor on the lives of the rest of the river nymphs.

She reached the end of the road, finally. Most of the pyramids were built so closely together that a single person would struggle to fit between their bases. The Great Pyramid, however, had been constructed with almost a thousand feet between itself and the closest other pyramids. It wasn’t hard for Naiad to guess why, for this open space was filled with corpses, though none of them seemed human. It was clearly a gathering place for whatever alien rituals were conducted at the top of the Great Pyramid, and those that had gathered had all seemingly died in their place.

By now, they had been dead for millennia, for they were all little more than skeletons and Naiad had never in her life seen them as anything but. They were humanoid in shape, but most were massive, between eight and fifteen feet tall. A few of the smallest were of human size, though still tall by human standards, but every single one of them was winged. The smallest had only a single pair of wings extending from their shoulder blades, while as they got larger, more and more pairs of wings appeared from further down their spine. The largest of the corpses had four pairs of wings running down their backs.

They had all seemingly died in place peacefully, for judging by their positions, they had died with their wings covering their faces. Those with more than a single pair had their lowest pair of wings also covering their feet, while those with more than two pairs had spread their extra wings as far out as they could in the relatively cramped space.

There were thousands of these creatures, so many that Naiad could imagine if they were still alive then there would’ve been very little of the floor showing from beneath the feathers of their wings—assuming, of course, that their wings were feathered. But they were all corpses now, and they had about as much bearing on Naiad’s purpose as the reliefs flanking the road. She turned her eyes away from the corpses and toward the top of the Great Pyramid. She could sense a great magical presence up there, beyond the magic flowing through the pyramid stones or the bright, gentle blue light that obscured everything between the Great Pyramid and its sibling on the ceiling.

She confidently strode right up to the base of the pyramid, where a more human-sized staircase led up and over the gigantic stone bricks that otherwise made up the pyramid, and slowly lowered herself down to her knees. There, she waited for about thirty seconds, her eyes turned downward in supplication, before quietly lowering herself down even further until her forehead touched the bricks beneath her.

As soon as her brow brushed against the stone, a loving, motherly voice rang out across the entirety of the submerged cavern for every watching nymph to hear, though it was by no means human or even of any language that Leon would recognize if he were present. The water that filled the cavern seemed to shake in time with every syllable, and all the Queens that heard it dropped down to their knees while their lesser nymphs froze in place as they swam around their Queens.

“My last daughter has finally returned to us after so long, and she has shown the proper respect… Let no one say that she is impious or lacks deference… Maia, come up here and see me…”

Naiad closed her eyes and suppressed the feelings of joy and sadness as the sound of her true name filled her ears once again, and then stood back up. She had come this far, and she was as ready as she would ever be to see her mother once again.