"You're examining old Miru?"
He turned. An old woman had stopped her vendor cart on the bridge just above the dock, watching him with mild interest. She sold dried fish and battered fish in paper parcels, with plenty of salt and vinegar sprinkled over the top. They had tried it on the first day and it was decent enough.
"Is that its name?" Law said.
"Was its name. She has been coming to this dock for thirty years. Everyone around here knows her." The old woman looked at the Yagara. "She will not be here much longer."
Law looked back at the animal.
"What's wrong with her?"
He already knew the answer from the basic diagnostics he had run, but hoped she might have something better to add.
"Nothing is wrong with her." The old woman answered as she began sorting through her own work. "She is old. That is all. When Yagaras reach this point they stop eating, stop working the canals, and start drifting. Then one morning they are simply gone."
"Gone where."
The old woman paused and looked at him properly for the first time, taking in the small serious face looking up at her from the dock.
"Tsui Village," she said. "That is what they say around here. It is the place where Yagaras go when their time comes. Said to be somewhere nearby, away from everyone's eyes, the final resting place for the Yagara." She went back to her parcels.
"Nobody has ever found it. Most people think it is just a story we tell so the disappearance makes sense. But the Yagaras always go somewhere and they never come back up, so." She shrugged the shrug of someone who had made peace with not knowing. "How did you know she was dying? Quite impressive for someone so young."
Law didn't answer immediately. He was looking at Miru again.
The Yagara's amber eyes were half closed, the slow rhythm of her breathing unchanged. She did not look distressed. She did not look like something that needed fixing. She just looked like she was waiting, probably for the same thing the old woman had described. Waiting to go to Tsui Village.
"Books," he said.
The old woman nodded like that was a perfectly reasonable answer and pushed her cart on.
Law stayed at the dock until the copper went out of the water and the city darkened around him. Miru drifted against the pilings and breathed slowly and Law sat with his arms around his knees and did not read anything.
Over the next few days Law spent most of his evenings outside, moving through the city and its canals while following the dying Yagara. It seemed like she was taking one last tour of the city before her time came, and as he followed her he also heard many strange stories about Tsui Village.
Each story was more absurd than the last. One claimed the place held an enormous amount of treasure because one of the drowned buildings had been the secret storehouse of a wealthy merchant who had kept all his gold there. Another said Tsui Village was a magical place that transferred the souls of dying Yagara bulls into new bodies. It all sounded absurd to him.
He continued to follow old Miru until one evening she stopped touring.
She drifted slowly into a small archway where the canal led straight into darkness. Even squinting, Law could not make out what lay inside. But there was a walkway. Narrow stone, elevated above the waterline, running along the right side of the tunnel into the dark.
Miru went through without slowing.
Law looked at the walkway, then at the water level, then stepped onto it.
The stone was solid under his feet. Damp but not slippery. He moved with one hand against the wall and followed the sound of Miru ahead of him. The light from the canal entrance was gone within twenty steps and the darkness closed in completely around him, forcing him to take tiny steps at a time to avoid falling. That would have been the end of him.
The tunnel curved. The ceiling rose. He could feel the space opening up before he could see it.
Then the walkway collapsed.
The stone simply gave way under his next step and Law dropped. He hit the water before he had time to do anything about it and the cold and the shock came together at once. He lost sensation in his arms and legs immediately, his body going heavy, sinking as though an anchor had been tied to his feet and was slowly dragging him down.
He tried to find the bottom with his feet. There was no bottom.
He had his eyes wide open and saw something almost magical beneath him. The water was lit. Faint blue-green, and in it he could see everything clearly. The streets of old Water 7, the place that had been swallowed by a great wave long ago. And through those streets, moving between the buildings with the same long unhurried rhythm Miru had carried on the dock, were Yagaras.
Dozens of them. Some drifted slowly along the old canal routes, some completely still in the doorways of submerged buildings, all of them luminous and quiet and entirely unbothered by anything above them.
He watched Miru drift down into the street below and settle among the others. But his lungs had no more to give and his consciousness went out completely.
The next thing he knew he was back at the surface, coughing.
He did not know how. One moment he was under and the next he was at the surface with the tunnel entrance visible ahead of him and the broken edge of the walkway within reach. He grabbed the stone and hauled himself up, struggling against the weight of his soaked body, and sat there with water running off him and his arms shaking from the effort of it all.
Miru was somewhere below him in the dark. He could not follow her there.
He sat until the shaking stopped. Then he got up and walked back through the tunnel and went to find Lucien.
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1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones. Please Do Support.