When the Under-Currents Tremble, the Legion Heeds the Call
---
Ⅰ · The First Omen — A Shiver in Silence
Before it could be heard, the Abyss was the warning.
A single oscillation rippled through three hundred kilometres of open water, fluttering bio-luminescent veils, turning shoals of glass-eels in perfect unison, dimming the beacon-pins along Ishara's restored transepts.
L2 felt it in the enamel of his teeth and in the bronze rings sewn beneath his clavicles.
> Phi-pulse, his mind supplied instantly—
0·618 Hz, the golden undertone of every Eldritch breach.
R2 felt it as well, though sensation translated for him as hunger and heat. The shock wave struck his sternum like a fist of vacuum, and his internal reservoirs—those chaotic vortex-cores that doubled as nerves—surged in sympathetic ignition.
They were standing on the buttress balcony that overlooked the crater-lake where Ishara's outer sanctum once had glimmered. Jagged ruins still carpeted the floor—broken coral minarets, half-melted tablets, the collapsed rib cage of a star-forged whale skeleton once hung as ornament. Yet something deeper and older than wreckage stirred now.
> "The balance is shifting," L2 breathed, as though the Abyss might answer back in mathematics.
"Nah—something is pushing it," R2 corrected, voice rumbling like boulders rolled over canyon tongue.
He extended one gauntleted hand; motes of ink condensed around his claws, then dissolved when his will dismissed them. Each mote contained a micro-signature of the Legion's vector field—proof the pulse had not been random tremor but an awakening command.
---
Ⅱ · Council of Echoes
They moved quickly through the temple's re-stabilised halls. Everywhere the sea-stone hummed with unease: hydrophonic chimes slipped out of tune, guardian wards flickered between midnight-blue and alarm-crimson, and the Pearl of Recompense L2 kept at his belt rattled in sympathetic vibration.
Inside the Chorale Chamber—a confluence node where twelve spiral aisles met—stood a translucent effigy of Prophet Lyssara. Water formed her body; fractured moonlight gave her contour. Actual Prophets rarely left their throne delta, choosing instead to project. Nevertheless their presence carried the gravity of planets.
> "Seals falter," she intoned, each syllable dropping like a stone into still water.
"Scion remains bound," L2 replied, "but something underneath tests the architecture."
Lyssara raised an arm. From her sleeve unfurled holographic data—helixes, phi-spirals, prime-offset spectrograms. Every line arced toward a single coordinate deep in the Rift-Trench, five hundred fathoms below the Scion's sarcophagus. A red glyph pulsed: LEGION M-CORE (DORMANT? )
> "Dormancy has ended," she said. "Undercurrents measure torsion far exceeding first incursion. Kraken's Scion was only a pregnant echo. Primary Legion-mind, gestating for cycles untold, now regards the surface with open eye."
R2 smirked, but the expression failed to reach his eyes. "Then let's go gouge that eye out before it blinks."
A dozen Archivists flinched at the barbarity of the suggestion.
L2 lifted two fingers for calm. "We cannot charge blind. Isharan runology predicted five trigger states. We have witnessed two—Pulse of Summons and Torsion Drift. The remaining three escalate non-linearly to a full dimensional inversion. We require containment before state four."
> "And how do we purchase that time?" Prophet Lyssara asked.
Silence held the room until L2 responded with the only currency deep seas honoured:
> "Blood, resonance, and Fibonacci."
---
Ⅲ · Fibonacci's Spiral in Living Water
The Archivists escorted them to a Helical Sink-shaft—a natural chimney at whose base lay a mathematic singularity known as The Dominus Knot. Centuries ago Isharan sages discovered the Knot behaved like a recursive wave-guide: every harmonic introduced at the rim echoed downward into smaller replicas, each rotated by the golden angle of 137·5 °. That fractal path, when fed correct inputs, amplified constructive interference, forging a shield that could muffle Eldritch frequencies.
Problem—since the Scion's rampage half the funnel-snails that anchored the spiral membrane had died, leaving holes in the recursion chain. New anchors—alive or engineered—would be needed, spaced according to Fibonacci indexing or the lattice would tear itself apart.
> "We'll replace the missing primes," L2 concluded after brisk engineering triage. "R2's raw energy will jump-start snail eggs, I supply silk foundation; Archivists synchronise psalms."
R2 shrugged. "Math talk, but if you need juice, I'm your thunder."
So began the Operation of Coiling Waters.
A. L2's Work
Reaper-Silk extruded from his wrist glands, flowing like mercury and tinkling like harp wire as it cooled. He shaped each thread into logarithmic arcs, embedding micro-runes every 34 µm—mimicking the growth rings of natural nautilus shells. When the strands met the chimney wall they fused seamlessly, forming living filigree whose only purpose was to hold resonance nodes at PHI multiples.
B. R2's Work
Deep within his sternum, the Void-scar flared. He inhaled water, exhaled plasma cavitation. Each breath birthed a tiny storm of charged bubbles; those bubbles seeded the fertilised snail eggs that Archivist hatchers released behind him. Plasma heat accelerated cell division; the embryos matured a century's growth in minutes, secreting crystalline shells calibrated perfectly by the golden ratio inherent in biological spirals.
C. Archivists' Chorus
Forty voices layered the Canticle of Seventh Flow, each stanza offset by one Fibonacci beat. The song created pressure nodes; pressure nodes guided snaillets to exact coordinates.
Three hours of labour climaxed as the final verse resonated with descending over-tones. The Knot lit up—turbulence collapsed into calm funnel, and a sapphire glow spiralled downwards farther than sight. The shield was reforged.
But victory tasted of copper. At that very moment an explosion of echoes raced back from the trench. The Legion-mind had answered their reinforcement with a new tactic—vertical incursion.
---
Ⅳ · Birth of the Leviathan Conduits
Between Temple and Trench, strata of basalt cracked open like jaws. Out poured contorted figures: squid-men plated in barnacle armour, eel-seraphs with bone wings, and lumbering macroforms shaped from petrified cartilage. Yet these were mere infantry. The true threat erupted later—Leviathan Conduits, hollow serpent-tubes grown to channel Legion essence. Each conduit operated as battlefield teleport node; if even one reached the restored Scion prison, the Legion-mind could piggy-back through and shatter seals from within.
> "We buy time, they build shortcuts," L2 observed grimly when tactical relays mapped the bloom.
Prophet Lyssara's image flickered into emergency chamber. "Scribes project conduit arrival at seal-depth in fifty-one thousand heartbeats. Spiral barrier slows them by golden factor… but partial only."
R2 cracked his knuckles. "Fifty-one thousand? Give me twenty and a clear vector; I'll collapse the shafts myself."
"No," L2 said instantly. "Their walls absorb brute resonance— your attacks will feed them." He turned to Lyssara. "We must invert flow. Force Legion to cannibalise its own energy. For that we require access to Stargate fragments stored in the Reliquary."
Lyssara hesitated—those relics were last-resort artefacts. Then she nodded. "The Abyss won't negotiate. Take them."
---
Ⅴ · Weaponising Divine Vestiges
The Reliquary, sealed since the Tidefall War, housed shards of out-realm portals—Stargate cores once capable of bridging light-years. Broken now, yet still bristling with entropic potential. L2 selected three slivers of Akasian Hyper-quartz, each humming in a phasing triad. He outlined his plan:
1. Implant shards at phi-offset intervals around each Leviathan conduit.
2. Sync shards' decay cascade to siphon incoming Legion energy, converting it into phase-incoherent white noise.
3. Redirect noise into Knot; Knot re-grounds it as harmless thermal drift.
A surgical strike team assembled: R2, two blade-archivists, and Seré—who volunteered despite a fresh coral wound on her shoulder.
> "Risk is absolute," L2 told them, fastening shard capsules to their belts.
"Risk fuels song," Seré replied with a tight smile.
---
Ⅵ · Deployment Run (22 minutes to event horizon)
They launched on Hydro-gliders—sleek skiffs propelled by magnetic implosion paddles. Fields of scattering Legion spawn swirled overhead; bioluminescent tracer-beams lit like morbid constellations. R2 took point, aura blazing bright enough to lure strike-swarm away from the gliders. With every swing of his void-charged fist he vaporised dozens, yet resisted temptation to detonate fully—the plan demanded discretion until shard insertion.
Conduit One rose ahead, a pillar of marrow-white chitin ringed by orbiting spores. As they approached, the pillar irised open, revealing capillary tunnels lined with quivering teeth. Two spawn-seraphs lunged. R2 met them mid-water, shoulder-checking one into the abyss, cleaving the other with a spinning back-elbow whose kinetic wake gouged a gouache streak along the conduit wall.
Seré and the blades slid into incision fissures, planted first shard exactly at 34·3 ° relative to polar axis, per L2's phi grid. Bio-alarms shrieked; chitin tightened; acid jets spat. The archivists escaped under covering barrage of R2's vortex punches, then rocketed toward Conduit Two.
Conduit Two fought back with phase displacement fields—pockets of time-dilated water that slowed motion to syrup. The team switched to magnetic grapples; even so, Seré's arm calcified inside one field before R2 tore her free. She re-materialised with frost fractures down to bone, yet still angled the second shard home.
Conduit Three was worst: its capillaries disgorged a Legion Bishop, sixty metres long, skeleton visible through translucent flesh. It swung a scythe-claw that clipped R2's helm, cracking visor. In that moment brute curdled into clarity—he seized the claw, channelled the Bishop's own negative entropy back up the limb, flash-freezing synapses. Creature stiffened; they planted shard three at its root.
Extraction countdown: eighteen seconds. Shards bloomed silver, then ultraviolet—vacuuming Legion charge. When overload threshold pinged, L2 from the Knot triggered remote detonation. Space warped. Conduits imploded, folding into four-dimensional knots that winked out of existence, leaving cavitation scars and dead spawn adrift like scorched petals.
---
Ⅶ · Backlash of the Abyss
Victory shockwave rolled outward, but so did a backlash pulse: the Legion-mind reacting to lost nodes. Every living thing in a hundred-kilometre radius heard a soundless scream. Temple buttresses moaned. Runes flickered.
Within the Knot, L2 staggered, nose bleeding twin spirals. The shield held but registers climbed: Seals near maximum stress. He keyed comlink.
> "R2—status!"
"Still kicking." Loud exhale. "Conduits gone. But something's angry."
Indeed: from Rift-Trench a column of super-heated brine shot skyward. Out of it climbed the Legion-mind's Avatar—a colossal silhouette formed of overlapping mantis-shrimp plates, crowned by a halo of rotating scutes. It brandished nine blades made of compressed hunger.
> "Seals can't restrain that," L2 whispered. Numbers fail when infinity kneels to fight.
R2's grin returned—this time fierce, unburdened. "Then we meet infinity with recursion."
---
Ⅷ · Recursion Gambit
L2's Silk algorithms were static; R2's energy was chaotic; but combined inside Phi architecture they could generate recursive null-waves: ripples that cancelled themselves layer by layer, dragging source phenomena into feedback collapse. High risk; demand ratio precision to nine decimal places; one mis-thread, they implode mind and marrow.
Yet there was precedent—the old ascenders handled cosmos with less.
Preparations: L2 opened Pearl of Recompense, extracted one micro-crystal of star-quartz attuned to his bloodline. He fused it into R2's gauntlet, creating a conductor that balanced chaos with golden cadence.
> "Five loops only," L2 warned.
R2 clenched fist. "Five is plenty."
They approached. Avatar unleashed blade arcs that sundered water into vacua. R2 juked, trading skin for distance; L2 trailed, weaving Silk behind like contrails drawn in ultraviolet. Each strand anchored to Fibonacci loci along the Avatar's carapace. When strand number 34 locked, L2 shouted: "Cycle one!"
R2 slammed fist into anchor one. Null-wave blossomed, devouring a cubic kilometre of dark water and a slab of Avatar armour. Yet wave tried to rebound; L2's Silk redirected reflection into the next anchor, amplifying cancellation. Cycle two, three, each tighter, frequency climbing.
On cycle four feedback licked at their bones—R2's left gauntlet vaporised; L2's vision shattered into golden triangles. Not enough!
> "Fifth loop!" R2 roared, voice fracturing. He buried broken arm into final node. For an atom of time he felt everything—wrath of Legion, love of deep seas, fear older than salt. Then the loop closed.
Avatar's plates collapsed inward, compressing into a singularity that popped like a bubble. Explosion? No: an implosion so perfect it left only silence and a sphere of still water in its place. Silk disintegrated; null-wave drained into basalt.
---
Ⅸ · Aftershock and Oath Renewed
Prophet Lyssara re-materialised above the Knot, expression for once awed. "Legion-mind retreats. Undercurrents subside to baseline forty percent."
Kahet led chanting crews in a restorative psalm; rune lights steadied to tranquil teal. Statues ceased weeping.
Med-adepts swarmed R2, stabilising void-scar fluctuations; Seré's arm was re-regenerated by pillar graft. L2 drank a draught of cerebro-salts, clarity creeping back.
The council assembled at dawn-echo—artificial timekeeping. Lyssara addressed the brothers:
> "By spiral and tide you have forced infinity to rethink assault. Yet recursion always returns. When next the Legion rises, it will adapt."
L2 bowed, but his eyes measured quiet confidence. "So will we. Knowledge cycles, and now Ishara's current flows in us too."
She presented each with Medallion of Confluence—a disc half coral, half starlight. "Token of alliance. Wherever deep water dreams, our voices will answer yours."
R2 tried to joke—"Hope your seas like heavy metal"—but coughed brine and settled for a grin.
---
Ⅹ · Toward Uncharted Trenches
Repairs began; apprentices mapped new phi anchors; snail breeders celebrated record hatch. But L2 already charted next objective: an anomaly beyond Abyssal Shelf—the Cavern of Ever-Night—rumoured to host an intact Stargate core and perhaps a shard of the Heart itself.
On the deck of their refitted vessel he rolled parchment across the rail—fibonacci spirals intersecting ley-lines, overlaying star-maps harvested from Isharan archives. R2 leaned over, shoulder still patched with coral-weave.
"Bigger, deeper, stranger," he mused.
"Always," L2 agreed. "Yet spiral teaches: deeper dives wrap back toward centre. Sooner or later, all paths converge."
R2 cracked neck, flexed new gauntlet. "Then let's keep spinning till centre shows itself."
Thrusters engaged. As the craft descended into velvet dark speckled by ghost-plankton, temple bells rang behind them—no longer funeral tolls but calls of renewal.
Far below, in cold pockets untouched by victory light, Legion embers smouldered—patient but wary. For the first time in epochs, the Abyss itself was uncertain, for two blood-bound anomalies carried codes it had never solved.
The under-currents may shake, the Legion may rise, yet hope now spiralled through the waters, golden as phi, endless as tide.
End of Chapter 47