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.

  **I ALSO TRIED A NEW STYLE OF WRITING FOR LOGOS 9-10, BUT I AM NOT SURE I LIKE IT. LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK.**

  Logos 12: Tidal Dissonance

  The sea sang in harmonics. Waves did not crash. They resonated. Poseidon’s citadel stood defiant on a precipice between worlds—half submerged in a radiant, ever-churning harmonic sea. Crystalline towers spiraled like frozen music into the sky, glinting with notes carved into stone. The waters that flowed through the foundations carried more than salt. They carried memory, essence, echoes of decisions made and unmade.

  And now, they carried conflict. The storm had not yet come. But the pressure had. Poseidon stood at the central platform, arms braced on the rail of a balcony woven from living coral and ether-metal. The entire citadel trembled—not from any external siege, but from within.

  His body ached. Not from pain. From discord. He had walked through the Veil. Watched Caelen reclaim his name. Heard the wolves sing in harmony for the first time in millennia. And through it all, his own symphony had begun to fracture. Inside him, the tides churned.

  Rahab. Raguel. Two resonances. Two truths. And now... no longer content to whisper. A thunderclap rippled across the sea—without lightning. It was a judgment, not a storm. Poseidon clutched his temple as his own thoughts split down the center.

  "Enough," he growled aloud.

  It didn’t matter. Inside his mindspace—a vault of stone, light, and thought—two figures emerged. Rahab. And Raguel. Each radiated power. Neither bowed. Rahab was fluid fire: bronze skin adorned with scaled tattoos that shimmered like wet ink, his eyes molten gold. Armor forged from the pressure of oceanic trenches clung to his limbs. His voice was thunder blurred into seduction.

  Raguel was serene rage: robed in ivory with silver etchings of sacred geometry, his eyes the gray of balanced judgment, his breath steady as cathedral bells. His very presence stilled the sea around him. They did not speak at first. They vibrated. And Poseidon’s bones rang with the argument. Rahab struck first.

  “Lethe was a cage. Harmony has made us weak. They need the flood.”

  His hands clenched, and with them, the water below the citadel began to rise—boil.

  “Justice is fire,” he continued, stepping forward. “Disguised as water. And it is time they burn.”

  Raguel countered, his tone a blade drawn in slow reverence.

  “Without law, the tides devour themselves. We are here to contain, not consume.”

  He raised one palm, and instantly, the boiling tides calmed. The sky brightened above the citadel. Poseidon winced. Their balance used to be seamless—grace and force, held in divine tension. Not anymore.

  “They’re growing,” he whispered.

  Rahab smirked.

  “We are grown, Sea King.”

  Raguel tilted his head.

  “You thought you were our master. You were only our container.”

  Poseidon stepped back. The ground beneath his feet—once echo-stable—began to vibrate with shifting frequencies.

  “I created you to guide me.”

  “No,” Rahab said. “You divided yourself to avoid becoming who you were meant to be.”

  “And what is that?” Poseidon barked.

  Raguel’s voice came like a whisper of law etched into marble.

  “The question. Not the answer.”

  The citadel groaned. Cracks began forming in its outer halls. The harmonic sea below surged against its bounds. Poseidon turned outward, heart thundering. This wasn’t just internal. It was manifesting.

  “They’ll tear it apart,” he whispered.

  “No,” Rahab corrected. “We’ll tear you apart.”

  Poseidon reached for his trident—but it wasn’t there. Instead, his hands glowed. One with heat. One with chill. Rahab and Raguel, channeled through him, overriding him.

  “I won’t let you destroy this,” Poseidon snarled.

  Raguel finally moved. A single step.

  “You already have.”

  A wave of stillness rolled over the citadel. Then came the scream. Not human. Not divine. A harmonic wail, echoing across dimensions. Poseidon spun, eyes wide. The sea split. A massive breach opened below the citadel, pulling water downward like a reverse maelstrom. And rising from it—Rahab. But not the echo. The entity. Fully formed. Wrapped in tidal armor. Eyes blazing with liquid wrath. Poseidon’s knees nearly buckled.

  “No…”

  Rahab stepped onto the platform with grace that belied the devastation around him.

  “I am not your rage.”

  His voice was thunder run through honey.

  “I am your honesty.”

  Poseidon moved to strike, but Rahab caught his fist—effortlessly.

  “You asked for justice,” Rahab whispered. “I will give them fear.”

  And behind him—Rising from the core of the breach—A shape. Mechanical. Organic. Divine. The Leviathan Engine. Its frame spun like a broken halo. Its surface reflected not light, but vibrations. It pulsed with dissonant chords that clashed against reality. Raguel appeared beside Poseidon now, face unreadable.

  “He’s building the question.”

  Poseidon staggered back.

  “What is that thing?”

  Raguel turned.

  “His answer. And your mistake.”

  The Engine hummed. It fed on the chaos. It thrived. Rahab touched its surface, and the sea screamed. Poseidon dropped to one knee.

  “Rahab, stop. This… this will destroy everything.”

  Rahab looked back.

  “No. It will reveal what’s real.”

  And as the sky cracked above, and the stars bent inward, the Leviathan’s first note rang out. Sharp. Holy. And impossible to ignore. The breach gaped wide beneath the citadel. No longer just a wound in the world—it had become a womb of unmaking. From its depth, the Veil wept not light, but raw reality, spilling downward in viscous sheets of colorless chaos. Geometry buckled. Time slurred. What emerged did not belong to linear perception.

  Rahab rose through it like a storm made flesh. Not birthed in agony. Not summoned in wrath. Chosen by rupture. He did not walk—he willed the ground to yield. Tidal armor clung to his form, forged from the pressure of collapsed stars and the memory of crushed oceans. His shoulders bore current sigils—moving constantly, inscriptions of power that hummed through the air. Behind his eyes was no rage. Only purpose. And it terrified Poseidon. He watched from the upper platform, unsure if the structure would even hold.

  “Rahab,” Poseidon called, voice cracking under the weight of rising dissonance, “you are me. This isn’t the way.”

  Rahab turned slowly.

  “No,” he replied. “I was you. Before you diluted me with law, with guilt, with containment.”

  He stepped onto a shelf of floating resonance—each step warping the air into new impossible harmonics.

  “You wanted justice,” he said again, raising his hand.

  The water around him curved upward, taking shape. A skeletal frame began to form—a circular engine made of no element Poseidon recognized, with chords stretching out like veins, latticed across the sky. Each spoke spun with contradictory motion, humming tones that clashed like broken truths.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “I will give them fear.”

  The Leviathan Engine was being born. Poseidon descended fast, using resonance pulses to slow his fall. The citadel cracked behind him as the breach expanded.

  “Rahab! You can’t do this! The structure—you’re pulling from the Veil itself!”

  Rahab did not respond. He sang. No words. Just tone. A single low note, drawn out longer than time. It didn’t destroy. It invited entropy. The Leviathan Engine responded, unfolding like a serpent of spiraled chords. It was alive. But not sentient. It had no will. It was will. Poseidon lashed out with a blast of balanced force—his trident returned to him in a gleam of blue light. The Engine didn’t block.

  It resonated back. The blast reversed—hitting Poseidon in the chest, but not with pain. With reflection. He gasped. The Engine was built on him. On every contradiction. Every suppressed scream. Every divine hesitation. Rahab’s voice broke through.

  “This is the tool your restraint would never allow. A god-machine that makes dissonance into decision.”

  Poseidon coughed, dropping to one knee.

  “What decision?”

  Rahab extended a hand over the machine.

  “If all resonance is equal… what deserves to exist?”

  The question hit harder than the blast. The Leviathan Engine surged. Its exterior took form—part coral, part rune, part memory. No metal. No stone. Just possibility made structure. Poseidon crawled to his feet.

  “You’re creating a test?”

  “I am creating choice.”

  Rahab turned.

  “There will be no more divine guessing. No more moral pretense. This… will force truth into the open.”

  Poseidon reached for the core. The Engine pulsed. And he saw himself—fractured, mirrored, split across realities. The Poseidon who never forgave. The Poseidon who drowned Atlantis. The Poseidon who let Rahab win.

  “Stop this,” he whispered.

  Rahab paused.

  “I’m not your enemy.”

  Poseidon raised his trident again.

  “Then why do I feel like I’m watching the world end?”

  The Leviathan answered. Not in sound. In echo. A dissonant pulse rang out across the breach. And the stars above the citadel… shivered. The stars were no longer watching. They hung—dead and drifting—above a desert of drowned constellations, their light dimmed not by distance but by doubt. This place, this plane, was not bound by time or gravity. It was metaphysical ash, the leftover matter from a thousand unmade prayers.

  Here, the Leviathan Engine had chosen to awaken. It did not rise. It assembled. Piece by impossible piece, drawn from every point in space where a voice had been silenced. Its form was neither mechanical nor organic, but a contradiction forged in the marrow of the multiverse. Where it moved, reality forgot itself.

  At its heart spun a spiral of shattered resonance. A song unsung. A question too large to ask in any one tongue. Rahab stood beneath it like a priest before the pyre of truth. Arms outstretched. Eyes filled not with fury, but conviction. The first sound came not as a blast—but as a summoning. A low tone, like a bow drawn across the strings of existence. It reverberated outward across dimensions.

  And then—The Leviathan sang. The harmonic scream split through every veil. Planets paused. Stars hesitated. The very concept of motion wavered. Sentients across galaxies clutched their hearts and felt their internal frequency—something they’d never been taught to name—begin to unravel. Across the Twelvefold Reach, the Wyrm Priests collapsed in unison. In the Omega Vale, the Vanta Scholars’ archives turned to dust. In the future, Stromaterra, the digital dreamscape, began glitching in ways even STROMA AI could not stabilize. Because the Leviathan wasn’t destroying. It was asking. And the question was too loud for the universe to ignore.

  “If all resonance is equal… what deserves to exist?”

  In a far-seeing chamber orbiting no star, the Nasu stood.

  They didn’t flinch. They didn’t run. They watched. One turned to the others, their harmonic echo solemn.

  “It has begun.”

  Another replied, “It always would.”

  Poseidon arrived through a tear in spacetime—a rent so thin it bled light. His form struggled to stabilize under the pulse of the Engine’s second chord. He dropped to one knee. His trident hissed, its tips flickering in and out of alignment with the realm around him. Rahab turned, his voice layered with tones Poseidon didn’t recognize—divine, ancient, broken.

  “Welcome, brother. To the quiet before recalibration.”

  Poseidon staggered upright. “This is madness.”

  “No,” Rahab answered. “This is clarity.”

  The Leviathan’s rings rotated faster now, intersecting through one another in defiance of geometry. With each revolution, a new sound emerged—a scream from a distant world, a laugh caught in terror, a lullaby forgotten in war. Poseidon walked closer. The ground beneath him wasn’t ground at all, but resonance turned solid. It buckled with his every step. He saw children weeping in the hum. Lovers torn apart. Whole civilizations encoded in discordant sound.

  “Stop this,” he said, barely above a whisper.

  Rahab only gestured upward.

  “Listen.”

  The Leviathan released a third chord. And this time… Poseidon heard himself. Versions of him—too many to count. The tyrant. The pacifist. The coward. The god who let Atlantis drown. The one who never learned to forgive. Each screamed their answer. Each was weighed. Each… failed. Poseidon fell to his knees.

  “I never asked for this.”

  “But you did,” Rahab said gently. “When you chose not to choose.”

  The Leviathan’s glow shifted from cold silver to burning blue. Across creation, beings began to respond. A drifter on the edge of a Cassiopeian moon began to chant a forgotten name. An orphaned girl in the Hollow Deep dreamt of her mother for the first time in years—and woke to find her voice could break glass. The Sentients—those hidden, those lost—felt the shift. The question wormed its way into their code, their minds, their purpose. In the Veil's deepest shadow, the Nasu placed a hand on a carved monolith and whispered:

  “May they answer well.”

  Poseidon forced himself to stand.

  “You’re creating chaos.”

  Rahab shook his head.

  “I am exposing it. Chaos has always lived beneath your balance. You just layered laws over its throat.”

  A fourth note—this one cracked a moon near Taygeta in the Pleiades system. Poseidon turned, searching for a weakness in the Engine. But everywhere he looked, it reflected him. His doubts. His cruelty. His fear of judgment. He struck. The trident connected with the Leviathan’s core. The backlash hurled him into the void. But as he spun, Poseidon saw it—The Leviathan did not resist.

  It absorbed. It echoed. It showed him a world without him—and asked the question again. Would it matter? Would it hurt? Would it heal? Poseidon screamed back—not in rage, but in refusal.

  “I am the resonance!”

  Rahab smiled.

  “Then sing.”

  The Leviathan halted. Every ring froze. Every sound ceased. In that silence… all things waited. And Poseidon—bruised, burning, breaking—stood before the machine. He raised his trident. And spoke a note he hadn’t spoken since before Atlantis fell. A chord of mourning. Of love. Of failure. The Leviathan shook. Rahab’s eyes widened.

  “You remember.”

  The rings reversed. Poseidon fell to one knee. And the machine began to change. It was not finished. Not yet. But it had heard. For the first time since its awakening, it had heard something new. And it was listening. The silence after the Leviathan’s song was not peace. It was pause. A breath held by creation. Poseidon stood suspended in his mindspace—neither fully in body nor essence. Around him, echoes of his former selves blinked in and out of existence.

  Fractured memories, failed hopes, brief victories—they shimmered like reflections on a sea that had forgotten how to ripple. The world was still. Too still. He felt the shift first in his ribs. A tremor, light as a sigh, then growing—a pressure behind his eyes. The echo of a scream not yet screamed. From the Leviathan Engine, a tone emerged again. Not dissonant. Not harmonic. Open. A question not yet asked. Poseidon stepped through the veil of memory and entered a chamber within himself. The mindspace, once vibrant and fluid, was now stark.

  The pillars of law, once etched with Raguel’s crystalline glyphs, stood half-shattered. Pools of molten sea-fire shimmered below, each one bubbling with fragments of Rahab’s fury. The two forces—Raguel’s stillness, Rahab’s rage—had become more than internal guardians. They had become echoes of gods in their own right. And he… he was the hollow shell in between.

  “You let us grow,” said a voice.

  Rahab.

  “You were too afraid to wield us, so we learned to wield ourselves.”

  From behind, another voice. Quieter. Colder. Raguel.

  “And now you beg for balance, when all you ever gave us was containment.”

  Poseidon turned. His avatars stood on either side, not as illusions but as truths—Rahab with molten fire coiling around his fists, Raguel with an absence so profound even thought dared not pass through him.

  “You think this is my reckoning?” Poseidon whispered.

  “It’s not ours,” Rahab said.

  Raguel nodded.

  “It’s yours.”

  The pillars cracked. A pulse rushed through the chamber. Suddenly, the sky above them—Poseidon's inner horizon—tore open. From it descended a shape. The Leviathan. No longer distant. No longer contained to the metaphysical desert. It had followed him inward. Poseidon gasped.

  The Engine hovered above his ocean of thought, its rings no longer spinning, but orbiting him. The question had shifted focus. Now, it didn’t ask if he deserved to exist. It asked what he was without them.

  “I tried to hold you both,” Poseidon said, his voice breaking.

  “You tried to chain us,” Rahab snarled.

  “You tried to quiet me,” Raguel added, his voice barely audible, yet louder than any scream.

  Poseidon dropped to his knees.

  “I was wrong.”

  He looked up. His hands were bare. The trident was gone.

  “I thought balance was silence. That peace came from stillness. That power came from harmony.”

  Rahab stepped forward.

  “You feared our song.”

  Raguel whispered.

  “But we were not meant to sing alone.”

  Then—A pulse. The Leviathan Engine activated again. But this time… it did not scream. It resonated. One note. From Poseidon. A unified chord. His voice. Their voices. Merged. The sea-fire surged. The glyphs reignited. The shattered pillars began to reform—not as law, not as wrath, but as rhythm. A new pillar grew in the center. Larger. Living. Inscribed with Gaia’s symbol—the spiral of becoming. And from within the pillar, a whisper came through the Veil:

  "You feared their song. But they were not meant to sing alone."

  Poseidon stood. Whole. But not in control. Not anymore. The Leviathan rotated slowly above his mindspace. Its rings no longer cracked reality. They wove it. Then—A sound. A note not from him. A new voice. Sharp. Unrecognized. It came from behind the Veil. The Leviathan stopped. Poseidon spun.

  “What was that?”

  Raguel stepped forward, brows furrowed. “That was not us.”

  Rahab’s eyes narrowed. “That wasn’t any of us.”

  The pillar pulsed. Then split. A flare of blinding green light shot through the chamber. And a symbol appeared—familiar, ancient, wrong. The Seal of Erebus. Poseidon reached out—too late. The Leviathan absorbed the mark. And for the first time since it awakened—The Engine hesitated. A hum began in the distance. Not from within Poseidon. Not from the Leviathan. But from the fabric of the universe itself. A low alert tone. Faint. Relentless.

  WARNING: RESONANCE ANOMALY DETECTED. STABILITY COMPROMISED.

  Poseidon turned to Rahab.

  “To what plane is that signal bound?”

  Rahab’s fire dimmed.

  “It’s not a signal.”

  Raguel blinked slowly.

  “It’s a summons.”

  The Leviathan groaned. A crack formed in one of its rings. Through it… a black shape moved. And from far across time, across dimensions, something ancient answered.