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.