Long ago, the Gods created the Four Guardians to rule over the world.

The Cat of Venom, a lion with a mane of spitting cobras instead of hair, to rule the grasslands. For the forests there was the Cat of Storm, a tiger with claws of lightning. For the sea there was the Double Eagle, a great two-headed bird whose four eyes never slept. The ruler of the mountains was the most powerful of the four, the Dragon, a terrible red beast with seven tails and flaming breath. But these protectors were anything but. They exerted their will over their domains, attacking humans for fun. The humans rose up against their tyrannical rulers, and after a long struggle, the monsters were exiled to prisons beyond even their ability to escape. No longer known as the Four Guardians, they became the Raging Four, monsters that haunted fairy tales and nightmares as they sought revenge against the humans who had trapped them.

The kingdom of Katos has known peace ever since then, but as a few are about to discover, the Raging Four are not just myths.

The first sign was the wind.

It came down from the northern peaks in the dead of summer, cold enough to frost the edges of the wheat. Farmers in the valley of Lorne awoke to find their fields whispering though the air was still. The stalks bent not with any natural breeze, but as if something immense and unseen were walking slowly through them, step by deliberate step. Old men muttered about weather gone strange. Children played at being frightened, daring one another to stand at the edge of the fields after sunset. But when the livestock began refusing to graze, when dogs howled at nothing and scratched at doors until their paws bled, even the boldest villagers felt unease creep into their bones.

Three days later, the first storm struck the western forests.

It did not begin with rain. The sky remained clear, a pale, pitiless blue. Yet lightning flashed between the trees, leaping from trunk to trunk without a cloud in sight. The flashes were too precise, too deliberate, raking across bark and stone in claw-shaped streaks that left the scent of scorched resin hanging thick in the air. Woodcutters fled the forest, swearing that they heard something laughing beneath the thunder.

In the port city of Helkar, the sea turned restless. Waves rose and fell though the wind lay slack, and ships in harbor creaked against their moorings as if tugged by invisible hands. Sailors who had spent their lives on the water claimed that they felt watched—studied—by something deep below the hulls. Some swore that at night they saw four faint lights beneath the surface, drifting just out of sight, never blinking. The council dismissed it all as superstition. Storms came, seas shifted, and people frightened themselves with old stories when times were too peaceful for their liking. The legends of the Raging Four were taught only to children now, warnings wrapped in fairy-tale shapes.

Yet not everyone laughed.

In a small tower at the edge of Katos, Archivist Merrow unrolled a brittle map older than the kingdom itself. Ink the color of dried blood marked four locations across the land—grassland, forest, sea, mountain—each circled with a sigil that had not been used for centuries.

The sigils were glowing.

Not brightly. Not enough that anyone else would notice. But to eyes that had spent a lifetime studying the records of the exile, the faint ember-red shimmer was unmistakable.

Merrow swallowed hard. “No,” he murmured, as if the map could hear him. “You were bound. You were sealed. You cannot be—”

A knock cut him off. The door opened before he could answer, and a young courier stepped inside, pale and breathless.

“Archivist,” she said, voice shaking, “a message from the northern watch.”

Merrow took the sealed parchment with fingers that suddenly felt far too old. The wax bore the mark of the mountain wardens, a seal used only for dire warnings. He broke it carefully, afraid that the words might vanish if he moved too quickly.

They did not vanish. They were short. Blunt. Written by someone who had not bothered with ornament or reassurance.

The peaks are burning. No fire we set. No fire we can quench. Something moves beneath the stone. Something large.

For a long moment, Merrow could not breathe.

He turned slowly back to the map. The sigil over the mountains was no longer a faint shimmer. It burned like a coal pressed into the parchment, pulsing in a slow, steady rhythm.

Once.

Twice.

Seven times.

The tower seemed suddenly very small. The kingdom, very fragile.

Merrow rolled up the map with shaking hands. Peace had lasted generations, long enough that people believed it permanent. Long enough that they forgot why the prisons had been built so far from any road or settlement. Long enough that the tales of the Raging Four had softened into bedtime stories.

“They’re not myths,” he whispered to the empty room.

Outside, the cold summer wind rose again, rattling the shutters as if something vast had brushed against the tower on its way past.

Somewhere, deep beneath the mountains of Katos, stone groaned like a door forced open after centuries of disuse.

And far away, in four different corners of the world, ancient prisons began—very slowly—to crack.

Far below the burning peaks, something opened its eyes.

The prison of the mountains had not been built of mere iron or stone. The humans of old had known better. They had carved the cell from the heart of the mountain itself, shaping the rock into seven great rings that coiled around one another like the tails of a sleeping serpent. Each ring bore runes hammered in by a hundred smiths and blessed by priests who had died before the last sigil was complete.

For centuries, the runes had glowed with steady blue light.

Now, one of them flickered.

A crack crept across the innermost ring with a sound like distant thunder. Dust fell in slow, lazy streams. The glow dimmed, then flared, then dimmed again as if struggling to remember what it was meant to do.

Inside the rings, a shape shifted.

Seven long tails, once wrapped tight as chains, uncoiled a fraction. Scales the color of molten iron scraped against stone. Heat, long suppressed, seeped outward and turned the air hazy. When the creature exhaled, the breath did not become flame—yet—but the rock closest to its jaws smoked and softened, sagging as if it were wax.

The Dragon of the Mountains did not roar. It did not thrash.

It smiled.

The smile was slow, patient, and full of an old, terrible amusement. Its voice, when it came, was softer than the settling dust, yet it carried through every layer of stone above.

“So,” it murmured, “the bindings remember they are only human work.”

***

Far away, in the western forest, the lightning storm did not fade with the passing of the day. Instead, it deepened. The flashes grew sharper, more precise, carving long scars into the earth that never quite closed. Animals fled in every direction, abandoning dens and nests that had sheltered their kind for generations.

At the heart of the forest stood a circle of ancient oaks older than the kingdom itself. Their trunks were blackened by countless storms, yet none had ever fallen.

Until now.

One tree split clean down the middle, not by wind, but by a bolt of white-gold lightning that lingered, clawing down the trunk as if guided by intent. The wood burst apart, and within the hollow center something gleamed—a lattice of silver chains, each link etched with prayers in a forgotten language.

The chains trembled.

A low growl rolled through the forest, not loud, but sharp enough to make the leaves shiver. Between two flashes of lightning, stripes appeared where there had been only shadow. Claws of pure brightness pressed against the inside of the silver lattice, each tap sending sparks skittering like frightened fireflies.

The Cat of Storm flexed its claws once, experimentally.

The lightning that formed them hissed with delight.

***

On the grasslands, the wind’s whisper became a hiss. Wheat bowed in long ripples that moved against the direction of the breeze, converging toward a single barren hill at the center of the plains. No grass grew there. No burrows tunneled beneath it. The earth was packed hard as stone and circled by a ring of blackened posts driven deep into the soil.

Each post ended in a carved cobra head, mouths open in eternal spitting rage.

For centuries, they had remained still.

One of the stone cobras cracked across the fangs. A fine line split its eye, and from that thin fracture leaked a thread of green vapor that curled lazily into the air. The ground around the hill bubbled as if something beneath it had begun to breathe again.

Below the surface, coils shifted. Dozens of serpents lifted their heads in unison, their bodies woven through a mane that belonged to something far larger. Venom dripped onto the packed earth and hissed where it struck.

The Cat of Venom's eyes opened, twin pools of sickly gold.

It did not try to rise. Not yet. It simply watched, patient as drought, as another cobra post cracked and leaned.
***

Out at sea, sailors no longer laughed at their own fears.

The four lights beneath the water had drawn closer to the surface, bright enough now that they shone even at midday, ghostly and unmoving. Nets came up torn, as though sliced cleanly by blades. Compasses spun uselessly. More than one ship reported hearing the slow, rhythmic beat of wings beneath the waves, impossible and yet undeniable.

In the deepest trench beyond the harbor, a colossal cage of black iron rested on the seabed, chained to anchors driven into the ocean floor. Barnacles and coral covered every bar, softening their edges with centuries of growth.

One chain snapped.

The sound did not travel as noise. It traveled as pressure, a silent shock that made every creature in the surrounding waters dart away in blind panic. Within the cage, two vast shapes shifted, and four unblinking eyes opened at once.

The Double Eagle did not flap its wings.

It simply lifted its heads, and the water around it churned as if the sea itself were drawing a careful breath.
***

Back in Katos, word of the strange events spread faster than any official report. Farmers spoke in hushed voices. Sailors refused certain routes. Woodcutters laid down their axes and would not enter the forests, no matter the pay. Each story sounded different, yet they all carried the same shape beneath them—something old was stirring, and the world felt smaller for it.

Archivist Merrow did not sleep that night.

He sat at his desk, the ancient map unrolled before him, watching as each sigil pulsed in its own slow rhythm. Mountain, forest, grassland, sea. Four fading prisons. Four returning horrors.

“If the past is waking,” he said to the silent tower, “then so must we.”

He reached for a locked chest at the foot of his bed, one sealed with a key he had never once been tempted to use. The metal was cold and heavy in his hand, as if it resented being touched after so long.

Inside the chest lay four objects, each wrapped in faded cloth: a shard of scale red as dried flame, a strip of silver chain etched with lightning marks, a vial of hardened green venom, and a feather black as midnight but edged in pale, watchful gold.

Relics of the old war.

Proof that the Raging Four had once been beaten.

Merrow stared at them, dread knotting tight in his chest. “We sealed you once,” he whispered, voice rough. “But the ones who did it are dust now.”

Outside, the wind shifted, carrying with it the faint scent of smoke, salt, and storm.

“Which means,” he finished quietly, “it will fall to a new generation to try again.”