The quarters they were given were a beautiful cage.
Carved from a single, gargantuan bubble of living coral, the suite was airy and suffused with a gentle, pulsing light from colonies of symbiotic anemones clinging to the walls. A channel of seawater, clear and cold, trickled along a groove in the floor, bringing with it tiny, translucent shrimp that skittered over polished stones. The air smelled of salt, ozone, and the faint, sweet decay of deep-water blossoms.
Corvannafax hated it.
The damp was a clammy kiss on her crimson skin, so different from the dry, windswept desert mountains of Northern Kazar or the punishing cold of Bergia. The silence was absolute—no howl of wind, no distant clash of arms, not even the groan of timber. Just the hum of the living city, a sound felt in the bones more than heard. She pressed a hand against the wall. It was warm, slightly yielding, like the cartilage of some vast, sleeping beast. A stomach, she thought, her lip curling. We are in a beautiful stomach.
Her gaze swept the chamber. Zeyzey was already at the water channel, dipping a finger, tasting it with the clinical focus of an apothecary assessing poison. Shelove was a tense shadow beside Koronos, her golden eyes wide, her telepathic touch on Koronos a constant, low-grade pulse: too-many-heartbeats-in-stone.
And Daggeroth… Daggeroth stood frozen before a translucent section of the wall, his face pressed close. Beyond, in a larger, dimly lit cavern, figures moved. Human figures. They wore simple tunics of woven kelp garnished with bright feathers of some unknown sea birds, tending glowing gardens of fungus on terraces of porous rock. His breath fogged the clear coral.
Before Corvannafax could speak, the curtain of living seaweed at the entrance parted. Two young White Malataks entered, their movements a liquid glide. They carried a platter of food: sashimi-thin slices of iridescent fish, spiny fruits, and bowls of steaming, fragrant broth. Their large, azure eyes swept the room, carefully avoiding the offensive splash of crimson that was Corvannafax.
"Eat. Regain your strength," one said, the words soft and melodic.
Corvannafax stepped forward, her boots silent on the spongy floor. "Your sentries. What is the watch rotation? How are the approaches to this… bubble… guarded?"
The White Malataks exchanged a glance. The male, his skin dappled with silver like fish scales, finally met her eyes. His expression wasn't hostile. It was worse. It was wary, edged with a profound, pitying distance. "Your color," he said softly, "speaks of the fires that burn the world above. It is… loud here. Please. Do not wander." They set the platter down and left as silently as they had come.
Heat flushed up Corvannafax's neck. Loud? She was a warrior who had faced down a Bergian inquisitor and the gibbering shadows of the Nightlands. She had clawed her way out of a dungeon. And here, she was reduced to a political stain, a symbol of a surface squabble these pale fish-people deemed beneath their notice. With a snarl, she drew her Bergian crystal sword. The violent screech-screech-screech of whetstone on its perpetually keen, majikally-hardened edge was a satisfying violation of the quiet.
When she looked up, Daggeroth was gone.
He moved through the coral corridors like a ghost drawn by a half-remembered song. The White Malataks he passed ignored him, their focus inward. He followed the memory of the human shapes, the pull of something that was not crushing emptiness.
He found the enclave in a high cavern where the ocean roof was thin, allowing fractured, greenish sunlight to penetrate. It was a desperate, beautiful mimicry of the surface. Patches of dark soil nurtured fat tubers. Driftwood frames held climbing vines. The air was warmer, smelling of earth and green growth. The people had the familiar Samiran cast to their features: the high cheekbones, the dark eyes but their skin was paler, softened by generations away from the jungle sun or maybe it's because his people were exposed to the jungle sun and that's why his skin is slightly darker. Their speech was a melody of familiar sounds in a strange order, an ancient tongue worn smooth by time and water.
An old woman sat on a stool of fused coral, mending a net of fine, silvery cord. Her hands were a map of wrinkles and strength. She looked up as Daggeroth approached, her gaze taking in his foreign leathers, his knives, the hollow, haunted void in his eyes. She did not startle. She simply gestured to a spot beside her.
He knelt, the movement stiff.
"Young man, you have the look of the far-walkers or perhaps the surface dwellers on the islands," she said, her voice like stones tumbling in a slow stream. "The deep-walkers brought you. Do you serve them?"
Daggeroth nodded. His own voice, when it came, was a rusted hinge. "My… I mean, our people… are from islands?"
"Long ago," she said, her deft, skilled hands never pausing. "Before the Great Fall. When the land-walkers fought their wars and forgot the debt to the Sea-kin. Our ancestors remembered. They stayed. The Pale Ones keep the promise." She touched a pendant at her throat, a worn, creamy shell. "You are safe here."
Safe. The word meant nothing. Nowhere was safe, he had seen true horror from beyond: things that men aren't meant to see or know.
"But you carry a deep cold in you, far-walker," she said, her eyes knowing. "A cold not of this sea."
He stared at her hands, at the simple, repetitive motion of weaving the cord. It was an act of repair. Of continuity. It was so profoundly, devastatingly normal. For a time, minutes, maybe an hour, the memory of chittering shadows and dissolving stone receded, held at bay by the tactile reality of the net, the rough cord in his own shaking hands as he, wordlessly, began to help her. He did not speak again. But when he finally stood to leave, his eyes were not on some distant horror. They were clear, focused on the path back. A single, silent thought had taken root amidst the ruins of his mind: continuity, life goes on.
While Daggeroth was among the humans, Koronos was summoned to the Matriarch's sanctum. The sanctum was a sphere of flawless crystal at the city's highest point, a blister on the ocean's ceiling. Beyond the curved wall was not the comforting blue of the shallows, but the infinite black of the deep, dotted with the lonely, drifting lights of creatures who had never known the sun.
Neri waited for him there, a silhouette against the starless void. "You agreed for passage," she said, her voice losing its melodic quality, becoming the grind of tectonic plates. "I ask it for more."
Koronos said nothing, his hand resting on the pommel of the First.
"The future is a turbulent current," she continued, turning. The turquoise flecks in her eyes swirled like agitated silt. "I catch glimpses. May I?" She raised a hand, fingers poised near his temple.
It was a test. Of trust, of power, of his tolerance for her kind of majik. With a grunt, he gave a single, curt nod, his face an impassive mask.
Her touch was cool. Then the vision slammed into him.
It was not images, but raw, horrific sensation. The Spires, not bright and piercing, but blackened obelisks weeping green lightning. A throne of fused bones, and upon it, Supremus unchained, his grey skeletal, metal face a crack in the world.
The sky over Sleeping Dragon, ripped open, bleeding silent, hungry void. The oceans of the vast realms of Oceanus were boiling. The Pearl Court, a broth of shattered coral and floating, pale bodies. A woman stood beside the throne. A dark queen. Her eyes were voids of cold, pragmatic triumph, her face a blur, an obscuring swirl of storm and shadow. A final, deafening crack as Sword of the First shatters into a million shards of dying light.
Koronos staggered back a step, the phantom sound ringing in his skull. The crystal chamber snapped back into focus.
Neri was breathing heavily, the light in her eyes dimmed. "A possible future," she gasped. "One of many. The paths are clouded by a will greater than mine. One in your group is a pivot point. Their spark could light a funeral pyre for the entire Omniverse: Terra Primius, Sleeping Dragon, the Spires and even the Void realm… or a guiding flame."
"I control my own," Koronos growled, boiling salt and ozone was the taste of the vision still in his mouth. He seized on the one tangible, absurd point. "Sleeping Dragon is a story. A ghost in our sky. Why should its fate concern me?"
A flicker of something like pity crossed Neri's exhausted face. "Oh, storm-wrought one. You have been walking on the ghost."
Silence. The hum of the crystal sphere seemed to swell, pressing in on him.
"The blue-white disc your priests chart and fear?" she continued, her voice soft as abyssal silt. "That is this realm, Sleeping Dragon. You are not lost. You walk the lands of your sister world, forever locked in a dance. The war you wish to flee is already here. It is the ground beneath you."
Koronos did not move. The pieces: his people but not his people, the pervasive, hungry majik, the very scale of the horrors he had faced, all clicked into a new and terrifying configuration. He was not a castaway on a far off realm. He was on the celestial antagonist of his people's oldest myths. The knowledge was a cold stone in his gut.
His face, trained many years to show nothing, remained a mask of stone. He gave a single, slow nod. It was not agreement, but a grim acknowledgment of a battlefield newly understood.
"Retrieve the Tear," Neri said, her strength seeming to leach away with the revelation. "It is a step. The only clear step I see on this world."
Koronos returned as Daggeroth slipped back into their quarters. The blue-skinned warlord's face was a grim mask, his knuckles white where they gripped the hilt of the First.
"We have our task," he rumbled, gathering them with a glance. "We retrieve their relic. They give us a ship but Shelove isn't coming with us; she is ill-suited for such a mission."
He offered no details of his audience with the Matriarch, but Corvannafax saw the new tension in his shoulders, the way his eyes lingered on Zeyzey for a half-second too long and even on herself. The witch merely arched a brow, her expression unreadable.
Neri's attendants arrived moments later, carrying the gear. The Breathing Amulets were simple things: kelp cords holding porous, opal-like stones that glowed with a faint, cool blue light.
"Place the stone over your heart," a white-skinned artificer instructed. "It will not give you air. It will take the breath from the water itself and keep the abyssal depths from crushing you into a ball of meat. In addition, it should offer some protection to your bodies from the frigid waters of the deep currents. You will feel… a trickle. A drowning in reverse. Do not fight it. Even though it is some of our most powerful majik, your panic will darken the stone… and that will be bad for you."
When the artificer approached Corvannafax, he hesitated. "The deep pressure… your kind's bone density, your particular makeup… it is different. The amulet may stress, may fail."
Corvannafax snatched the cord from his hands and fastened it around her own neck. The stone settled against her sternum, cold and alien. "My kind is stress incarnate," she said, her voice flat. "It will hold."
They were led to a vast, echoing grotto, one side open to the vast blue of the deep ocean. The water within was still as oil. And in it waited the mounts.
They were not like any beast of land or sky. Sleek and serpentine, longer than three warhorses, with skin like polished basalt and long, wing-like pectoral fins. Their heads were elegant, with large, luminous eyes that held a deep, patient intelligence. They drifted silently, empathic leviathans whose minds, Koronos was told, were a slow, vast song of currents and cosmic pressure. The lead mount was called Chal.
"Your power," Neri's stern, scarred commander said to Koronos, gesturing to Chal. "You must forge a bond or something, I'm not sure how you will do it because it takes years of training to get them to trust a rider. But Neri says you can do it, so you guide him. He guides the pod. It is our only advantage. The defilers and the Whisper have attuned the depths to reject our song. Yours is alien. Wild. It may pass. That's what I was told anyway. So, yeah."
A final briefing over a luminescent sand-table showed the descent: down a thermal plume, into the eternal midnight beyond the reach of the sun, to the fissure where the stolen Tear pulsed with corrupted energy. The dangers were etched in cold light: pressure vortices that could crush a skull, the Whisper's psychic influence that bred paranoia and madness, the corrupted guardians, and the rogue Malataks themselves: their pale skin now marbled with invasive, black veins and sickly bioluminescent fungi.
Zeyzey held her amulet stone, her eyes closed, sensing the intricate weave of its majik with a hungry focus. Daggeroth checked his knives, his movements deliberate, mechanical. He was not fighting for the Pale Ones. He was fighting the deep cold in his soul.
Corvannafax looked from the cool blue water to Koronos, to her own reflection in the dark surface. This was not her war. This was not her element. It was a wet, silent nightmare. But her oath was her element. It was the bedrock beneath her feet. She gripped the familiar hilt of her crystal sword, feeling its latent frost-majik stir.
"Let's sink this kraken and have some calamari for dinner," she muttered, "and be done with it."
They stood at the stone ledge. The amulets glowed like drowned stars on their chests. Below, Chal and his pod waited, silent and immense. Koronos knelt, placing a broad hand on the lead mount's head. He closed his eyes, and a new silence fell. The hum of the city gone, replaced only by the drip of water and the vast, waiting quiet of the abyss.
Corvannafax took one last, deep breath of the damp, fragrant air. A land-breath.
This is no song, she thought, the old anger a warm coal in her gut. This is the deep, dark, silent kill.
She met Koronos's sharp, blue nod. Together, they stepped off the ledge and plunged into the waiting deep.