The first word that comes my mind is fuck.
The second, mysteriously, is incomplete, and I’m left scrambling to figure out why as the impression fades.
A single moment seems to stretch out into infinity as reality shatters and the endless emptiness of the void encroaches on our slice of reality, granting me more time than I would ever want to stare into the face of my death.
It hurts to look at, but the Titan’s visage draws my eye and holds it, trapping my vision in a single spot. Appraise fails to work on it, because of course it does, but I can tell just from the pressure it exerts that it is powerful. Even its presence alone outclasses any blow the three of us can hope to put up.
The nameless Titan’s body shimmers with heat, a thousand heart-shaped scales oscillating through colors of the rainbow. Its very existence breaks the reality around it, crushing concrete and wood and a dozen antimemetic species to ashes just by virtue of occupying the same space. I can’t make out where its face is, and every last one of its vibrant scales oozse with the malice of a cold glare.
It has to occupy at least half of the fragment. Even as Zil shouts out a panicked command, recasting the teleportation ritual on the circle we currently stand on, more of the Titan comes into view, utterly obliterating everything in its path.
This isn’t even an attack. It’s just moving.
Paralyzing pressure bores down on me, threatening to root me to the ground and make this half-reality my grave, but my resistances are stronger than they have any right to be.
At last. A being of true power.
If I die, you die too, I think to my passenger. Though the voice in my head is inaudible, this proclamation feels greedy, as if it’s reaching a hand out and hoping the living wall in front of me will reach back.
The void smashes into us as the Titan advances, and its vibrations increase in intensity. A patch of its scales turns a pitch black, and the heat emanating from them is so fierce that it’s a wonder none of us have burns.
And it’s still hundreds of feet away. The only way I can tell is by referencing the remaining intact structures between the Titan and us, because it occupies the entirety of my visual field past that point.
It hungers, and that desire ripples out into the open air, stronger than I’ve ever felt it. Everything this creature does, it does in spades. The all-encompassing urge to devour rips into me, outclassing anything I’ve ever felt from my amalgam, my own thoughts, even my divine passenger.
So this is what has come of the primordial beasts.
What could possibly be incomplete about this?
Zil finishes screaming out the verbal part of his ritual, connecting a fistful of rods down to the circle we arrived onto—and the runic power within it fades. Blank cracks run through the runic pattern, spiderwebbing out through the steel, and the text warps, garbled into illegibility.
The unstoppable wall that is a living being and must somehow be unfinished in some way, any way, expresses its desire once more.
Demon. Witnessed.
Unlike the last time I had the displeasure of being directly addressed by a Titan, this one occupies the same chunk of reality I do. When images assail my mind, magic assails my body in kind. The newborn Titan forces me to witness myself die in a hundred thousand different ways. It shows me death after death after death, and the very act of doing so is almost too much for my body to handle. Organs fail, crumpling under raw pressure, and I Shapeshift to create stopgaps. Even using skills is harder now. Of course it is.
Alongside the physical effects, however, is the realization that these images have even less of an effect on me mentally than the Titan of the Nameless Sea’s. It’s like I’m watching someone tear apart a doll fashioned in my likeness, painting the stuffing within a shade of crimson that doesn’t quite match blood.
Is this what my instincts were screaming me about? Is the lack of creativity, the Titan’s inability to communicate in the same way as its brethren, is that what the incompleteness stems from?
In part, maybe. But that doesn’t feel like the full answer.
Not that it will matter. The heat’s intensity ramps with every passing fraction of a second. Zil and I have no issue with it thanks to our resistances and body-empowerment skills, respectively, but Ashley is already on the ground, screaming in pain.
The deafening roar of the Titan’s scales drown her out.
I ready myself to fight, but every instinct in my body tells me to flee. Even the damnable voice that tells me to advance no matter the cost tells me that this is not a fight I can win. This is a Titan. It is to me as I am to a bacterium. It won’t even register my death.
Except it will. Because it spoke to me. Because Scintilla spoke to me. They want something out of me, and I’m not dying until I figure out what it is.
There’s nowhere to run, which leaves us with one option.
And one choice is the same as none.
I activate every skill I have, determined to fight to my last.
Blood Magic, every form of it. Knifefighting alongside Soulblade, infusing the tip with Smite and Soulrend alike. Stealth and Imitation and Antimemetic Cloak, for what little those are worth. Radiant Aura, though even I know the Titan’s aren’t demonic. Siphon, on the off chance I can steal even a fraction of its overwhelming presence. Abyssal Echo, even if the Titan has a mind far beyond mine. Ethereal Tempest, to redouble every flea-bite attack I can deliver. Every last charge in my Soulshard Rifle goes into a single attack, creating a devastating red beam that would obliterate even Zil if he took a direct hit.
Speaking of which, Zil and Ashley join me, the former gritting his teeth through the pain and the latter creating a bow made of pure purple energy even as she screams. I’m paying too much attention to my arsenal to focus on what they’re doing, but Zil triples in size and glows with power as Ashley fires a single arrow that is almost as painfully bright as the Titan.
Even a single cell can kill a living organism, given the right conditions.
These are not the right conditions.
My blood sizzles as it slithers through the air, and it simply ceases to be when cracks of void break the reality that hundreds of gallons of my crimson fluid is governed by. My Soulblade extends ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred feet, but it shatters like brittle glass when the very tip touches the Titan’s surface. The combination of the demonic and the divine actually manages to connect with a scale, briefly discoloring it, but the Titan doesn’t so much as flinch. Siphon fills me with enough magical power to keep going even after my barrage, but the pressure ratchets up. I may as well be trying to drain an ocean with a straw. Twisting its mind might have an effect, but if it does, it’s not one I can see. My storm of swords simply evaporates, empty void claiming white mist. My Soulshard Rifle’s blast is soaked up by a single scale, which flickers for a moment before returning to normal.
Zil’s attack is no more fruitful, but Ashley’s attack—which I recognize now as a special skill—carves out a reality for itself, reassembling just enough space in the broken void to bridge the gap, and it detonates with a thunderous crash, striking the same hut-sized heart scale I did. The scale flickers, discolors, goes dark.
All of that. All of that for a single scale amongst hundreds of thousands. The Titan slows for a single instant, then continues on. It’s not fast, thank what gods may exist, but it is inexorable, and there’s only so much reality left in this fragment.
Incomplete, I realize. Its speed. That’s another part of the puzzle. Scintilla, Titan of the Nameless Sea, crossed hundreds of miles in hours. This one is yet newborn, and so its speed is hampered.
Not that that’s enough.
“Hold on!” Zil shouts as the three of us retreat as far as we can. “I have one more trick, then we’re fucked!”
“We’re walking corpses,” Ashley replies, her voice hoarse. “You just haven’t accepted that yet.”
She bites down on her tongue hard enough that blood trickles out of her mouth, her body convulsing, and I use Phantom Shape to keep her up, creating extra limbs to support her walking.
There is still a non-zero chance she tries to kill me here, but I highly doubt she’s thinking of that right now. Ashley’s stated desire was to secure the Crowned Islands from outside threat, and this Titan probably takes precedence over me.
“Domain: Perfect Self,” Zil says as we run, barely winded. His voice quavers as another wave of raw killing intent washes over us, but the same soothing sensation as before washes over us. “Special skill: Self-Integration - Ritual.”
The Guardian of Self’s eyes light up a bright, arcane blue, unnatural light glowing from his enlarged body, and I watch as runes carve themselves into his arms in fast motion. It happens so fast that unenhanced eyes might miss it, but I catch it as an entire ritual circle applies itself to his body.
I recognize these runes. They’re the same ones that the Titan’s very existence broke earlier.
“I can only try this once,” he says, scooping Ashley and me up with his hands like we’re babies. He pauses. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be dead, so I guess I shouldn’t care about that.”
Zil glows brighter, every piece of the ritual glowing blue and bright. It’s slower than it should be, I feel, thanks to the way the Titan’s presence makes casting skills feel like swimming through molasses.
The stomach-twisting sensation of teleportation infuses the area once again, less stably than it has before.
Reality shatters around us as the Titan approaches and Zil grunts in effort.
Our travels through teleportation circles have felt as if we’re on a boat in the midst of a thunderstorm. This must be what happens when someone is thrown overboard. Reality twists and warps around us as Zil’s spell attempts to take hold in a fragment that no longer exists, targeting a reality that may well not be there either.
I see flashes of other fragments. I recognize some. At least, I recognize what they used to be.
This isn’t the first pocket reality the Titan has broken.
Incomplete, I think once more as we tumble through nothingness. This is what an incomplete Titan does.
Can I use that knowledge? Is there any weakness I can exploit?
You are witnessed.
Images flash behind my eyes once more, snapshots of gore and violence flooding my mind once more, but it’s different this time. This time, I’m more resolved. The corpses I become look like they could actually be me. Some of them are me.
And I’m not alone.
In each and every image, I stand in front of a shimmering wall of scales.
Before I can make heads or tails out of the vision, Zil’s ritual completes, slamming us uncomfortably into our target reality.
Every time we’ve traveled between fragments, we’ve gone from ritual circle to ritual circle.
This time, we appear three hundred feet in the air.
We’re back in reality. The real reality, not one of the mockeries of one that the Halcyon family captured for their own use. No trace of the void permeates this place, and I can see for miles around us.
Beneath us are the Wastelands, which are no longer what I remember them to be. In the hours since leaving them for other realities, waste has been added. A lot of waste.
The pieces of the shattered fragments I caught glimpses of are scattered haphazardly on the sand beneath. Much of it is burning, and dead monsters, experiments, and humans decorate the grounds like morbid cake toppings. I recognize pieces of the grey facility, still monochrome in the real world. I wonder if they maintain the same properties out here that they did in their chunk of anomalous land.
I activate Bloodpath as we fall, and Zil lands safely with Ashley in his hands. Compared to everything we’ve been through, a fall is nothing. We arrive on the hellhole that is ground level without further incident.
Locate, I request immediately, searching for two targets in particular. If the Titan has ruined the set of fragments, it is eminently possible that it knocked the prisons out of their existences too. That would mean—
The skill locates Sierra immediately. Adrian is right next to her, and they’re moving.
“Zil,” I say. “Regroup. Now.”
He doesn’t question me, thankfully, and he joins me as I Bloodpath to the first allies I’ve made.
To my surprise, Sierra tackles me in an embrace as soon as I materialize in front of her. She looks wholly intact apart from a slash across her stomach, which I also wasn’t expecting.
Even more shocking is the fact that I wish we had more time. I want to properly embrace her back, to catch up on her story, to express the bubbling emotions within me.
I can’t even take the time to evaluate what that means about me. Fuck.
I look into Sierra’s eyes, and my words catch in my throat.
“Sierra,”I manage to say say.
“Evelyn,” she replies, burying her face into my shoulder. “You’re okay. Of course you are.”
“Sierra,” I repeat. “There’s a—“
“I know,” she says. “It hit our fragment. Sent us spinning here. It won’t be long before it emerges again.”
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Adrian says, a Blade of the Eternal Sea in each hand. “Like, now.”
It won’t matter, I realize. The Titan wants me. It wants me so bad that it linked minds with me, witnessing me in its broken newborn speech.
Why?
It seeks completion. It seeks me.
Not for the first time, I wish I had a way to excise my passenger from my body.
“I can’t run,” I say, closing my eyes and thinking. “Wherever I go, the Titan will follow.”
“Take who you can and evacuate,” Zil tells Adrian. “There are hundreds in the Halcyon fragments. Leave before the Titan comes. We’ve only got a handful of minutes.”
The Titan is stronger than me. In its current state, I can’t even affect it. It’ll crush me, I know. This isn’t something I can just run from. It chased us through realities, and even if its speed isn’t great yet, it will be.
But it’s incomplete, isn’t it? That thought is still nagging at me. It’s unfinished. Eating my passenger will make it complete? That can’t be it.
It’s not a full Titan. The realization isn’t the crystal-clear resolution I need it to be, but the pieces click into place. The existing Titans shake the world when they surface. This one shook a world, yes, but it was a world in a bottle. It can’t match its brethren. Not in speed, not in power, not in presence.
That leaves me with one extremely shitty option.
I use Shapeshift, unearthing the item I’ve stored deep within me.
“Sierra,” I tell the woman in my arms, “You should run.”
Her eyes widen as she takes in the circular tablet I pass into a ghostly hand, Phantom Shape bringing it between us.
“Run.”
I pass my mana into the Titan Caller.
Around us, the world begins to rumble.
You have awakened [Sersui, Titan of the Shifting Sands].
The first word that comes my mind is fuck.
The second, mysteriously, is incomplete, and I’m left scrambling to figure out why as the impression fades.
A single moment seems to stretch out into infinity as reality shatters and the endless emptiness of the void encroaches on our slice of reality, granting me more time than I would ever want to stare into the face of my death.
It hurts to look at, but the Titan’s visage draws my eye and holds it, trapping my vision in a single spot. Appraise fails to work on it, because of course it does, but I can tell just from the pressure it exerts that it is powerful. Even its presence alone outclasses any blow the three of us can hope to put up.
The nameless Titan’s body shimmers with heat, a thousand heart-shaped scales oscillating through colors of the rainbow. Its very existence breaks the reality around it, crushing concrete and wood and a dozen antimemetic species to ashes just by virtue of occupying the same space. I can’t make out where its face is, and every last one of its vibrant scales oozse with the malice of a cold glare.
It has to occupy at least half of the fragment. Even as Zil shouts out a panicked command, recasting the teleportation ritual on the circle we currently stand on, more of the Titan comes into view, utterly obliterating everything in its path.
This isn’t even an attack. It’s just moving.
Paralyzing pressure bores down on me, threatening to root me to the ground and make this half-reality my grave, but my resistances are stronger than they have any right to be.
At last. A being of true power.
If I die, you die too, I think to my passenger. Though the voice in my head is inaudible, this proclamation feels greedy, as if it’s reaching a hand out and hoping the living wall in front of me will reach back.
The void smashes into us as the Titan advances, and its vibrations increase in intensity. A patch of its scales turns a pitch black, and the heat emanating from them is so fierce that it’s a wonder none of us have burns.
And it’s still hundreds of feet away. The only way I can tell is by referencing the remaining intact structures between the Titan and us, because it occupies the entirety of my visual field past that point.
It hungers, and that desire ripples out into the open air, stronger than I’ve ever felt it. Everything this creature does, it does in spades. The all-encompassing urge to devour rips into me, outclassing anything I’ve ever felt from my amalgam, my own thoughts, even my divine passenger.
So this is what has come of the primordial beasts.
What could possibly be incomplete about this?
Zil finishes screaming out the verbal part of his ritual, connecting a fistful of rods down to the circle we arrived onto—and the runic power within it fades. Blank cracks run through the runic pattern, spiderwebbing out through the steel, and the text warps, garbled into illegibility.
The unstoppable wall that is a living being and must somehow be unfinished in some way, any way, expresses its desire once more.
Demon. Witnessed.
Unlike the last time I had the displeasure of being directly addressed by a Titan, this one occupies the same chunk of reality I do. When images assail my mind, magic assails my body in kind. The newborn Titan forces me to witness myself die in a hundred thousand different ways. It shows me death after death after death, and the very act of doing so is almost too much for my body to handle. Organs fail, crumpling under raw pressure, and I Shapeshift to create stopgaps. Even using skills is harder now. Of course it is.
Alongside the physical effects, however, is the realization that these images have even less of an effect on me mentally than the Titan of the Nameless Sea’s. It’s like I’m watching someone tear apart a doll fashioned in my likeness, painting the stuffing within a shade of crimson that doesn’t quite match blood.
Is this what my instincts were screaming me about? Is the lack of creativity, the Titan’s inability to communicate in the same way as its brethren, is that what the incompleteness stems from?
In part, maybe. But that doesn’t feel like the full answer.
Not that it will matter. The heat’s intensity ramps with every passing fraction of a second. Zil and I have no issue with it thanks to our resistances and body-empowerment skills, respectively, but Ashley is already on the ground, screaming in pain.
The deafening roar of the Titan’s scales drown her out.
I ready myself to fight, but every instinct in my body tells me to flee. Even the damnable voice that tells me to advance no matter the cost tells me that this is not a fight I can win. This is a Titan. It is to me as I am to a bacterium. It won’t even register my death.
Except it will. Because it spoke to me. Because Scintilla spoke to me. They want something out of me, and I’m not dying until I figure out what it is.
There’s nowhere to run, which leaves us with one option.
And one choice is the same as none.
I activate every skill I have, determined to fight to my last.
Blood Magic, every form of it. Knifefighting alongside Soulblade, infusing the tip with Smite and Soulrend alike. Stealth and Imitation and Antimemetic Cloak, for what little those are worth. Radiant Aura, though even I know the Titan’s aren’t demonic. Siphon, on the off chance I can steal even a fraction of its overwhelming presence. Abyssal Echo, even if the Titan has a mind far beyond mine. Ethereal Tempest, to redouble every flea-bite attack I can deliver. Every last charge in my Soulshard Rifle goes into a single attack, creating a devastating red beam that would obliterate even Zil if he took a direct hit.
Speaking of which, Zil and Ashley join me, the former gritting his teeth through the pain and the latter creating a bow made of pure purple energy even as she screams. I’m paying too much attention to my arsenal to focus on what they’re doing, but Zil triples in size and glows with power as Ashley fires a single arrow that is almost as painfully bright as the Titan.
Even a single cell can kill a living organism, given the right conditions.
These are not the right conditions.
My blood sizzles as it slithers through the air, and it simply ceases to be when cracks of void break the reality that hundreds of gallons of my crimson fluid is governed by. My Soulblade extends ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred feet, but it shatters like brittle glass when the very tip touches the Titan’s surface. The combination of the demonic and the divine actually manages to connect with a scale, briefly discoloring it, but the Titan doesn’t so much as flinch. Siphon fills me with enough magical power to keep going even after my barrage, but the pressure ratchets up. I may as well be trying to drain an ocean with a straw. Twisting its mind might have an effect, but if it does, it’s not one I can see. My storm of swords simply evaporates, empty void claiming white mist. My Soulshard Rifle’s blast is soaked up by a single scale, which flickers for a moment before returning to normal.
Zil’s attack is no more fruitful, but Ashley’s attack—which I recognize now as a special skill—carves out a reality for itself, reassembling just enough space in the broken void to bridge the gap, and it detonates with a thunderous crash, striking the same hut-sized heart scale I did. The scale flickers, discolors, goes dark.
All of that. All of that for a single scale amongst hundreds of thousands. The Titan slows for a single instant, then continues on. It’s not fast, thank what gods may exist, but it is inexorable, and there’s only so much reality left in this fragment.
Incomplete, I realize. Its speed. That’s another part of the puzzle. Scintilla, Titan of the Nameless Sea, crossed hundreds of miles in hours. This one is yet newborn, and so its speed is hampered.
Not that that’s enough.
“Hold on!” Zil shouts as the three of us retreat as far as we can. “I have one more trick, then we’re fucked!”
“We’re walking corpses,” Ashley replies, her voice hoarse. “You just haven’t accepted that yet.”
She bites down on her tongue hard enough that blood trickles out of her mouth, her body convulsing, and I use Phantom Shape to keep her up, creating extra limbs to support her walking.
There is still a non-zero chance she tries to kill me here, but I highly doubt she’s thinking of that right now. Ashley’s stated desire was to secure the Crowned Islands from outside threat, and this Titan probably takes precedence over me.
“Domain: Perfect Self,” Zil says as we run, barely winded. His voice quavers as another wave of raw killing intent washes over us, but the same soothing sensation as before washes over us. “Special skill: Self-Integration - Ritual.”
The Guardian of Self’s eyes light up a bright, arcane blue, unnatural light glowing from his enlarged body, and I watch as runes carve themselves into his arms in fast motion. It happens so fast that unenhanced eyes might miss it, but I catch it as an entire ritual circle applies itself to his body.
I recognize these runes. They’re the same ones that the Titan’s very existence broke earlier.
“I can only try this once,” he says, scooping Ashley and me up with his hands like we’re babies. He pauses. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be dead, so I guess I shouldn’t care about that.”
Zil glows brighter, every piece of the ritual glowing blue and bright. It’s slower than it should be, I feel, thanks to the way the Titan’s presence makes casting skills feel like swimming through molasses.
The stomach-twisting sensation of teleportation infuses the area once again, less stably than it has before.
Reality shatters around us as the Titan approaches and Zil grunts in effort.
Our travels through teleportation circles have felt as if we’re on a boat in the midst of a thunderstorm. This must be what happens when someone is thrown overboard. Reality twists and warps around us as Zil’s spell attempts to take hold in a fragment that no longer exists, targeting a reality that may well not be there either.
I see flashes of other fragments. I recognize some. At least, I recognize what they used to be.
This isn’t the first pocket reality the Titan has broken.
Incomplete, I think once more as we tumble through nothingness. This is what an incomplete Titan does.
Can I use that knowledge? Is there any weakness I can exploit?
You are witnessed.
Images flash behind my eyes once more, snapshots of gore and violence flooding my mind once more, but it’s different this time. This time, I’m more resolved. The corpses I become look like they could actually be me. Some of them are me.
And I’m not alone.
In each and every image, I stand in front of a shimmering wall of scales.
Before I can make heads or tails out of the vision, Zil’s ritual completes, slamming us uncomfortably into our target reality.
Every time we’ve traveled between fragments, we’ve gone from ritual circle to ritual circle.
This time, we appear three hundred feet in the air.
We’re back in reality. The real reality, not one of the mockeries of one that the Halcyon family captured for their own use. No trace of the void permeates this place, and I can see for miles around us.
Beneath us are the Wastelands, which are no longer what I remember them to be. In the hours since leaving them for other realities, waste has been added. A lot of waste.
The pieces of the shattered fragments I caught glimpses of are scattered haphazardly on the sand beneath. Much of it is burning, and dead monsters, experiments, and humans decorate the grounds like morbid cake toppings. I recognize pieces of the grey facility, still monochrome in the real world. I wonder if they maintain the same properties out here that they did in their chunk of anomalous land.
I activate Bloodpath as we fall, and Zil lands safely with Ashley in his hands. Compared to everything we’ve been through, a fall is nothing. We arrive on the hellhole that is ground level without further incident.
Locate, I request immediately, searching for two targets in particular. If the Titan has ruined the set of fragments, it is eminently possible that it knocked the prisons out of their existences too. That would mean—
The skill locates Sierra immediately. Adrian is right next to her, and they’re moving.
“Zil,” I say. “Regroup. Now.”
He doesn’t question me, thankfully, and he joins me as I Bloodpath to the first allies I’ve made.
To my surprise, Sierra tackles me in an embrace as soon as I materialize in front of her. She looks wholly intact apart from a slash across her stomach, which I also wasn’t expecting.
Even more shocking is the fact that I wish we had more time. I want to properly embrace her back, to catch up on her story, to express the bubbling emotions within me.
I can’t even take the time to evaluate what that means about me. Fuck.
I look into Sierra’s eyes, and my words catch in my throat.
“Sierra,”I manage to say say.
“Evelyn,” she replies, burying her face into my shoulder. “You’re okay. Of course you are.”
“Sierra,” I repeat. “There’s a—“
“I know,” she says. “It hit our fragment. Sent us spinning here. It won’t be long before it emerges again.”
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Adrian says, a Blade of the Eternal Sea in each hand. “Like, now.”
It won’t matter, I realize. The Titan wants me. It wants me so bad that it linked minds with me, witnessing me in its broken newborn speech.
Why?
It seeks completion. It seeks me.
Not for the first time, I wish I had a way to excise my passenger from my body.
“I can’t run,” I say, closing my eyes and thinking. “Wherever I go, the Titan will follow.”
“Take who you can and evacuate,” Zil tells Adrian. “There are hundreds in the Halcyon fragments. Leave before the Titan comes. We’ve only got a handful of minutes.”
The Titan is stronger than me. In its current state, I can’t even affect it. It’ll crush me, I know. This isn’t something I can just run from. It chased us through realities, and even if its speed isn’t great yet, it will be.
But it’s incomplete, isn’t it? That thought is still nagging at me. It’s unfinished. Eating my passenger will make it complete? That can’t be it.
It’s not a full Titan. The realization isn’t the crystal-clear resolution I need it to be, but the pieces click into place. The existing Titans shake the world when they surface. This one shook a world, yes, but it was a world in a bottle. It can’t match its brethren. Not in speed, not in power, not in presence.
That leaves me with one extremely shitty option.
I use Shapeshift, unearthing the item I’ve stored deep within me.
“Sierra,” I tell the woman in my arms, “You should run.”
Her eyes widen as she takes in the circular tablet I pass into a ghostly hand, Phantom Shape bringing it between us.
“Run.”
I pass my mana into the Titan Caller.
Around us, the world begins to rumble.
You have awakened [Sersui, Titan of the Shifting Sands].
