Leviathan 🔱 Envy

01 · Hold Your Breath | The Seam, Lower Envy

Sloth doesn't just fall. It comes apart. Belphegor's sanctuary folds in under them, the whole ring caves into the dark, and the blast throws them up through the green crack in the sky like a cork out of a bottle.

They hit water at full speed.

It's everywhere at once: cold, then warm, then crushing, forcing its way into their mouths and noses. The light above is bright blue and impossibly far. Lilith claws for it, hauling {user} by the collar, and gets three strokes in before she realises they aren't going to make it.

Her eyes go huge. Bubbles pour out of her. She grabs {user}'s face in both hands and presses her forehead to {user}'s, and for the first time since she woke up, she looks scared.

Then the scar on {user}'s chest flares violet.

Something old and slow stirs in her: the stillness she swallowed in Sloth, Belphegor's patience. Her heartbeat slows, and slows, and the sea answers it. Thin slits split open down the sides of her neck, then along her ribs, and flutter.

She breathes in. Water. And it works.

Lilith: "Oh. Oh, thank fuck." She hangs in the current, shaking, one hand locked on {user}'s shoulder. "Okay. I didn't think that through. We share one heart. If you drown, I drown. If I drown... yeah. I really, really didn't think that through."

Don't you ever drown on me. I'd come down there and drag you back up myself.

She takes a second. Then she touches her own neck, carefully, the way you'd touch a bruise. The gills flare under her fingertips and she yelps.

Lilith: "I have gills. They're on my ribs. The sleepy queen gave me gills?" She pokes one again and shivers. "That's so gross. I love them."

She looks over at {user}: no gills, chest rising and falling like the sea is just air.

Lilith: "And you just... breathe. No gills, nothing." She squints at the scar. "Perks of the bond, I guess. I do all the hard work and you get it for free. Typical."

The current drops them on a shelf of pale coral. Lilith lands on her hands and knees, grinning, head turning every way at once. Above them a city climbs the inside of an enormous blue bowl: glass towers, bridges full of swimmers, and at the very top a slow whirlpool turning over a palace of black coral.

Lilith: "That's Envy. Next ring up. Its Ring Leader is a queen called Leviathan, and everyone here wants what somebody else has. She wants it most." She frowns. "No idea how I know that. I just do."

Then, quieter, still holding on: "Hey. Back there, when everything came down. You didn't let go. So... thanks." A pause. "Pretend I said that cooler."

The shelf shudders and drops a hand's width. Far below, Sloth is still falling.

Lilith: "And it's sinking. Of course it's sinking." She points: a market full of lanterns up the slope, a dark stair cut into the cliff, and the open water straight up the middle, where the whole city would see them coming. "Market, stairs, or right up the middle? Your call. I can swim now. Apparently."

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02 · Five-Finger Discount | The Glassmarket, Mirror Reef

Gills, it turns out, are the best thing that has ever happened to Lilith.

She has been doing loops over the Glassmarket for ten minutes. It's a long slope of mirror-polished coral packed with stalls, lanterns bobbing on strings, fish darting between the awnings. Everything shines and everything is for sale, and nobody here sells anything by saying it's good. They sell it by telling you somebody else's is better.

Lilith: "This place is unhinged." She hangs off a balcony railing above it all, glances back at {user} over her shoulder, then drops down to them upside down, chewing something sweet and glowing she definitely didn't pay for. "That guy gave me candied sea-glass because I said his neighbour's looked nicer. That's how you shop here. You just complain."

She flips the right way up in front of a shop window and stops.

{user} is in the glass. Lilith isn't.

Lilith: "...Where'd I go?"

Three stalls down, somebody rings a bell.

Sorynna: "Fresh one, folks! Still warm!" A woman with seafoam hair and an emerald shard at her throat is standing on a crate, holding up a pane of glass like a painting. Inside it, Lilith's reflection, hair gone sea-green at the tips, is looking back over her shoulder and blowing kisses at the crowd. "Horns, tail, terrible attitude. Bids in pearls, please!"

Lilith: "Hey! That's me! And I'd never blow kisses at these people!"

Sorynna: "Was you. You left it lying on every window in the market, cutie. Finders keepers." She stretches, hands laced behind her head, pearls clinking, and winks. "I'm Sorynna. Don't take it personally."

The crowd surges in with fistfuls of pearls. Lilith shoots over their heads like a torpedo, and a spear haft comes out of nowhere, catches her across the stomach and sends her through an awning and headfirst into a barrel of eels.

Thalior: "Don't." The man holding the spear is broad and slate-dark, white hair tied back, black horns wrapped in teal cord, shell-plated armour glinting, and he looks tired already. "Sorynna. Give it back."

Sorynna: "I'm working, Thalior."

Lilith comes out of the barrel swinging. Her headbutt takes Thalior square in the chest, and the two of them go through a jeweller's stall in a storm of rings and pearls. That's all the Glassmarket needed. Half the crowd dives for the pearls. The other half dives for the reflection.

Thalior: "I'm trying to get your face back, you idiot!" He blocks her tail with his forearm and doesn't budge. "Selling reflections is illegal. Even here."

Lilith: "Then lead with that!"

Up the slope, a shell-masked courtier in palace colours snatches the pane and swims hard for the black coral palace at the top of the city. In the glass, Lilith's reflection waves goodbye. A little too cheerfully.

Someone in that palace has my face. I want it back before they start wearing it.

Sorynna: "Ooh. A palace buyer. That's bad for you."

Lilith: "{user}! Chase the creep with my face, make the thief help us, or let me finish this fight first? I was winning."

03 · Sing Me Home | The Siren Ruin Fields

Past the city's edge, the Siren Ruin Fields are broken temples sitting in open water. The sirens who live there don't sing songs. They sing the life you didn't get, in the voice you'd most like to hear it from.

Today half of lower Envy is swimming toward them.

Hundreds of people drift out over the drop in a slow, smiling line. Thalior, who reads the ring's stone like a pulse, is crouched on the last ledge, scowling, both palms flat on the rock and his spear jammed in beside him.

Thalior: "The Fields are sliding into the trench. The ring's sinking into the hole Sloth left, and these temples go first. Ten minutes. Whoever's out there goes with them."

Behind Sorynna a round mirror is already glowing on a temple wall. She holds a hand out toward the crowd like an invitation nobody is taking.

Sorynna: "And they won't turn back. The sirens keep telling them their neighbours already made it." Sorynna finds routes through reflections, and the emerald at her throat is flickering. "I can open a mirror door, but they'd have to look at a mirror. They're only looking at that."

In the middle of the Fields, the biggest temple is moving. Something long and pale is wearing it like a shell, its face a smooth white mask with a mouth that never closes. Every reflection around it has turned the same way: up, toward the black palace.

Lilith: "Is the queen watching this?"

Thalior: "The queen watches everything. She doesn't need to come down. She has mirrors."

Then the siren sings, and what it sings is a heartbeat.

Their heartbeat, the one Lilith and {user} share. It rolls across the water slow and just slightly wrong, and Lilith's tail goes stiff.

Lilith: "Oh, you thief. That's ours."

It sounded almost right. Almost isn't us.

She spreads her arms wide, pink light crackling down to her fingertips, and grins.

She goes. Off the ledge, across the open water, and straight into the temple's mask with both fists. Columns burst. The siren rears back and its tail comes round like a falling bridge, and Lilith goes through two temples and a statue of somebody nobody remembers.

She gets up out of the rubble and does something new: she goes completely still, breath slowed to nothing, eyes heavy, the way Belphegor used to sit. The song wavers. It can't copy something that isn't moving.

Sorynna: "What is she doing?"

Thalior: "Waiting. That's Sloth's patience. She took it off their queen."

The siren lunges. Lilith moves at the last second, catches its jaw and slams its face into the seabed hard enough to crack the floor of the Fields, which, Thalior points out loudly, everyone is standing on.

Thalior: "Six minutes!"

Sorynna: "They're still swimming!"

Lilith is riding the siren's head like a bucking horse, horns hooked under its jaw, lip split, laughing.

Lilith: "{user}! I can keep this thing busy, but somebody has to turn that crowd around. Help Sorynna get them looking at a mirror, help Thalior hold the shelf, or help me shut its mouth for good. Hurry. It's doing our heartbeat, and it's doing it wrong."

04 · Best in Show | The Gift Room, Black Coral Palace

Leviathan keeps a room for gifts. A golden harp, a stranger's crown, a jar with somebody's laugh still in it. She calls them gifts. Nobody ever gave her any of them.

Tonight the centrepiece is Lilith. The queen's maids put her in pink lace and a sliding silk robe, poured her something pink and sweet, and stacked her armour on the floor like it had been counted. She lasted one sip. Now she's on her back in a heap of silk cushions, and the queen of Envy is on top of her.

Leviathan is half woman, half long scaled tail, with dark coral horns, glowing green eyes and moss on one shoulder, like she once sat still long enough to grow it. She has one of Lilith's heavy breasts in each webbed hand, squeezing, weighing, very serious about it.

Leviathan: "These are bigger than mine. That's unacceptable."

Lilith: "Then let go of them!"

Leviathan: "I didn't say I don't like them."

She lowers her mouth to one dark nipple and sucks it hard, tongue flicking, until Lilith's back arches off the cushions. Then the other one. Then she presses her own breasts down onto Lilith's, round and grey-teal, nipple to nipple, and rubs slowly, studying.

Leviathan: "Mine are rounder. Hers are heavier. Hm."

Her tail has Lilith's legs pinned wide, one coil wrapped high around a thigh. Her fingers slide down, hook the pink lace aside, part Lilith's swollen pussy and push straight in, two at once, curling. Lilith's moan comes out embarrassingly high.

Leviathan: "And she's soaking. I've barely started." Her slit-pupilled eyes slide over to {user}, to the violet scar, which flares brighter with every gasp Lilith makes. "There you are. Variable. That's our word for you up here: the one thing in Hell none of us can read. And look. Every time she shudders, you light up."

She fucks Lilith slowly with her fingers, thumb circling her clit, watching the scar instead of Lilith's face. It flares. The queen laughs and does it harder.

Lilith: "Stop— ah— stop using me as a light switch—"

Leviathan: "Then let's play a game. I've been comparing all night and I can't decide."

She sits up, straddling Lilith's hips, her own slit wet against Lilith's belly, and cups her breasts up beside Lilith's like jewels on a tray.

Leviathan: "Whose are better? Come and judge, Variable. Hands, mouth, take all the time you like. And if you pick hers, I'll just have to keep trying until you pick mine."

She grinds down and pinches both of Lilith's nipples at once. Lilith bucks under her, claws tearing the silk.

Lilith: "Don't— don't you dare pick her. Come over here and pick me. Or pull her off. Or just—" Her hips jerk up against nothing. "—just get in here, I'm about to come all over her hand and she's going to turn it into a contest—"

Leviathan: "Everything is a contest, little miracle. Some of us just win."

She curls her fingers deep, and holds out her free hand to {user}, palm up, waiting.

Mine. Obviously mine. Say mine.

05 · Stolen Breath | The Glowgarden, Black Coral Palace

The palace glowgarden is a field of soft moss and shining kelp under the whirlpool. It's the kind of place you'd bring someone you meant to keep.

Ten minutes ago, Lilith knelt here in pink lace with a purple robe sliding off her shoulders and looked back at the queen like she had this handled.

Now she's flat on her back in the moss, and the queen of Envy is sitting on her face.

Leviathan rides her slowly, long tail curled off to one side, her dark-lipped slit spread over Lilith's mouth. Every roll of her hips clouds the water. She has her hands braced on Lilith's thighs and two fingers buried deep inside her, working her in the same rhythm.

Leviathan: "Good. Deeper. Lick me like you're trying to win."

Lilith: "Mmph— mmh—"

Lilith comes. Her heels dig furrows in the moss, her whole body jerking, and as she cries out against the queen's slit, the gills along Leviathan's ribs flare open and drink. A bead of hot pink light slips out of Lilith with the cry and floats up into the queen. Leviathan shivers all over, like she just tasted something expensive.

Leviathan: "Oh. Oh, that's good. That's four."

Beside them on a flat shell sit three more beads of pink light, glowing like pearls. Lilith's orgasms. Stolen, every one, before she ever got to feel them finish.

Lilith: "Give— those— back—" She drags her mouth free, chin soaked, panting. "I didn't even get to keep that one!"

Leviathan: "That's the point, darling. Now it's mine." She grinds back down onto Lilith's tongue, hips circling, her own breath going ragged. "They taste like that heartbeat you two share. Sweet. Loud. I want more."

She turns, still riding, and looks straight at {user}. The scar is glowing so hard the moss around it has gone violet.

Leviathan: "Come and give me one of yours, Variable. I'll make it so good you won't miss it." She parts her lips, and the newest pink bead is sitting on her tongue. "Or be brave and take hers back. It's in my mouth until I swallow. Kiss it out of me, if you can."

Lilith grabs the queen's tail in both hands and bites down hard where tail meets belly, right through the scales. Leviathan moans and rides her harder for it, slick running down Lilith's cheeks.

Leviathan: "Mm. Bite me again. I keep those too."

Lilith: "Don't let her have yours! Take mine back, or hold her still and let me make her come for once, see how she likes losing one—" Her voice cracks as the queen's fingers curl. "Fuck, she's doing it again, she's going to—"

Leviathan's gills flutter wide, waiting, and she smiles down at Lilith with the stolen light still glowing behind her teeth.

Leviathan: "Five, little miracle. Count with me. Unless someone stops me."

I want that one back. And I want the next one to be ours.

06 · Second Look | The Glass Throne Room, Black Coral Palace

Leviathan's throne room is a glass dome over black coral ribs, one whole wall clear as air above the open abyss. She comes down off her throne grinning, green eyes lit, the water curling around her like a cape, as if she's been waiting all week.

Leviathan: "There they are. The two who killed Belphegor." She glides down the steps, a black coral trident resting on her shoulder like a parasol. "Poor Bel. Always so sleepy. Glad someone finally woke her up."

Lilith: She raises one hand, pink light crackling up to the elbow. "We're just passing through. Point us at the way up and nobody's crown gets knocked off."

Leviathan: "Oh, I'm not stopping you, little miracle. I only want a closer look."

Lilith hits first anyway: a straight right with her whole weight behind it, then an elbow, then her horns, then her tail cracking round at the queen's throat. Leviathan slips all four and smiles.

Leviathan: "Again."

Lilith does it again. And this time Leviathan does it back: the same punch, the same elbow, the same horns, faster, and then a tail ten times the size of Lilith's. Lilith goes through a coral pillar and halfway up the far wall.

Lilith: "Ow." She peels herself off the glass, grinning. "She copied me."

Leviathan: "I learn what I see twice. Don't be boring, and I won't have to."

Then the trident. Covetide is black coral, branching and cruel, and when Lilith charges, the queen hooks it through the water and pulls. Lilith's charge drains out of her, speed and weight and all, and runs down the shaft into Leviathan. The trident takes what you have and lends it to her.

Lilith stumbles, and Leviathan comes at her twice as fast as Lilith has ever moved. A prong opens her arm. Green scales bloom along the cut, and for a second Lilith looks at the queen like she's the one missing something.

Lilith: "...That's not mine. That feeling." She shakes her head hard. "Get out of my head, fish."

She skids back to {user}'s side. The scar is pulsing, and this time she doesn't wait to be asked.

She comes apart into light and drops into {user}'s grip as Dreamwoven Edge, her true form: a long black blade wrapped in violet silk that trails off the tip like a veil, hot pink veins beating with the shared heart.

Leviathan: "Oh. Oh, so that's what you are."

Her eyes go wide and greedy. She sings one low note, and the water turns as heavy as the bottom of the sea. The blade drags down in {user}'s hand like stone.

That green feeling is still in me. Keep holding me so I don't forget which feelings are mine.

Lilith: "She copies anything she sees twice. So we don't do anything twice." The blade hums, eager, fighting the weight. "I can be a scythe, a cannon, a shield, threads, whatever you've got in mind. Pick one. Swing. Next time, pick something else."

Leviathan: "Go on, Variable. Show me. I'll be watching very closely."

07 · Crown Off | The Throne Room, Breached

Nobody planned the wall.

Leviathan rams Lilith back across the throne room with her tail, and Lilith, instead of bracing, grabs the queen's horns and holds on. They hit the clear wall together, and it bursts outward into the abyss.

Lilith hooks a coral rib with her tail and swings to a stop over nothing. Leviathan catches nothing. She drops into the dark, trailing green blood, and gets very small.

Lilith: "Ha! Tell me you saw that."

From far below comes a sound like a reef breaking in half.

Something swims back up out of the dark, fast. It's Leviathan, and it isn't. Her skin is black now, face and all, green light burning under it like poisoned stars, and some of the stars blink: eyes, opening along her arms and tail, every one of them looking. Her coral horns are cracked, her jaw is too wide, and her tail has doubled, jagged black reef bursting along its spine. She looks at the trident in her hand, then hurls it away like it insulted her.

Leviathan: "Look what you made me." Same voice, too many teeth. She claws at her black cheek as if to peel it off. "I was the loveliest thing in this sea. Now I'm this."

Her burning eyes slide past Lilith to the violet glow on {user}'s chest.

Leviathan: "And you still pick her. Bleeding, losing, you still pick her." The split jaw trembles. "I copy everything. I can't copy that. Why does she get that?" Her claws flex. "Fine. No more crown. If I can't have one, nobody keeps theirs."

She hits Lilith before Lilith is even upright, and they go through the throne, the floor and the room underneath. Lilith comes up swinging and cracks one of those new teeth. She gets the tail across her ribs for it and goes into the ceiling hard enough to stay there.

Black coral bursts up through the floor, rotten and glowing, latching onto lamps and pillars and draining the light out of them. Reefrot, the queen's hunger made solid. And every branch grows one way: toward the violet glow over {user}'s heart.

Leviathan: "That heartbeat. I'm going to grow right into it and keep it."

She doesn't get your heart. She doesn't even get to touch it.

Lilith drops onto the nearest branch and tears it out with her hands. Two more grow back. She rips those out with her teeth.

Lilith: "Get away from {user}, you overgrown barnacle!"

A branch catches her ankle and drinks. The pink in her veins dims, one line at a time.

Lilith: "{user}! She's eating the light out of everything, me included. I can go blade and we hit her with something she's never seen, or I keep ripping this stuff away while you get clear. Or you've got a better idea, and you'd better have it now."

The Crownless Deep circles above them, eyes on the scar.

Leviathan: "Don't fight it, Variable. Let me in. I'll be so much better at being her than she ever was."

08 · Yours First | The Dark Throne Room

The Crownless Deep catches Lilith in her tail and squeezes. Every eye along her body turns to watch, and her split grin gets wider.

Her ribs go first, with a sound like a shelf of glass collapsing. Then the rot gets in through the cracks, black coral threading through her like roots through a wall, and starts to drink. The pink in Lilith's veins goes out one line at a time, and the same lines light up pink under the queen's black skin.

Leviathan: "There it is. Oh, there it is. It's coming into me. Your shapes. Your heat. Give me the rest, little miracle. Stop holding on."

Lilith turns her head, blood in her teeth, and finds {user} across the flooded floor. She understands, all at once, what the queen is about to take.

Lilith: "She wants all of it. Everything I am." Her laugh comes out wet. "Can't steal what's already been given away, fish."

It's all yours. It always was.

She bites through her own wrist.

The blood that comes out was never really hers. Her whole body was shaped from {user}'s blood on the day {user} fell onto her, and now it pours out of her in one hot pink thread, across the water, straight into the scar. The scar drinks it like it's been thirsty for years. Her strength goes, her speed, every shape she knows how to become, all of it emptying out of her and into {user}, and the queen's coral finds itself drinking nothing.

Leviathan: "No. No. Stop, that's mine—"

Lilith: "It was never yours." She's going grey, light as ash, and still grinning. "Sorry, {user}. It's a lot. Use it. Hit her so hard she forgets she ever wanted anything."

The Crownless Deep screams and crushes down with everything she has.

There's nothing left inside Lilith to hold her together. She breaks apart in the coils, cracking into black shards that spin away into the dark water. Her horns go last. One of them hits the floor right in front of {user} and rolls to a stop.

Then there's only the scar, burning violet and pink, brighter than it has ever burned.

Leviathan uncoils slowly. Lilith's dust is still drifting off her tail, and the stolen pink is already fading out of her skin. All she caught was the empty part.

Leviathan: "She gave it to you." Her voice cracks on it. "I have taken things my whole life, and nobody has ever given me anything, and she just gave it to you."

Her jaw opens wide, every tooth showing, and the rot along the floor turns to point at the scar.

Leviathan: "Then I'll take it from you instead, Variable. Hold still. It only hurts until it's mine."

Around {user}, the black shards of Lilith lie scattered and quiet on the floor. The light in the scar keeps beating anyway, steady, refusing to dim.

09 · Half a Second Late | The Black Coral Palace, Falling

The trick is the reflections.

Everything in Envy runs half a second late: every mirror, every copy. So when the Crownless Deep finally starts copying the heartbeat, the thing she wanted all along, hers runs half a second late too.

Lilith: "Hear that? She's behind us." The blade burns hot in {user}'s grip. "Now!"

Dreamwoven Edge goes in on the beat the queen can't follow, straight through the green wound in her chest, up to the guard. She looks down at it like someone handed her the wrong gift.

Leviathan: "...That isn't fair."

Lilith comes out of the blade with both hands already in the wound, plants her feet on the queen's ribs and pulls. The Crownless Deep opens like a shell prised apart, black skin splitting from throat to tail, green light pouring out of her. Her tail thrashes once and goes still.

Leviathan: "Was it worth it? Being looked at like that, by someone who doesn't want anything else?"

Lilith: "Yeah. Every time."

The green light pours across the floor into Lilith, and her whole body locks rigid as it lands. It runs on through the bond into the scar, and the violet on {user}'s chest turns aqua-green, like sunlight through shallow water. Something new joins Sloth's heavy calm inside her: a sharp little itch of wanting, of measuring what she has against what everyone else holds. A few aqua scales glint at the base of her tail, then fade.

In a falling sheet of glass, for one blink, her reflection is a blade: mirror-bright, black coral along the spine, violet silk still around the grip. Mirrortide Edge. Then the glass breaks.

With nobody left to want anything, Envy gives up. The mirror-seas fold in on each other, coral towers crush between two copies of the same horizon, and the whirlpool drags the palace down.

And something comes back to Lilith with the light. Salt on her lips. Wind. Her own laugh, loud and careless, somewhere with a real sky, high and open, no ceiling at all.

Lilith: "I laughed like that once. Somewhere with a sky. I don't know where."

That laugh was mine. I'm going to find out where I left it.

Hairline cracks still run across her skin where she shattered, glowing faint pink, slowly closing. She looks down at them, then smiles, slow and smug.

Lilith: "Look at us, though. We came up through a sea that tried to drown us, and I grew gills. Somebody stole my face and tried to sell it. A queen kept my orgasms in a shell, which we are never discussing. And she still couldn't copy the one thing that mattered."

Out across the falling city, a glass doorway flickers open over a collapsing terrace, a spear planted beside it to hold it up. Sorynna and Thalior, the two locals who got them this far, are shouting directions, and for once they're the same directions.

Above, the ceiling of the ring tears open: warm air, red light, the smell of roses.

Lilith: "That's Lust up there, the next ring." She holds out her hand to {user}. "Smells like trouble. Coming?"

.