The afternoon light in the Owl Library bled through high, leaded windows, thick with dust motes dancing like captive spirits. It pooled on the massive oak table where Marya Zaleska sat, surrounded by a fortress of parchment, leather-bound tomes, and scattered rubbings. The air hummed with the quiet reverence of forgotten knowledge, thick with the scent of aged paper, cedarwood shelves, and the faint, metallic tang of distant nebulous vents – Elbaph's lifeblood.
Opposite her, Ange shifted on her cushion, the giant librarian's usual gentle demeanor replaced by a furrowed brow and restless energy. Her fingers, large enough to palm a human skull, tapped nervously on the tabletop beside the crucial verse laid bare:
"What roots drink the tears of the sky?
Four keepers born of flame, sight, storm, and flame's denied.
The tyrant's child must weep alone—
A crown undone, a debt atoned."
"It's the keepers, Marya," Ange insisted, her voice a low rumble that vibrated the teacup near Marya's elbow. She traced the glyphs with a thick finger. "Flame, sight, storm, flame's denied… Devil Fruits, surely? Or perhaps ancient guardians? But why give them their own verse? Why separate them so distinctly from the rest?" She leaned forward, her earnest face attentive. "And the tyrant's child… weeping alone? Atonement? Could it be a Celestial Dragon seeking redemption? Or… or perhaps a figure from the Void Century itself? The imagery is so potent, yet so…"
Marya wasn't listening. Her gaze was fixed on a different page entirely – a beautifully illuminated manuscript on Freyja folklore, open to a depiction of the Vanir goddess. The artist had captured her in a chariot pulled not by stags or boars, but by two sleek, powerful cats, their eyes gleaming like captured stars. Freyja's expression was regal, sorrowful, yet resolute. The image resonated, a sharp counterpoint to the fragmented chaos of the riddle.
The library's quiet wasn't silent. Beneath Ange's voice, Marya registered the distant, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of Saul moving ladders in the restricted section, the soft scritch-scratch of Gotfrid's quill at his distant desk, and… something deeper. A faint tremor, barely perceptible, shivered through the stone floor, vibrating the amber paperweight Ange used to hold down loose scrolls. It matched the phantom tremors Marya had felt ever since witnessing the Volva sisters' descent into madness.
Pray the lady sleeps… Elda's dying whisper slithered through her memory, colder than the deepest sea trench. It mingled with the grotesque memory of birds raining from the sky onto Gaban's doorstep, their tiny bodies broken, a silent, feathered apocalypse. The unnerving chill that had permeated the air that night, the unnatural stillness before the downpour of death… And the Sea Kings. Massive, ancient leviathans, drained of life and strung up like grotesque trophies near the harbor. What force could do that? What did it all mean?
Her eyes flicked, almost against her will, to the scroll detailing the Celestial Tideglass. "…one fragment beneath Elbaph's sacred oak in Freyja's shrine…" The words taunted her. Where? Elbaph was vast, its landscape dotted with ancient branches and numerous shrines – Warrior's Spring, the Grove of Echoes, the Whispering Peaks sanctuary. Was it a literal shrine? A hidden chamber? A sacred grove itself? The Tideglass, a relic capable of mapping Devil Fruit powers… was it somehow tied to these 'keepers'? To the unraveling stability of Elbaph itself?
"Marya?" Ange's voice cut through her reverie, sharper this time. "Marya, are you listening? What do you think about the flame's denied? Could that represent the D? The Will that defies?"
Marya blinked, slowly lifting her gaze from the image of Freyja's cat-drawn chariot. Her golden eyes, usually sharp and assessing, held a distant, troubled cast. She scanned the chaotic tableau on the table – the cryptic verse, the Tideglass scroll, the Freyja manuscript, star charts, crumbling maps of Elbaph's geothermal vents. The sheer weight of interconnected mysteries pressed down, as tangible as the island's gravity. Ange's hopeful, expectant face seemed suddenly very far away, a well-meaning distraction in a labyrinth she needed to navigate alone.
She sighed. It wasn't a sound of frustration, but of profound mental fatigue, a release of breath that stirred the dust motes dancing in the sunbeam beside her. The amber paperweight pulsed faintly warm under her fingertips – another echo of Freyja's fading power, perhaps? Or just the trapped sunlight?
"Ange," Marya's voice was calm, low, devoid of its usual clipped correctness. It held a note of finality. "I think…" She paused, her gaze drifting back to the image of the cats. Sleek, powerful, guardians of a goddess bound beneath the world. Guardians… keepers? The tremor vibrated the table again, a low groan from the island's bones. "…I need some air."
She pushed her chair back, the scrape of wood on stone loud in the sudden quiet that followed her words. Standing, she didn't look at the riddle or Ange's crestfallen expression. Her focus was inward, turning over the image of the chariot, the warmth of the amber, the dying Volva's plea, the dead birds, the strung Sea Kings, and the maddening, elusive location of Freyja's shrine. The library, with its towering shelves laden with fragmented truths, felt suddenly stifling. The answers weren't here, not in these words alone. They were out there, woven into the shuddering earth, the sighing wind, and the fading golden light of a goddess's eternal vigil. She needed to walk. To think. To find the roots that drank the sky's tears, guided by the ghost of a goddess and her cats.
The heavy oak door of the Owl Library sighed shut behind Marya, muffling Ange's anxious murmurs about 'flame's denied'. The late afternoon air of Elbaph hit her – thick with the mineral tang of geothermal vapor, the sweet rot of fallen skypine needles underfoot, and the distant, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of giant children practicing war games at the nearby Walrus School. The tremor beneath her boots was more pronounced here, a low, grinding counterpoint to the shouts and laughter. She walked without direction, her mind a whirlpool of cryptic verses, dying Volva whispers, and the haunting image of Freyja's chariot cats.
"Marya! Over here!"
The voice, warm and clear, cut through her reverie. Ripley stood near the school's moss-covered stone fence, waving. She held a basket woven from thick reeds, smelling faintly of fresh-baked barley bread and the pungent local skyr cheese. A smear of flour dusted her cheekbone. Marya stopped, blinking as if surfacing from deep water. Ripley's perceptive eyes, the color of deep fjord water, scanned Marya's face as she approached.
"Everything alright?" Ripley asked, her voice softening. "You look like you've been wrestling trolls in the archives."
"Merely thinking," Marya replied, her tone neutral. "The air in the library grows… thick."
"Ah, the weight of ancient words," Ripley nodded sympathetically. She shifted the basket. "A walk might clear your head. Fancy some company? I was just heading back from dropping off Colon's forgotten lunch. The lad would starve if his head wasn't attached."
Marya gave a noncommittal shrug. Company was neither sought nor actively avoided; it was simply another element in the environment. They fell into step, their strides mismatched – Ripley's easy, ground-covering gait beside Marya's precise, almost silent tread. The path wound past the schoolyard where young giants, massively taller than Marya herself, wrestled with wooden practice swords under the watchful eye of a grizzled instructor. The scent of sweat and damp earth mingled with the geothermal tang.
After a comfortable silence, broken only by the crunch of gravel underfoot and the distant hiss-pop of a vent releasing steam, Ripley glanced sideways. "So, what history has you tangled today? Something fierce, judging by the furrow between your brows."
Marya sighed, a rare concession to frustration. "Stuck. On origins. Connections. Elbaph's roots are… knotted." Her gaze swept the horizon, taking in the towering silhouette of the Treasure Tree Adam piercing the cloud-streaked sky. "The library offers pieces, but the picture remains fractured."
Ripley's face lit up. "Origins? Well now, perhaps you've been looking in the wrong places! Books are grand, but stone remembers things ink forgets. How about a proper Elbaph history tour? I know just the spots most scholars miss."
Marya considered this. It wasn't the library. It was… movement. Observation. "Very well."
Their first stop was Aurust Castle, a sprawling, ancient fortress perched on a metallic spur overlooking the harbor. Its dark basalt walls, scarred by centuries of weather and forgotten sieges, loomed forbiddingly. A young giantess named Shae, dressed in the practical tunic and leggings of a castle steward, bounded over, her braids bouncing. "Welcome to Aurust! Care for a tour? We've got the Hall of Kings, the Whispering Armory, the–"
"Not interested in castles," Marya interrupted flatly, her gaze already moving past the imposing gates, scanning the landscape below. Castles spoke of power consolidated, not origins sought. Shae blinked, momentarily deflated, then shrugged good-naturedly and waved them on.
Ripley chuckled softly. "Right then. Castles aren't for everyone. How about… the Old Place?" Her voice dropped slightly, taking on a more somber tone. "It's… different."
She led Marya away from the well-trodden paths, down a slope where the geothermal activity intensified. The air grew warmer, thick with the unmistakable, rotten-egg stench of sulfur. Strange, hardy ferns with leaves like cracked emerald glass clung to the steaming stones, their edges glistening with mineral deposits. The ground vibrated more intensely here, a constant, unsettling hum resonating in Marya's bones. Ahead, nestled against a sheer cliff face, weeping rust-colored water, lay the ruin.
The Ancient Facility.
It wasn't grand like the castle. It was a wound. A cluster of low, domed structures built from an unnaturally smooth, dark stone, unlike the rough-hewn basalt of Elbaph's traditional architecture. Time and violent upheaval had cracked the domes open like shattered eggs. Jagged fissures ran through the walls, spewing faint wisps of vapor that smelled acrid, like overheated metal and smog – the ghost of long-dead industry. Silence hung heavy here, oppressive and unnatural after the distant shouts from the school. No birds sang. The only sounds were the hiss of escaping steam, the drip-drip of mineral-laden water, and the relentless, subterranean thrum that made Marya's teeth ache.
"It's always given folk the shivers," Ripley murmured, stopping a respectful distance away. She rubbed her arms against a sudden chill that had nothing to do with the warm air. "They say it's older than the oldest sagas. That something terrible happened here during the… well, during the bad times before the bad times we don't talk about. 'The Great Petrification', the elders whisper. Children dare each other to touch the walls, but even they don't stay long. It feels… hungry."
Marya's sharp eyes scanned the structure. No visible doors. Just those jagged cracks. Her curiosity, a cold, insistent flame, overrode Ripley's palpable unease. "What were they working on?" she asked, more to herself than Ripley.
"Nobody knows for sure, love," Ripley replied, her voice hushed. "Mystery wrapped in stone. Some say they were forging weapons to fight gods. Others say they tried to harness the fire under the mountain and woke something best left sleeping. Whatever it was, it ended… suddenly." She gestured towards the impassable cracks. "No way in. Not for us, anyway. The stone's too thick, the gaps too treacherous."
Marya didn't answer. She stepped closer, her boots crunching on brittle, glass-like slag that littered the ground. She stopped before a particularly deep fissure in the largest dome, barely wide enough to slide a hand through. Ripley called out, a note of alarm in her voice, "Marya, be careful! It's unstable!"
Ignoring her, Marya took a slow breath. Her form dissolved. Not into vapor, but into a thousand swirling particles of cold, silvery mist – the power of the Kiri Kiri no Mi. The mist flowed like mercury, seeping silently through the narrow crack, leaving Ripley staring, open-mouthed, at the empty space where she'd stood.
Inside, the world was stone and silence.
The air was frigid and utterly still, tasting of ancient dust and the metallic tang of deep earth. The only light filtered weakly through the cracks, casting long, distorted shadows. Marya reformed, her boots landing soundlessly on a floor coated in a fine grey powder – the dust of millennia.
The sight that met her eyes was a tableau of instant, catastrophic preservation. Not ruins. A snapshot of annihilation.
The facility's interior was a cavernous space dominated by colossal, cylindrical vats, now shattered and petrified, their interiors fused into grotesque, obsidian-like flows. Twisted pipes, like fossilized serpents, snaked across the floor and up the walls, ending in jagged stumps. Massive reactor chambers, their intricate inner workings exposed and frozen mid-collapse, loomed like the ribcages of petrified beasts. Refining apparatus, complex arrays of gears and conduits, were all rendered in the same, unyielding grey stone.
And among it all, the people.
Skeletons, yes, but preserved with terrifying immediacy in the postures of their final moments. Lab coats, remarkably intact in their stone casings, hung on frames caught mid-stride, mid-reach, mid-fall. Some wore bulky pressure suits with round, helmeted visors, their glass eyesockets staring blindly into the eternal gloom. One figure was petrified while frantically turning a massive stone wheel. Another was caught shielding their face. Near a shattered console, a group seemed huddled together. The silence wasn't just absence of sound; it was the silence of a scream frozen in stone.
The sheer, overwhelming stillness pressed on Marya, colder than the air. This wasn't decay. This was capture. A moment of unimaginable violence or catastrophic failure instantly rendered eternal. The scale was industrial, alien. What were they refining? What power were they trying to harness that could turn everything – metal, glass, flesh, bone – to stone in a single, terrible instant? The air hummed faintly, not with machinery, but with the memory of immense, contained energy – a phantom vibration in the stone itself. Near one shattered vat, she noticed clusters of faintly glowing, fist-sized geodes embedded in the floor, pulsing with a weak, internal light – the source of the humming Ripley felt outside? Living batteries turned to mineral tombs?
The weight of it settled on her – the ambition, the hubris, the sudden, absolute end. This wasn't just history; it was a tombstone for an entire endeavor, a dark secret buried beneath Elbaph's vibrant surface.
Marya dissolved back into mist, flowing out through the crack and reforming beside Ripley, who jumped.
"By Freyja's tears, girl! Don't do that!" Ripley gasped, hand over her heart. "What… what did you see in there? Is it… bad?"
Marya brushed a fine layer of the grey interior dust from her sleeve. Her golden eyes were distant, processing the petrified horror. The dying Volva's words, "Pray the lady sleeps," echoed with new, chilling resonance. Was this facility connected to whatever threatened Freyja? To the unnatural tremors and dying creatures?
"It is… a tragedy," Marya stated, her voice flat, devoid of inflection, yet carrying the weight of what she'd witnessed. "Elbaph holds a story far darker than its sagas sing."
Ripley stared at her, the cheerful tour guide facade momentarily stripped away, replaced by a deep unease that mirrored the facility's aura. "Cryptic as ever," she finally managed, forcing a weak, nervous giggle that sounded brittle in the sulfurous air. "Right then. Enough gloom! Let's try somewhere with a bit more… color. How about the mural?" She turned, eager to leave the oppressive silence of the Old Place behind. "It tells a happier story. Mostly."
The walk back from the Ancient Facility was steeped in uneasy silence. Ripley's forced cheerfulness had evaporated entirely, replaced by a troubled frown as she led Marya away from the sulfurous stench and oppressive stillness. The path wound upwards now, towards a sheltered overhang carved into the side of a basalt-branched cliff. The air here smelled different – damp earth, the faint sweetness of hardy star bloom vines clinging to the petrified face, and the sharp, clean scent of rainwater collected in wooded basins.
"This is it," Ripley announced, her voice regaining some warmth as they approached the overhang. "Ancient children scribbled their dreams here, forever captured in stone." She gestured towards the protected expanse.
The Mural of Elbaph.
Marya stepped forward, and the world narrowed. Fifty feet of smoothed petrified tree trunk unfolded before her, a breathtaking panorama sheltered from time's worst weathering by the deep overhang. Unlike the grim petrification of the facility, this was a symphony of color and life. The pigments glowed with an inner luminescence – reds like cooled lava, blues as deep as the twilight sky over the Calm Belt, greens like sunlit moss, and shimmering gold leaf that caught the afternoon light filtering through cracks above, making the entire scene seem to breathe. The petrified stone wood itself felt warm under her tentative touch, as if holding the sun's memory.
Ripley smiled, some of her natural ease returning. "See? Color. Life. A child's renderings."
Marya's earlier detachment dissolved into pure, stunned absorption. The mural unfolded Elbaph's mythical history in vivid, interconnected scenes. At the very bottom, colossal, glowing roots – unmistakably Adam's – plunged into a swirling, star-filled abyss. Golden light radiated upwards from them. "The World Tree drinks the tears of the sky…" Marya murmured, recalling the riddle's first line, the words tasting like cold revelation on her tongue.
Above the roots, a majestic entity stood, free and radiant, a necklace the focal point of golden light that seemed to pulse even in the static pigment. Giants, scaled like fish in some depictions, others furred like beasts, some with luminous skin, and some with a glowing, third eye, worked alongside, weaving what looked like nets of shimmering light around the roots – Seidr, the life-magic now fading.
Then, her gaze locked onto a central grouping that seized her breath. Not abstract symbols of power, but distinct peoples, woven into the very fabric of the mural's creation narrative. In the center, dividing the mural, stood a massive oak with leafy branches reaching toward the moons of the heavens. To the left was a collection of races – Mink, Lunarians, Giants, Fishmen, and others unknown - in wooden ships working in unison against a dark, massive, winged demon holding a flamed sun. A lone figure with a halo of flames leading the charge. To the right, a serpent emerged from underneath, breathing and exchanging power with a winged creature that obstructed the skyward-reaching branches. A factory spewing smoke is in the corner with haloed beings descending on a conveyor and emerging with sparks on the back of an elephant-shaped creature encompassing a ship and a crowned figure atop.
Marya's golden eyes widened, the pieces of the riddle's second line – "Four keepers born of flame, sight, storm, and flame's denied" – clicking together in her mind with an almost audible, tectonic snap. Beings. Races. Not abstract powers. "Flame's Denied." The outcast. The defier. The D. "The Sun God…" The whisper escaped Marya's lips, cold certainty settling in her gut like a stone. Nika. The liberator. The spark the riddle's later verses demanded.
But then, her focus turned on the mural's fractured stone at the Ancient Facility. The vibrant colors darkened, grew murky, clashing. Figures depicting early precursors to World Government designs. And there, chillingly familiar amidst the chaos, were Buildings. Not Elbaph's traditional stone and wood, but smooth, domed structures comparable in form to the petrified horror they had just left. Tiny figures descending a conveyor downwards, depicted traveling into the roots – the figures shown with faint, ghostly halos as they descended. Beside this grim apparatus, another conveyor returned upwards, but what came back were people with jagged, stylized sparks of raw, dangerous energy.
An image flashed through Marya's mind with brutal clarity: the petrified skeletons in pressure suits, the shattered reactor chambers, the humming geodes embedded in stone. The unnatural stillness of the facility. The dying Volva sisters clawing at their skin, whispering of the Maw's laughter. The dead birds raining from the sky. The strung-up Sea Kings. The tremors shaking the very roots.
The fragmented verses of the Poneglyph riddle, the Tideglass fragment hidden beneath Freyja's shrine, the dying plea to pray the lady sleeps – it all coalesced, molten and terrifying, into a single point of understanding.
"Ground Zero," Marya breathed, the words sharp and sudden in the sheltered quiet. She turned to Ripley, her usually stoic golden eyes wide with a rare, raw intensity that bordered on alarm. "This is where it all happened. This is Ground Zero." Her gaze snapped back to the mural, to the roots drinking the starry abyss, to the conveyors plunging down. "A tree… it has roots. Is there… is there something under Elbaph? Something they woke? Something they fed?" The questions tumbled out, urgent, directed at the mural, at the island, at Ripley.
Ripley's face, which had been watching Marya's intense reaction with growing confusion, instantly paled. Her eyes, usually warm fjord-blue, went impossibly wide, reflecting pure, unvarnished dread. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out. That silent, horrified stare, the blood draining from her cheeks, was all the confirmation Marya needed. The cheerful giantess who baked bread and worried about forgotten lunches knew. Knew the dark secret beneath the sagas.
Without another word, without a glance back, Marya dissolved. Her form vanished into a swirl of silvery mist that flowed like cold water over the warm branches of the Mural and vanished into the shadows of the overhang, leaving Ripley alone, trembling, staring at the vibrant mural that had just revealed the terrifying heart of her home's deepest wound.