As of yet, Draconua had never truly experienced something she could consider a challenge—something to beat out the sweat of her brow, leech blood, bring a tear to any one of a dozen eyes. Emergence had been but a fleeting inconvenience. Being cleaved nearly in half had merely granted her a new form to explore. The Creator had offered her a dose of Chaos, and she craved more.

Oh, she always craved. She would drink and drink, yet still find herself parched. The limits had yet to be even scraped. Her appetite had yet to turn sour. Her body had yet to be anything but intact and miraculously unpoisoned; there were days during which Oil would slick down her whole hide, unstable and horrific—and others where it leaked from just the sockets of her eyes and down her gullet. On the former, she would venture into the caves, spewing unholy weather upon whatever cave was at the fringe of her capacity.

The valkhound rarely ever made it past Leo.

Today, Draconua was set into a... peculiar calm. It was eerie, like the stillness of red skies in the morning; a portent of a raging typhoon to come, perhaps. The eye of a hurricane before the storm wall totally swallowed everything. Her faceplate glinted in the light of the Spire (and she sneered at it, for it was not the wicked iridescence of the one at... well, not home, but an approximation of it) as she plodded past. Twelve eyes swung in every possible direction before focusing dead-ahead.

Hooked claws scraped deep into the earth as she slunk forward.

There. Trials and tribulations. Nose to the grindstone. Blood, sweat, tears. An innocuous, dark corridor with promise. Draconua lifted her snout, her rattling inhaling of scent coupled with a widening grin. She swept her tongue over her tusks; she could taste something in the musky odor of damp stone and eons of dust. Excitement, a thrill, ozone, absence—

The Sleepless Chaos cackled once: a sharp, shrieking note. This... test... it would be something, she was sure.

"I AM DRACONUA, THE SLEEPLESS CHAOS. I AM READY."

She settled onto her haunches, and she waited.

There was a soft flutter, a rustle barely-audible by mortal ear, and then the impossibly large owl landed. Talons scratched the stone, and toxic eyes shifted to regard Draconua with dark interest.

What had begun as a smoldering heat shimmer around him, flecked through with glowing embers, shifted as he inspected her: changed to black, a swarming and oily sheen that curled smoky around each feather.

"A CHILD OF CHAOS? ANOTHER ONE?" he screeched, and then threw his head back, to cackle. Ahh, but it was funny-! They were awakening, now, were they not? The Sentinel had been here not so long ago, all black oil and madness, too. And now this one was here.

Oh, what joys would the future hold!

"YOU ARE READY? YOU MAY THINK YOU ARE READY. BUT WHO REALLY IS?! -EMUH WILL FIND OUT! YOU WILL HAVE YOUR TEST." Then he was gone, in another flash of feathers and smoke--before talons could shred him, before jaws could gnash him because these creatures were so terribly volatile.

He should know. Oh, he should know.

As he vanished into the shadows, the room began to twist. Porous gray rock darkened, slicked with damp, a cold mist rising; the ground churned in grinding rumbles. Tangled vines, a foot thick and studded with thorns as large as a man's arm, began to curl up and fill the space. The mist grew thick, wet, the air hard to breathe. Draconua was left facing a narrow-ceilinged, dark space, with curls of thorny vines--like coiled snakes turned on their sides--filling it from top to bottom. And then something--many somethings, by the sound--began to buzz within. It was a quiet noise, but pervasive, as if a thousand insects were hidden in the brush beyond. It was... ominous, somehow.

A narrow path led into the vines, but quickly grew impassable. There was no real hint as to how Draconua was to progress--what she was to do--only the path, and its abrupt and immediate end.

@Draconua

Enter Emuh.

Draconua tipped her head downward to regard the suddenly-present owl-beast, the very tip of her tail flickering in keen interest. Shiny, fresh-scarred skin tugged around her bottom jaw as she bared her teeth in a grin. He laughed, but was it truly at her? The Sleepless Chaos echoed it with her own, gasping and ragged. Another child of Chaos, he said. She gazed at Emuh from where she stood, watching as feathers went from smoldering to purging His darkened essence. It was little but intriguing to her.

The monstrous valkhound lurched back to her feet, and straightened her neck where it'd hung low to the ground. Filthy, Oily locks dragged along with the motion. They clung to her already sweaty hide, curling in meaningless patterns (much like a particular substance she was so obsessed with.)

A sneer twisted her lip. "I KNOW THAT I AM," came her echoed response. Hussar wings put their points to the air, spread wide to cast a broad silhouette.

Voidfire preemptively bloomed in her gullet, and—gone was the administrator, so wise in his judgement. A moment more, and Draconua—assuming that this was merely a trial by combat—would have taken initiative and given no quarter.

Spare change was hard to come by.

Instead, the very nature of the corridor shifted to fit that of a more cramped Eridanus—and, perhaps, more lethal. Less forgiving to those soft-bodied, barely emboldened beasts of... whatever it was had birthed them. Draconua eyed one of the thorny vines as she sulked forward a few paces, a few spare eyes tracing the dangerous curve (and finding some amount of familiarity with it, given the recency of finding a similar one slicing through her entire abdomen.) A wing grazed the edge of the path, and she stutter-stepped back a foot or so (not much, in comparison to... her entire length, but notable enough.)

There were many somethings beyond the thorny blockade, and the Sleepless Chaos was not one to let an obstacle remain in her way.

Voidfire simmered again in her gullet, licking at the very fringes and begging for release into the dense, cloying air. Draconua sucked in a breath, lashed her tail once, and did her level best to unleash a billowing stream of all-consuming flame.

The fire crackled, black and cold, through the foliage in a torrent. It spread and twisted with void-black embers through the vines, which withered, blackening in an instant, curling away into nothing but ash. The air filled with smoke to join the mist; choking and thick.

The buzzing abruptly intensified. Grew angry.

From beyond the tangled vines, along the now greatly widened pathway (one that even Draconua could shove easily down without fear of the thorns) came... insects: mutated things, many-limbed and many-eyed, no two the same. All were oily black; no two were the same. They looked gruesome, grotesque, and wholly unnatural: an open boil on that one, a head half-eclipsed by oilstone on another, limbs jutting out of other limbs on a third. All had great pincers, and enormous stingers--some more than one--and all were zipping straight for Draconua.

They were each a foot or so long, with black-veiled diaphanous wings, and there were two dozen of them at least.

1/3

@Draconua

The vantablack smoke burned in her lungs, but she reveled in it nonetheless. Pegasus had not caught as easily as this; Eridanus had quivered before it, but still yet resisted. This? Oh, this overgrowth was ravaged by her magic. It seethed in an instant and bellowed with creaking stems and chlorophyll-turned-to-ash. Draconua let loose a crowing peal of laughter, the cry of a solitary prisoner set free, a beast feeling the grass beneath its feet for the first time, a person meeting an old friend after years apart.

Dozens of insects flooded from the undergrowth, their buzzing drone growing to a fever pitch intensity. Her sanguine faceplate swung to regard them as they came, and she practically howled with joy. Challengers!

They would flee soon enough, gnashing pincers and all. Their Oily appearance did little to dissuade her from her warpath---the Sleepless Chaos had no allies but herself.

She backpedaled, arching her neck—craning it as if to prepare another gout of flame. Draconua promptly sidestepped to the edge of the path. A wing caught in the thicket, and then clumps of her slicking-over hair. Pressure crashed down on her, knocking the wind straight out of her lungs (or what little there were, given the entropic smoke still curling through them.)

Her magic truly was chaos, Emuh noted--watching unseen. From one extreme to another, its target mindless, barely-controlled.

How exciting!

The flood of insects poured over Draconua, the creature downed by her own chaos, and--they added to it. Stingers plunged for hefty hide, sharp enough to penetrate: injecting pure Oil itself. Oh, it was only adding her to herself--but the effect was exponential.

Maddened turned to madder. The entropy of her Chaos intensified tenfold. It was painful; but perhaps she would revel in it.

But not much damage had been done... not yet. That would come, if she continued to fail at her own defense--if her Chaos continued to flail wildly, instead of coming to her aid.

@Draconua

The pressure shifted, releasing her for mere seconds before multiplying, careening straight into a graph's asymptote. It increased exponentially, crawling higher and higher. Cacophonous whispers drowned every other semblance of hearing; hide and hair smoldered; electricity coiled through every tendon. She seized where she was, stuttering through the motions of biting and clawing and scraping.

Horrible, but oh, she'd felt such a thing before. Not too long ago! It built higher and higher, surging through her. These awful bugs and their presence—she needed them and she needed them away.

Draconua twisted her neck, bracing her skull against a twitching forelimb, and sucked in a wheezing breath. Black lightning coalesced in her gullet, charring flesh black and dulling already-dead nerve endings. Without a care for if she was contacting every member of the swarm, or that she was directing forks of electricity at herself, she yowled shrilly.

There was the whipcrack of lightning, but muffled as it lanced through her own innards.

The Sleepless Chaos screamed.

The Chaos within them--they themselves, the roiling mass of stinging flesh--revelled in chaos alongside her. Were they truly enemy, or were they brothers-in-arms, celebrating the same master, the same forces that she herself--worshipped? Or simply embodied? Claimed as her own?

They claimed it, too.

Their payload delivered, the insects moved to tearing, instead: pincers ripping at flesh where they could. Spines gripped, hide torn, bristling red hairs tugged violently. A few of them fell away, sizzling, oil dripping from split carapaces where her chaotic lightning had lanced through their misshapen bodies.

They would take her apart, piece by little piece, if she did not end it quickly; dozens of little avatars of Chaos dismantling, consuming, assimilating the larger into themselves. Did the vessel truly matter, if all that wielded Chaos became nothing but-?

@Draconua

The Sleepless Chaos screamed and she wept, Oil crashing from her eyes and nostrils in waves. It half-blinded her—as if the pincers carving the nightmarish Thanksgiving turkey did not already send her vision into blurry monochrome.

She thrashed once, tearing her forearm and wing free with lacerations on each and thorns still mired in them. Her head dragged halfway along the floor, knocking into sizzling carapace before she managed to lift it. Flanks heaved with ragged, gasping breaths. They convulsed, too, like the rest of her body. Every second was another edging closer to total collapse. An insect clipped near a still-intact nerve, and Draconua shrieked.

And, in that moment...

ERUPTION.

The world...

IGNITED.

Her oil. Their oil. The remaining foliage. The oil-slicked rock. The very air itself. The sudden heat engulfed her world, the monstrous insects incinerated with screeches--was that voice, or steam escaping the cracking bodies?--plumes of purple-black ash filling the air in toxic coils. The heat was so immense that flashes of green electricity sparked through it, the magic and its power uncontainable.

When the world stopped roaring, burning, smoking--then Draconua (or what was left of her) would see what remained: a tangled, trampled, smoking bed of ashes, tangles of broken vines leading away beneath the cave's low roof. A few twitching bodies sizzled or steamed, half-burnt away to nothing.

Only one thing yet stood untouched, farther in: a strange, black stone structure like a massive, taloned hand, closed like an upraised fist beyond. From the slender gaps beneath its claws glowed reversed void-light: whatever Draconua sought, whatever the point of her test, it likely lay within. She would feel the inciting pulse of Chaos from within.

Its rocky structure took up most of the room, fully a third the size of the Sleepless Chaos herself.

2/3

@Draconua