THIS IS A BOOK OF LORE. IF YOU ARE NOT INTO THE VOT UNIVERSE, THEN DON'T READ THIS BOOK.

  YOU WILL THINK YOU WANT TO READ IT BUT DO NOT. IT WAS NOT MADE FOR YOUR EYES.

  The sea above Thalassaris was still. Too still. A silence not born of peace—but of pressure. The kind of silence that builds in the lungs just before the drowning begins. Below that silence, beneath miles of sacred ocean veiled from divine detection and mortal awareness, there lay a forgotten chamber. A place cut from no stone, shaped by no hand. It was older than the city above, older than the war-torn stars themselves. Only a few knew of its existence. Even fewer dared enter it.

  Poseidon was one of them. And he was not sure he would leave. The entrance was narrow, the descent long. Even his divine senses dimmed the deeper he went, like memory dissolving in dream. The water thinned into a kind of liquefied thought—time forgot itself here. The sound dissolved into pressure. No light flickered but what he brought with him—and even that shimmered uneasily, as if uncertain it had the right to shine here.

  He reached the basin after what felt like an age. And there it was… A black plane, impossibly still, set in a circular chamber that seemed to curve around thought itself. The walls were smooth and without origin, humming faintly—not with song, but with pause. The air (if it could be called that) shimmered with the resonance of unfinished prayers.

  It was the kind of place where gods came to forget. Or to remember something they shouldn’t. Poseidon exhaled. Even that breath felt heavy. He moved slowly to the edge of the pool, the echo of his footsteps reverberating in ways that didn’t match physics. Sometimes they sounded behind him. Sometimes ahead. Once, they seemed to come from within his own chest.

  He ignored it. He had to. His thoughts weren’t safe anymore—not since Erebus’s last echo had fractured his inner harmony. The Veil hadn’t just reflected him back. It had studied him. And now, Rahab and Raguel—his twin aspects—wouldn’t speak.

  They stirred. Oh, how they stirred. But they did not speak. They were waiting. Watching. And Poseidon didn’t like being watched. Especially not from within. He knelt at the edge of the water. Didn’t touch it. Not yet.

  “Just hear yourself again,” he told himself.

  “You are more than this fracture. You are ocean. Depth. Will. Flow.”

  But even the thoughts felt hollow. Erebus had made sure of that. That last resonance… that echo… it hadn’t been just a taunt. It had been a mirror. A mirror that showed Poseidon not as god or creator. But as a man... playing one. The stillness of the pool was unnatural.

  No ripple. No shimmer. Not even the suggestion of movement. He hated how familiar it felt. Like the Veil. Like Erebus. But this place wasn’t built by Erebus. It was older. Built by someone else. Someone Poseidon hadn’t spoken of in ages.

  Gaia. Even the name made the chamber feel colder. He let himself breathe slower. Focused. Lowered his frequency—not his power, but his presence—until he was no longer resonating outward, but listening inward. It wasn’t meditation. It was survival. And that’s when the first ripple came.

  Not from the pool. From him. He felt it. A flutter. A distortion. A note out of place. Poseidon flinched. His breath caught. He closed his eyes tighter, trying to push it down. But the echo came again—stronger. Not from Erebus. Not from Rahab or Raguel. But from something just outside perception. A hum.

  Like Gaia’s resonance… but off by one note. It wasn’t threatening. It was... inviting. Poseidon opened his eyes. And the pool was no longer still. It was mirroring him. But not as he was. As he had been. Before the war. Before the Veil. A younger Poseidon. Radiant. Whole. Beautiful in symmetry. Drenched in authority and righteous calm.

  The version of himself he wrote about in the Canticles. The one who had believed in truth like it was water. He moved closer. The reflection didn’t distort. Didn’t mimic. It was independent. It smiled. Poseidon staggered back.

  And the reflection changed. Warped. The features cracked. The glow inverted. It became Rahab—seething, tidal, a fury that knew no center. The storm in Poseidon’s marrow. Eyes black as Leviathan’s breath. And behind it— Another figure.

  Raguel. Cold. Statuesque. Law made flesh. An ocean frozen into command. They stood side by side. Then shifted again. Moved. And Poseidon realized: They were not illusions. They were manifestations.

  The air thickened. Gravity softened. And Poseidon’s skin began to hum. Not tingle. Hum. Resonate. As if the pool beneath him had tuned itself to his inner frequencies… and was tugging. Not violently. Almost gently. Pulling him inward. Into something beyond the chamber. Beyond Thalassaris. Beyond the veil of thought itself.

  Poseidon tried to stand. But his knees buckled. He caught himself—but his reflection no longer matched his movement. It had stopped mimicking altogether. And now, it was watching him. Rahab and Raguel on either side. Poseidon in the middle.

  Eyes open. Mouth closed. But speaking. Not in words. In resonance. And his body answered. Without consent. Without understanding. He felt the walls vanish. Felt himself fall—Not downward. But inward. Into memory. Into myth. Into the Dreamveil. His last thought before the light shattered.

  “Gaia… what have you done?”

  The fall wasn’t fast. It was slow enough to feel. Poseidon’s descent into the Dreamveil wasn’t a tumble—it was a yielding, as if gravity had softened into honey, and reality melted like salt into deep, black water. His body did not fall through space—it surrendered to vibration.

  He reached for control. There was none. The world around him was no longer the sacred pool beneath Thalassaris. It was color without form. Light that moved like liquid. A horizon with no sky, only the suggestion of upwardness—a vast cathedral made from shifting auroras and pulsating echoes.

  And beneath his feet—or what should’ve been his feet—was a surface like molten glass. Every step rippled with impossible geometry, like thought becoming architecture in real time. The air carried no scent. The air wasn’t air. It was awareness. Poseidon’s senses rebelled. Even as a god, he had limits. And this place—this space—was testing them. He had entered the Dreamveil.

  “Gaia…”

  Her name left his lips like a forgotten prayer. He didn’t know if she heard him. He didn’t know if he heard himself. A subtle hum surrounded him now—beautiful, layered, haunting. It wasn’t Erebus. It wasn’t the Veil. It was Gaia’s Frequency—or close to it. Something warm. Familiar. But just… off. As if tuned to his memory of her, not her actual self.

  The Veil, he realized, was adapting. Not showing him what was. Showing him what he was ready to see. Poseidon moved forward. He wasn’t sure how. The world bent with him, folding its shape around each motion like a living echo. Then—he saw it. A figure in the distance, walking toward him across the mirrored glass. Not a monster. Not an illusion. A version of himself. It was regal. Clean. Undeniably idealized.

  Hair like carved oceanlight, skin reflecting the stars, a trident gleaming like the first tool ever forged. Every movement was smooth, deliberate. It had none of his present weariness. No scars. No weight. This… was the Poseidon from the Canticles. The one the mortals prayed to.

  The one he used to believe in. The figure stopped ten paces away. It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Its smile said everything:

  “This is who you were supposed to be.”

  Poseidon’s breath hitched. He wanted to speak, to demand answers—but the dream wouldn't let him. His voice echoed without direction. Even in his own domain, the current didn’t respond. Then—A second figure emerged behind the first. The air cracked around it.

  Rahab. No disguise. No metaphor. He towered with tidal mass, his body an amalgamation of storm and serpentine depth. Eyes like whirlpools, hair made of crashing waves. Veins pulsed with dark water and fury. His presence made Poseidon's soul tremble—not in fear, but in recognition. Rahab didn’t walk. He rolled forward like an incoming surge, the kind that drowned cities before they had names.

  “Finally,” Rahab growled. “No more veils. No more lies.”

  Poseidon clenched his fists. But the air around him began to still. And from that stillness—the third figure emerged. Not loud. Not violent. Just… there.

  Raguel. Cold. Composed. Every motion calculated. He stood perfectly upright, robes of muted silver swaying without breeze. His eyes were the color of starlight that never reached a planet. His presence was not commanding—it was absolute.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t blink. He simply stared. Poseidon felt as if the world had been judged the moment Raguel entered the Veil. The three figures stood before him now. Not metaphors. Not memory. Manifestations. Rahab on his left. Raguel on his right.

  And his idealized self—the myth—standing between them. All watching. All waiting. And then Poseidon understood: These were not illusions. They were fragments made flesh. The Dreamveil hadn’t given him symbols to decipher. It had pulled his resonance apart… and manifested what it found.

  Poseidon’s knees buckled. Not from pain—from weight. The truth slammed into him like a collapsing tide: He had never been whole. Everything he’d written. Everything he’d believed. Every war, every law, every sacred tide—it had all been the voice of a man trying to drown the parts of himself he feared most.

  And now… they stood before him. With eyes. With voices. With will.

  “Say it,” Rahab growled.

  Poseidon stayed silent.

  “Say it!” the monster bellowed. “You made me your sin. The part you use to break the things that don’t fit your neat little oceans.”

  Raguel’s voice was softer. But it cut deeper.

  “And you made me your justification. The ‘law’ to excuse every wave you sent crashing into the world.”

  The idealized Poseidon didn’t move. But his silence was louder than either of them. Mocking. Poseidon looked between them. Three truths. One god. And none of them enough.

  “I didn’t come here to destroy myself,” he muttered.

  Rahab stepped forward. “But you did, Poseidon.”

  He raised his arms, the Veil around him rippling.

  “You came here because you knew you couldn’t control us anymore.”

  Raguel nodded once. “Control is not truth. And you’ve spent eternity pretending it was.”

  Poseidon tried to back away, but there was no ground behind him now.

  Only echo. The Veil was closing in. Not as punishment. As mirror. And then… They began to merge. Not into him. With each other. Rahab's chaos flowed into Raguel’s stillness. Raguel’s law sank into Rahab’s fury. They didn’t become one. They became each other. Distorting. Harmonizing. And the more they merged—the more Poseidon realized: They were doing what he never could. His perfect version—his myth—stepped forward now. Smiling. And finally spoke.

  “You are not afraid of chaos,” he said.

  “You’re afraid that chaos and order were never separate.”

  Poseidon’s throat tightened. And then the Dreamveil shuddered. The ground beneath him broke. And he fell—Into himself.

  “It wasn’t the flood that broke the world. It was the stillness after.”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The first strike tore reality in half. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t sound. It was resonance—raw and ancient—ripped loose like a scream from the core of Poseidon’s fractured essence. Rahab launched forward, his body nothing but crashing currents and primordial rage. Water wasn't just his weapon—it was his form, and every drop in his being carried a memory of Poseidon's denied fury. He moved like tidal destruction—unpredictable, endless, pure chaos compressed into motion.

  Raguel met him with silence. A single hand lifted. A sphere of stillness bloomed around him, catching Rahab’s first strike mid-surge. Waves froze. Foam turned to crystal. Time hiccupped. And then—shattered.

  The battlefield wasn't a place. It was a condition. A metaphysical arena shaped by Poseidon's divided soul. Galaxies spiraled like chakrams. Fractured moons drifted like discarded chess pieces. The floor was light. The sky was sound. Everything was in motion—until Raguel stepped.

  With every movement, he canceled momentum. With every breath, he redefined gravity. He moved like martial law incarnate. Formless. Unfazed. His stance was ancient—based not on combat… but correction. Rahab was faster. But Raguel was cleaner. And Poseidon… was trapped in between. Floating, watching, feeling every blow as if it struck his own body.

  “Stop this!” he roared, hurling a wave of power outward—but it passed through them like smoke.

  The Dreamveil would not let him interfere. Not yet. This was not a battle of bodies. This was a trial of truths. And he was the accused. Rahab vanished in a swirl of whirlpools—then reappeared behind Raguel, lashing out with a jagged trident of boiling plasma tides.

  Raguel didn’t turn. He pivoted space. The strike missed by inches—but the consequence rippled across dimensions. A dormant star in the distance ignited. Another collapsed. The feedback pulled the battlefield into a tighter spiral—clocks spun in reverse, time stuttered. Poseidon felt his skin vibrate. His very name began to unravel in echo.

  “You built the Veil because you couldn’t face us!” Rahab roared, leaping again, this time splitting into multiple forms mid-strike—each one a different note of his frequency.

  Raguel lifted his arms. Silence slammed into them like a wall. Every clone froze mid-attack, suspended in space. Then—one by one—they imploded into harmonic rings. He spoke at last.

  “You fear your own chaos, Poseidon. So you buried it in me.”

  Rahab reformed from the shattered water, drenched in fury.

  “And you locked it in me. Called me disorder. Unworthy. Filth.”

  Raguel’s expression didn’t change. “Truth must be delivered in doses. You are overdose.”

  “And you are denial,” Rahab snapped. “You would sterilize the sea to make it safe.”

  The air shook again. But this time—it wasn’t from a strike. It was from Poseidon. He clenched his fists. His body flickered with unstable light. Rahab and Raguel turned to him at once.

  “Now you feel it,” Rahab said, grinning with salt-soaked teeth.

  “The Veil doesn’t protect you,” Raguel intoned. “It reflects what you couldn’t bear to face.”

  And then they charged. At each other. Poseidon tried to stop them. The Dreamveil would not allow it. Rahab summoned a ring of planetary debris—slammed it forward with a sonic pulse, hurling moons like shuriken. Raguel extended his fingers, forming a sigil of denial mid-air. Each moon bent around him, missing by micro-inches, then froze in perfect orbit—trapped by sheer will. He retaliated by stepping forward and condensing a black hole with a thought. Not to destroy Rahab—but to isolate him. Rahab shattered it with a scream. The scream ripped holes through the cosmos. One spiral galaxy tore in two. Poseidon screamed, feeling the tear inside his ribs.

  The Veil pulsed again. And the world decomposed into staves—like music un-written. Every motion became note. Every breath, rhythm. The fight became symphonic violence. Rahab danced between explosive beats—slamming fists of tsunami energy into constellations. Each strike rewrote gravity wells. Raguel countered with martial stillness—catching waves with his bare palms, turning them into harmonic feedback loops that reversed Rahab’s own attacks against him. Then—Poseidon heard it. A note. Unbearably high. Inhumanly sharp. The moment it struck, the battlefield fractured.

  Not visually. Vibrationally. He dropped to his knees. Blood—real or metaphysical—ran from his ears. The fight didn’t slow. It accelerated. Rahab tore apart the dreamfloor, dragging screams of rage from sea-shaped swords. Raguel carved glyphs into reality with his bare hands, sealing entire sections of the Dreamveil behind unspoken laws. And Poseidon? Poseidon cracked. Not from pain. From revelation.

  He saw it all. His dualities weren’t trying to destroy each other. They were trying to prove which version of him would survive. Rahab, the god of flood, rebellion, righteous rage. Raguel, the god of justice, peace, balance through control. They were trying to consume the space between them—the space he had lived in all this time. And if one won? He would vanish.

  The sound crescendoed. Too loud to think. Too sharp to breathe. Poseidon grabbed his head—screamed. And then—He exploded. Not physically. But resonantly. A shockwave of Poseidon's essence flared out across the battlefield, hitting both Rahab and Raguel mid-motion.

  Time paused. Then shattered. They were knocked back—disassembled into light and water and thought. The battlefield folded inward. And then silence. Poseidon stood in the void. Alone. Chest rising. Falling. Hands shaking. The silence now wasn’t reflective. It was waiting.

  “You are not a god. You are a mirror.”

  The silence wasn't peaceful. It pulsed. Like a heartbeat… beneath the skin of existence. Poseidon stood trembling in the center of the unraveling Dreamveil. The battlefield, if it could be called that, had disintegrated. The stars were gone. The echoes quiet. The staves of cosmic resonance had receded into soft, shimmering mist. And yet—He was not alone. Not anymore. He felt it before he saw it. A pressure—not heavy, but present. The weight of being watched… not by a predator, but by something older. Something that remembered him long before he knew what remembrance was. The mist parted slowly, like curtains being pulled by time itself. And a figure emerged.

  It was not light. Not shadow. But… echo. Half-seen. Half-heard. Shifting. It didn’t move so much as exist in multiple positions at once, collapsing into form only when Poseidon's focus tried to fix it. And even then, it resisted. Long robes. Unwritten glyphs moving like ink across their surface. A face that wore a thousand expressions and yet none. And from within it—A voice. Not sharp. Not loud. But cutting.

  "You cannot write truth while fractured," the figure said.

  The voice layered itself—feminine, masculine, divine, void. It came from behind him and from within him at once.

  "The ink leaks."

  Poseidon staggered back, chest heaving.

  “Who—who are you?”

  The figure did not respond with a name. Instead, it extended a hand. Something appeared between them. A book. It didn’t fall. Didn’t float. It simply… was. Thick, bound in coral and bone, glowing faintly with a resonance Poseidon recognized with a shudder. His own. The title burned across the cover in silver fire. The Canticles of Tides

  His scripture. His doctrine. His truth. He took a step forward. Then another. His fingers hovered over the cover like a man touching the tomb of someone he both loved and feared. He hadn’t written this. Had he? He opened it. And everything—everything—changed.

  The first page was familiar. Lines he remembered inscribing with his own hand. Words he had sung into the memory of oceans and laws. Mantras. Parables. Judgments. But the tone… felt wrong. The rhythm was off. As if the words had moved in his absence.

  As if the book had… kept writing itself. He flipped a page. Then another. And another. Each one cut deeper. Some lines were true memories—altered. Others were fabrications—but ones he wanted to believe. And some—some were predictions. Events that hadn’t happened. Yet. One line pulsed. Not glowed—pulsed. Alive. It drew him like a tide, and he read it aloud:

  “And when Poseidon wrote what he believed was truth, the universe bent—not to reality, but to his fear.”

  He nearly dropped the book. The words didn’t echo. They folded into the space around him, reshaping the Dreamveil with invisible hands. He fell to his knees. His hands trembled, clutching the sacred volume that now felt like a confession. A betrayal. He wanted to scream. To tear it apart. But he couldn’t.

  Because deep down… he remembered writing it. Not with pen. Not with voice. But with belief.

  “You were never the Author,” the voice said again.

  This time, it wasn’t many. It was one. Gaia. Soft. Gentle. Irrevocable.

  "You are not a god," she said. "You are a mirror. And even mirrors must shatter… before they reflect what lies beneath."

  Poseidon shook his head, breath catching in his throat.

  “I… I kept the tides. I shaped the oceans. I held the storms back—”

  "You maintained the illusion," Gaia whispered. "You believed law was truth. But you never asked whose law."

  He flipped another page. It showed an image—not painted, but etched in light. Him. Writing. But not on stone tablets. On water. Each word dissolved seconds after being written. Behind him stood Rahab. Watching. And Raguel. Judging. But over both of them…Stood Gaia. Smiling. Not cruelly. But knowingly. Like a parent watching a child pretend to be an adult.

  “What is this…?” Poseidon whispered.

  “A record of your resonance,” Gaia said. “The Canticles were never finished. Because you never stopped writing with fear.”

  The words from earlier flashed again, seared into his memory:

  "The universe bent—not to reality, but to his fear."

  Poseidon stood, trembling. The battlefield was gone. There was only mist, light, and the echo of a lie too long believed.

  “You’re telling me…” he began, voice cracking, “everything I’ve built—every law, every judgment, every Veil…”

  “Reflected what you were afraid to become,” the Curator said.

  He stepped forward, face now clearer. It was him. A version of Poseidon with no godhood. No armor. No glory. Just a man. Tired. Lonely. Wise. Poseidon clenched his jaw.

  “This… this can’t be true.”

  “But it is,” said the Curator, kneeling before him.

  “You just didn’t write it yet.”

  The book flipped again on its own. A future page. A future line. He stared. It said:

  “And when the gods lost faith in themselves, the mortals ascended to finish the sentence.”

  Poseidon stared at the line. Then back to the Curator.

  “What does this mean?”

  But the mist was thickening. The vision dimming. The veil pulling him back. The last thing he heard before the Dreamveil collapsed was Gaia’s voice, soft as sleep:

  “What you write next, Poseidon… will determine if you are still a god… or something else.”

  There was no final chord. No grand fanfare. Just a soundless crack, deep beneath the note of existence. The mirror pool—once still as divinity, once perfectly tuned to Poseidon’s illusion of self—shattered. Not explosively. But completely. As if it had been waiting to break all along.

  Poseidon fell with it. Or perhaps into it. He didn’t know which. All he could feel was the collapse—not of the Dreamveil, but of the story he had built around himself. The divine fiction that he had mistaken for gospel. Every line of law. Every sacred song. Every judgment ever etched into the Canticles…

  It had all been his fear in disguise. He screamed. But not from pain. From understanding. And the moment he did, he wasn’t in the Veil anymore. He was falling. Through water that wasn’t water. Through memories shaped like lightning. Through echoes of battles he hadn’t fought yet.

  He saw mortals, wielding divine resonance without permission. He saw gods, crumbling beneath their own reflections. He saw Erebus, silent as always… watching. And at the edge of it all—Himself. Not as a man. Not as a god. But as something unfinished.

  Then—Impact. His body slammed into the real world like a crashing tide. The sanctum beneath Thalassaris jolted. The reflective pool, now cracked and lifeless, rejected him like a vein rejecting corrupted blood. He gasped—eyes wide, lungs sucking in breath that felt wrong. Everything was wrong. The chamber was dimmer.

  Colder. Off-key. Poseidon staggered to his feet. Water clung to his skin, but it no longer felt like home. His trident, once humming in resonance, was silent. No divine hum. No surge. Just weight. He clutched it like a memory. Like a sword held too long after a war had ended.

  Inside him, Rahab and Raguel stirred. Not violently. Not angrily. Just… aware. As if they'd been watching too. As if they’d seen what he’d seen. And were now waiting.

  Poseidon’s mind reeled. What do I do now? He tried to return to the comfort of control—but it was gone. I could rewrite the Canticles. Reassert order. No one has to know. Rahab snorted. Lie to them? Again? Rewrite the fear in a new font and call it “wisdom”? Raguel countered, calm but sharp. The people need structure. Chaos is not freedom—it’s fire with no hearth.

  And somewhere, deep inside— his own voice whispered. But maybe it’s not about them anymore. He looked at the pool. Saw his reflection. And for the first time—Didn’t recognize it. It flickered. Between forms. A king. A storm. A judge. A man. A mistake.

  “Poseidon.”

  The voice was real. Here. Now. He turned—and saw him. The Curator. Standing at the far end of the chamber, robes still shimmering with glyphs that hadn’t been invented yet. Face neutral. Eyes ancient. Voice soft.

  “You’ve returned.”

  Poseidon nodded. “Not whole.”

  “None of us are,” the Curator replied.

  A silence passed. Not awkward. Sacred. Poseidon finally asked:

  “Was this all Gaia’s doing?”

  The Curator tilted his head.

  “Would the answer change what you saw?”

  Poseidon looked down. His grip on the trident loosened.

  “No,” he admitted. “But I think… I needed someone to blame.”

  The Curator walked forward, each step whispering across the cracked pool. He stopped just before Poseidon. And held out something. The book. The Canticles. Still glowing. Still unfinished. Still… changing. Poseidon didn’t take it. Not yet. He looked at it like a weapon he no longer trusted.

  “There’s more in it now, isn’t there?” he asked.

  The Curator nodded. “There will always be. Until you stop writing from fear.” Poseidon’s hand trembled as he reached forward. The moment his fingers touched the cover— He felt it. Not knowledge. Not power. Possibility. All the futures he had denied. All the truths he had buried. All the versions of himself he had murdered in the name of divine symmetry.

  He opened the book.Pages flipped on their own. Some he remembered. Others he had never seen. One line glowed again:

  “He who fears what he is… will become what others need him to be.”

  Another.

  “The sea does not judge. It accepts. Until it drowns you.”

  And then… A blank page. Waiting. Not for prophecy. For choice. The Curator’s voice was almost a whisper.

  “What you write next, Poseidon… will determine if you are still a god, or something else.”

  Poseidon looked up. The chamber was breathing now. Something unseen had stirred. The Dreamveil may have ended. But its influence had not. Not entirely. Because somewhere…Just beyond the edge of perception… Erebus was still watching. And this time? He was smiling.