The Cryo Sovereign's Secret

Silence followed their vanishing.

But it was not relief.

It was the kind of silence left behind by betrayal.

By loss.

By failure.

The realm Asmoday had crafted was splintering at the seams—its containment threads stretched too thin, its purpose undone. And in its center—

Neuvillette, Sovereign of Hydro, stood without wings.

His Draconic form was not made to fly.

It was built for the deep.

Four legs carved like tidal stone.

A tail that could split rivers.

Scales layered in hues of stormcloud and salt.

Each breath he took weighed a world.

---

The air bent around him, as if the ocean had been reclaimed.

Even the Sovereigns nearby felt it—the pressure, the hush, the reminder of old debts unpaid.

The rain returned.

Not as droplets.

But as judgment.

---

Neuvillette stared at the space Ronovoa had fled from.

His tail flicked once—

and a distant spire of Asmoday's crumbling realm collapsed into the mist.

His voice did not thunder.

It echoed—

like something spoken through a thousand leagues of water.

"We were… seconds away."

The words rumbled in his chest—low, dangerous.

"I cast the Judgment.

Her crimes weighed.

The punishment drawn."

A pause.

"And yet—she slipped away."

One clawed foot scraped the stone beneath, cracking it clean.

"Because the heavens—again—intervened."

---

The clouds above flickered.

And then darkened.

The sea inside his eyes churned.

"This is not the first time I've watched justice escape in Celestia's name."

He turned his head slightly—just enough for the others to feel it.

Not a look of blame.

A look of calling.

"But it will be the last."

And with that, the rain became a downpour—

not of sorrow,

but of resolve.

The kind of storm that doesn't pass.

The kind that rebuilds entire worlds.

Next moment the Sky Split.

Not from thunder.

Not from rain.

But from flame.

Not fire.

Flame.

The kind that remembers what the world looked like before names were spoken.

--

Xiuhcoatl erupted—

a serpentine colossus of living magma, cloaked in wings of fire so vast they touched horizon to horizon.

His eight flaming wings didn't flap.

They boiled the wind out of the air.

His arms—too long, too thick—ended in spears of molten glass and searing ash, and his horns curled like obsidian scythes, glowing with inner light.

Around his head, fire danced.

But it wasn't celebratory.

It was a mourning crown.

Where his coils touched the ground, the stone melted—

not from anger, but from the heat of truth too old to ignore.

His eyes, twin furnaces, scanned the space where Ronovoa had been.

And they did not blink.

"You ran…"

His voice was not shouted.

It rumbled from every volcano on Teyvat that still remembered his name.

"You ran when justice came.

When balance was finally turned against you.

And still—still, we showed restraint."

He slithered forward, circling the others slowly—

Not as threat.

But as ritual.

"I allowed my people to war with each other.

I let them burn for a lie we had to sell.

I let Kukulkan think I had died—so he could inherit a broken nation and build it whole again."

His voice tightened.

"And for what?"

He reared back, flames fanning wide—

"So you could leave before we broke you?"

His molten claws struck the ground—

And a spire of flame erupted upward—

burning a jagged pyro sigil into the fractured sky itself.

---

He turned to the others, eyes flicking from Neuvillette to VlastMoroz to Zephyr.

"If we are to fight the Shades, let us never again hold back."

"This game of patience has cost us too much."

"Next time—there will be no mercy."

Then, as if the world itself were listening,

a dozen dragons erupted from the sky behind him—

some half-formed, some cloaked in lightning, some newborns still flickering with flame—

His firstborns.

The ones who remembered Tollan.

The ones who had waited, sealed in silence, while the world moved on without them.

And they roared.

Not in anger.

But in loyalty.

---

Xiuhcoatl lowered his head, flames licking his coils.

"Let them know."

"I'm alive."

"And next time…"

"…I will burn them all."

The fire dimmed.

Xiuhcoatl's rage, volcanic and holy, still trembled in the air like aftershocks—but even flame must yield when winter comes.

And winter… came.

---

VlastMoroz, Sovereign of Cryo, had shed all mortal shape.

There were no limbs now.

No cloak.

No voice of Rosen to disguise her.

Only her true form:

A leviathan of frost and silence, so vast she blurred the horizon.

Her eyes shimmered with galaxies—constellations frozen in their dying moments, caught within pupils that had once seen the birth of the stars.

Her body, scaled with runes older than erosion, slithered through the shattered air above the Sovereigns like a celestial glacier.

If she coiled once around Mondstadt, the sky would go dark.

If she blinked, it would snow for a year.

And now… she blinked.

---

She descended, her breath a fog that slowed time itself.

Each word she spoke resonated not in ears, but in memory.

Like the moment your mother first told you the world was cruel.

---

She stopped before Xiuhcoatl, lowering her colossal head beside him.

Her eyes met his molten ones.

There was no judgment.

Only grief.

"You burned alone for far too long," she whispered, and the sky cracked with snow.

"I saw you in the volcano.

I watched the flames recoil from your name.

I knew you had not died.

But we needed you to stay dead—until we could rise together."

Xiuhcoatl said nothing.

But his crown of ash dimmed.

His anger settled.

Not because he was calm,

But because she had said it.

---

VlastMoroz turned to the others now. Her vast form hovered above the newborn silence left by the battle.

The other Sovereigns looked to her—not as queen,

but as Family.

She raised her gaze to the fading edges of Asmoday's ruined realm.

And her voice deepened—soft, and final.

"They know now."

"We are no longer at odds."

"The deception that kept us alive—

has ended."

A thousand ice-flower sigils spiraled from her breath as she exhaled.

"There will be no more hiding.

No more false wars.

No more sacrificing Emblems to buy time."

"They will come for us again.

So this time… we prepare."

---

Snow swirled beneath her form—then froze midair. Not decorative.

Foundational.

The start of a world.

"We will build a new realm," she said.

"Outside Celestia's gaze.

Beyond the reach of the Descenders.

A realm that belongs only to us."

"And when the Shades return…

we will not run."

---

She looked back at Xiuhcoatl.

Then to Neuvillette.

Then to Raiclaus, Apep, Zephyr, and Varnak'Thul.

Each one heard it:

"This time, we burn the sky back."

Raiclaus hovered in silence.

Sparks snapped off her wingblades.

She stared down at the Lectors kneeling below—former dragons, broken in the shape of a lie.

They didn't speak at first. Neither did she.

One stepped forward, limping.

"Mother… we came. But we no longer know what we are. Are we still at war? Should we still hear hatred for the Hydro Sovereign?"

Her jaw clenched. Electricity coiled down her arms like shame trying to look like strength.

"You're mine," she said simply. "That's enough."

---

Neuvillette shifted.

Still in his draconic form, he regarded the cursed Lectors with something between judgment and guilt.

"They've suffered long enough."

Raiclaus's eye twitched.

You put that curse on them."

"You asked me to," Neuvillette replied. "To keep the illusion alive. To fool Celestia."

"That doesn't mean I forgive myself," she muttered.

"Then let this be your penance."

He raised a claw. Water spiraled in a slow circle, then snapped.

---

In a flash of light, the Lectors were gone—

and thunderstorm dragons stood in their place.

Their wings spread wide, their forms whole again.

"We remember now," one whispered.

"And we are still yours."

Raiclaus looked away, trying not to let the sound in her throat become a sob.

"Then build."

---

The dragons rose.

Spiraled. Danced.

Lightning etched into the skies, condensing, folding, forming walls.

And from that storm—

A castle emerged.

Floating in air. Flickering with chaotic thunder. A home of lightning, reborn.

Raiclaus exhaled.

"Let them try and take this one from us."

Amid the floating debris and rising structures, the ground shifted.

It didn't crack or shatter—it bloomed.

Vines coiled from stone. Roots pierced the fractured realm like they had every right to be there. And in moments, verdant forests began to sprout—dense, ancient, and oddly warm, like the breath of a world beginning to dream again.

At the center of it all, Apep slithered through the earth, half-submerged, her serpentine form coiling beneath canopies she herself had summoned.

"This realm was dead," she murmured. "Now, it breathes."

---

Neuvillette turned toward her, voice thoughtful.

"Apep… don't you want to leave something behind? Like I did."

His gaze softened.

"In Fontaine, a blooming sovereign walks the path I once did. He doesn't hold my memories, but he carries enough to stand tall."

Apep did not answer immediately.

Leaves rustled as her long body curled through the roots.

"I left a fragment of myself behind," she said at last. "A lesser form. Enough to whisper through Sumeru's sands."

Her head rose slightly, golden eyes reflecting ancient grief.

"But unlike you, I don't wish to pass the torch. I still intend to return."

Neuvillette blinked, a slow and weighted pause.

"Even now?"

"Especially now," Apep replied. "This place—it's artificial. It only holds what we brought. No more. No wild storms. No real decay. No rebirth."

Her tail lifted, coiling around a thin shoot growing between stones.

"And I won't let it drift away."

---

She opened her jaws—slowly, reverently—and from her mouth unfurled a single silver seed wrapped in thorned vines.

She buried it deep beneath the realm's soil.

The roots took hold.

But they didn't stop at the edges of this space.

They pierced the fabric of the void, stretching far… latching into the ley-lines that still trembled in Teyvat's crust.

"Now," she said quietly, "this realm is tied. It may float, but it will never be lost."

---

And with that, she vanished into the roots.

A grove rose in her place—twisting, alive, ever-growing.

Not as a monument.

But as a reminder—and a lifeline to the world they still called home.