Whenever a strange allure grips him and commands him to follow the path it etches for him, Volterra knows better than to resist. The necklace slung around his neck, from which armour of red dragon hide can be summoned with the merest flick of the mind, is testament to the glory that can come when curiosity gets the better of logic.

Interestingly enough, this time the pull comes from the exact same place that the leviathan received his beautiful gift. The Isles hold a fond place in his mind - here he made his first kill, as the giant skeletal nightmare attempted to strike him down on the coral-patterned sands of the tropical south. That's not something he is ever likely to forget, and the addition of his armour certainly helped cement his enjoyment of the place. It took many days for him to get rid of the stink of water-dragon-spittle from the deepest reaches of his coat, but the iron-hard red prize was certainly worth it.

Of course, he's bound to be a tad more wary of the ocean now he knows what lies beneath those innocent-looking waves. He remembers the tempest and the savage segments of predator that lurched up from the eggshell-blue depths, the tongue that created a bridge and flicked him eagerly into the ravenous maw. To think he once swam across this particular sea without a single thought to what lurked beneath, so great was his eagerness to join in with the Rift God fight.

As a result, there's a tad more trepidation about the mammoth stallion as he walks across the crisp yellow sand, his authoritative stride still holding the ghost of a limp from the crippling effects of his broken ribs. He is dragonless; both red and gold have seized the opportunity to hunt the fish they adore so much, so they are not even distant specks on the horizon as they dive beneath the surface and pillage it of its bounty. It isn't long before the young warlord discovers a decent-sized crowd of other Helovians, and his gaze naturally travels towards the thing they are staring at. It is a conglomeration of everything one might think of when they picture the ocean floor; Volterra keeps his gaze impassive as he looks the thing over, but his gut twists with discomfort at how alien it appears.

The seas certainly hide a multitude of weird-ass shit.

Others seem to be offering the hand of friendship towards the odd creature; Volterra, however, hangs back. He was there for the Rift God fights, and he knows how misleading first impressions can be. There is no saying that this beast will not simply attack as the Gods did, cause devastating injuries to those not wily enough to get out of its way. So the leviathan does not join in with the welcomes that the others offer the animal, but nor is his body language confrontational. He simply stands, a gigantic monolith of obsidian flesh and taut muscle, ready to act should things turn nasty.

And, jaded and cynical as he is, he is quite convinced that they will turn nasty. In his experience, Helovia's interactions with alien life never end well.