Elizabeth felt the pull of the Spell. One moment she was enveloped by its familiar sensation. The next, she found herself standing atop a solitary stone, overlooking a sea as dark as ink.
Without hesitation, silvery light enveloped her as she summoned [Broken Promise], [Last Hope], and [Destined Death]. The familiar crystal clear dagger settled comfortably into her hand, while her armor materialized around her body in a cascade of silver radiance. Resting against her chest was a delicate necklace bearing a tiny skull, no larger than a fingernail, a stark contrast to the elegant armor that encased her.
With a weapon in hand, Elizabeth immediately surveyed her surroundings.
The stone beneath her armored boots was broad and mostly flat, its surface carved with weathered grooves that had somehow remained dry despite the endless sea surrounding it. The regularity of its edges made it appear less like a natural rock and more like something deliberately crafted.
Only after confirming that no abomination was rushing toward her did she allow herself to relax, if only slightly. Even then, she remained vigilant, pushing her senses to their limits. She listened to the slow, heavy rhythm of the waves as they lapped against the stone, and felt the familiar surge of strength that always came from standing beneath the open sky with the sea at her side.
'Thank the gods. I landed somewhere peaceful.'
She released a slow breath, only then realizing she had been holding it.
'But where exactly am I?'
The surroundings were lightless. She could barely make out what lay beyond the inky sea, only a scattering of jagged hills poking above the water in the distance. She combed through her mental map of the dream realm, every region humanity had ever explored, but nothing matched what stretched before her now.
'A moonless, starless sky. A sea black as spilled ink. Wait...There was no source of light at all.'
She frowned slightly. She knew there should be no light, and yet she was seeing everything with impossible clarity. The answer, of course, was obvious the moment she thought of it. Her senses had been enchanted by her inherited lineage.
'Neat. Night vision too. It just keeps on giving, doesn't it.'
Her thoughts eventually returned to the question that truly mattered. No matter how long she pondered it, she could not recognize this place. There was no moon hanging above the black sea, nor were there any stars scattered across the heavens, which let her rule out the Storm Sea immediately. Nor did a towering castle rise in the distance, eliminating the lake surrounding Bastion as another possibility.
So where, in tarnation, had she ended up?
'No...Don't tell me. Surely my luck isn't that bad. Right?'
A realization began to take shape in her mind, one she became more reluctant to accept with every passing second. Somehow, she had ended up in one of the unexplored regions of the Dream Realm.
That alone was unsettling, but it was far from the worst possibility. Most unexplored regions had at least been documented to some extent. A fortunate survivor, or a wandering Saint, had usually lived long enough to sketch a map and record a few observations.
This place, however, matched nothing in her memory.
That could only mean one thing. No one had ever made it out of here alive.
Suddenly the slow, melodic wash of the dark sea did not sound inviting anymore. It felt as though she had fallen into the belly of some vast beast, and the sea itself was its digestive acid, slowly working to dissolve anything foolish enough to linger. Given how her luck had been running lately, she could not even rule that out. The only thing keeping her steady was the faint, familiar power humming through her from the sky and the sea alike.
Speaking of which, she realized she did not have the absorbed water from the academy, so the enchantment running through her was weaker than it should have been. Lucky, at least, that she had landed near a sea. But before she could move toward the edge to fix that, a sound reached her from the darkness.
The rhythm of the waves broke. A new sound rose beneath it, the frantic slap and churn of something splashing hard through the water. She braced for combat at once, gripping her dagger tight in her left hand while her right hand began to slowly dissolve into liquid.
The sound crept closer. Louder. Her pulse climbed with it, each beat seeming to echo in her ears. Beneath the relentless splashing, she began to hear something else, ragged, desperate breathing, as though someone were fighting for every gasp of air. It drew nearer, close enough now that she could finally place where it was coming from. She turned her head toward the black expanse of the sea, and her eyes went wide with horror.
Something was cutting through the water at terrifying speed. Human arms, swimming in something close to a perfect front crawl, which meant the thing was, or had been, a person. But that was not what made her blood run cold.
Behind it trailed a fin. A massive fin, and it was closing fast.
'Damn it!'
Elizabeth scrambled back from that side of the platform, already cursing the possible sleeper who had dragged this horror to her doorstep. Judging by the size of that fin alone, whatever monstrosity it belonged to was enormous, and this stone slab would never survive a direct hit.
As the swimmer and the fin closed the distance, [Destined Death] screamed a warning through her spine, shiver after shiver crawling up her back. She snapped her head around, searching desperately for any nearby peak within swimming distance, any scrap of higher ground she could retreat to.
Elizabeth clicked her tongue. There was nowhere to run and she had no intention of trusting herself to that black water for even a moment.
'DAMN IT!'
Her grip tightened on her dagger. She was already weighing whether to summon Rethen's Finger when [Destined Death]'s warning spiked violently, a wave of dread crashing through her all at once. She spun just in time to see a figure burst from the water and slam onto the platform like a fish thrown ashore, gasping, naked, and scrambling away from the sea. 'It' was Human at least.
She had no time to look at him properly. The stone trembled beneath her feet as a set of monstrous jaws broke the surface behind him, rows upon rows of teeth glistening in the dark, each one longer than she was tall. All hesitation vanished. She summoned [Pinkey of Rethen] and readied herself, while the stranger threw himself forward, desperation twisting his face as he fought to put distance between himself and the horror at his back.
Just as Elizabeth stepped forward to meet it, [Destined Death] shrieked again, sharper this time, more urgent, as though thousands of voices were screaming at once. A moment later, a colossal black tentacle tore through the surface of the sea and rose into the air like some impossible tower, dripping and immense, blotting out what little she could see of the horizon. Elizabeth's heart seized in her chest. Beside her, the sleeper's knees gave out, and he collapsed onto the stone.
Then the tentacle fell. It wrapped around the massive jaws in an instant and dragged the beast, still screaming, back beneath the waves, the water churning white and violent where it vanished.
A few moments later, silence returned, and the sea settled back into its slow, rhythmic sound.
'Oh, dead gods. Just where in hell did you send me?'
A few seconds later, [Destined Death] shrieked again, but this time it was different. The sound pressed into her bones with a heavy, sinking weight. Something nearby had just died.
She stayed alert, refusing to loosen her grip on [Pinkey of Rethen] and [Last Hope]. The owner of that tentacle could return at any moment.
Only after several long minutes passed without another attack did she finally exhale and dismiss Rethen's Finger. Even then, her mind remained ready to resummon it in an instant. With the immediate danger fading, she turned her attention back to the sleeper who had crashed onto the stone.
Her eyes widened slightly as she recognized him. The short boy knelt on the ground, shivering, though his fierce gaze made it clear the shaking came from adrenaline bleeding out of his system rather than fear. His focused expression slowly turned toward her. His eyes, two pools of unfathomable darkness, met her grass green gaze. A flicker of recognition crossed his face, and Elizabeth frowned at that.
'He can see in the dark as well.'
Neither of them spoke. The silence stretched, heavy and brittle, as if a single word might summon something neither of them wanted to face.
The boy seemed to realize he was naked. Silver sparks began forming around him, and a moment later he was clothed in dark grey garments, complete with a pair of high, soft soled leather boots. Clad in grey fabric and lusterless leather, he finally looked better.
'Good. It was starting to get awkward.'
As if he had read her mind, the boy stared at her with a frown, his lips parting slightly. He hesitated before asking in a whisper.
"You can see in the dark, can't you?"
Elizabeth let out a deep sigh. He must have noticed the relief on her face.
"Don't worry, I'll try my best to forget what I saw," she whispered back. The boy looked away and stared back at the sea, refusing to meet her eyes, clearly in shame, yet he did not turn his back toward her.
Silence returned for a while before the boy turned back to her.
"Do you know where we are?"
She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged.
"A death zone, most likely. An uncharted zone, if we're lucky."
The boy's expression hardened as he sighed. He was taking it surprisingly well. Why was that?
"What are the chances we can make it out alive?" he asked grimly.
Elizabeth was wondering the same thing. That oversized fish had already been well above the Awakened rank, which meant it was likely Fallen rank. And to make matters worse, the thing had struggled against, and been killed quite quickly by, something far more horrifying lurking in the deep. In terms of chances, they had none.
"We can only wait and see if our odds improve. Because right now, they're at zero."
"Damnation," he muttered under his breath, before silence settled back over them.
"I never quite got your name," Elizabeth said. "I'm sure you already know mine, so it seems only fair that you introduce yourself. Because right now I've been calling you something rather unpleasant in my head."
The boy frowned, but he complied nonetheless.
"Sunless."
Elizabeth raised a brow at that and smiled slightly.
"Well, Sunless. Ironic that you ended up in a place without a single trace of light. Must have been fate."
Sunless rolled his eyes as he looked at her.
"I'd prefer if you called me Sunny."
Elizabeth nodded, her expression turning more serious.
"Well then, Sunny. We might be stuck together for a while in this hell, so let's lay out what we can and can't do, so we know what we're working with."
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We reached 60k words! Yay.