Chapter 9— The Iron Tomb

  The pressure wave had done more than just bruise Rowan’s ribs. It had shattered his sense of reality.

  He drifted in the silt-choked water, his lungs burning with a jagged, airless fire. Every time he tried to pull a breath, it felt like inhaling needles. He’d only been on this mission with Celeste for a few hours, but those hours had been spent watching her slowly unravel into something unrecognizable. Now, as the grey muck began to settle, he saw the final result.

  She was more like a monster and nothing like a woman.

  Rowan huddled against a jagged coral pillar, his fingers white-knuckled around the obsidian shard he’d scavenged. It felt like a toothpick against the scale of what he’d just witnessed. He watched the lavender blur move through the silt with a terrifying, frictionless speed. When she found him, her glowing eyes didn't look like eyes at all, they looked like twin spotlights cutting through the dark.

  When she reached for him, Rowan had recoiled, his heels digging into the muck. But the look on her face at his reaction made a sudden wave of guilt rush into him. She had just saved him with her own life. She hadn’t thought twice about pouncing on that Siren, risking the crushing weight of the deep to tear him away from a horrifying death, and now he was being ungrateful. He was flinching from the person who had bled for him.

  He reached out and gently took her wrist. It was trembling, a high-frequency vibration that hummed against his palm, but he didn't mention it. He only mentioned how hot her skin was. It was blistering, a dry, electric heat that made him barely manage not to flinch.

  "It is the Core," she said, her voice sounding like stones grinding together, but the look on her face said otherwise. She looked cornered, even in her victory. “We need to get to the ridges. This thing isn't dead, and I don't want to be here when she calls her friends for help.”

  They kicked upward. He didn’t know what more was waiting out there in the black, but he knew peace had long left them. Water rushed past his face, and he started to realize how breathing underwater wasn’t as simple as it had been a few hours ago. The magic Celeste had poured into him felt thin and the water too heavy.

  Celeste was going at a terrifying speed. Everything she did after that massive energy blast was either too quick or too powerful, as if she no longer understood how fragile a human was. He clenched his hand at her bicep, his fingers sinking into the dense, new muscle as he struggled to get the words out.

  “Slow down.”

  She stopped abruptly, the momentum jarring his bones. She turned to look at him, her chest heaving, the indigo blood from the cut on her cheek drifting between them in oily ribbons.

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  Rowan stared at her. He should be asking her the same. Up close, the tension in her was terrifying. She was flinching at every small sound—the settling of silt, the groan of a distant thermal vent. She looked like a weapon pulled to its limit, a bow bent until the wood began to scream.

  "I'm okay," he lied, his voice trembling. "But you... Celeste, you're shaking. You look like you're about to snap. What’s wrong?"

  Celeste hesitated, her golden eyes darting away as if searching the dark for an answer that wasn't there. Then, she let out a wet, jagged scoff. "I just leveled up." She looked down at her hands, the claws still twitching. "It sounds fucking ridiculous. But I just did, and it unsettles me so much. This body... it's even worse now."

  Rowan stared at her, the realization sinking in. That was why he’d felt her muscles densify under his grip in the blink of an eye. That was why her speed had surged into something that defied the weight of the water. To him, it was a miracle; to her, it seemed like a violation.

  "But isn’t that great?" he asked, trying to find a footing in the madness. "I mean, leveling up is good to survive in this hellhole, yeah?"

  "I guess." Her voice was small, stripped of the tectonic grate it had held moments ago. She sounded like a terrified girl trapped inside of an armour that was growing too fast for her to control.

  Rowan felt a sharp prick of shame. He was being selfish again, looking at her and seeing only the safety her new power could buy them. He wasn't thinking about the cost, the way her bones must have ached or the way her mind was being rewritten by a system she never asked for.

  "Hey," he said, reaching out to steady her despite the blistering heat of her skin. "It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay."

  Celeste didn’t look convinced. She looked like someone waiting for the next explosion. But she didn't pull away. After a long pause, he whispered, "Let’s keep going?"

  She gave him a barely-there nod and began to swim upward. This time, her movements were different. She used careful, deliberate flicks of her massive tail, taming the raw power in her fluke so the displacement wouldn't crush him. She held him with a gentleness that seemed to take more effort than the fight itself.

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  As they drifted toward the upper ridges, Rowan tried to remember something—anything—for the hundredth time. And just like every time before, he was met with nothing but blurred, disoriented pictures and echoes of voices that vanished before he could catch them. He didn't care about his roots or his family; that knowledge would only crush him now that he was trapped in this lightless tomb. He just wanted to know about the pendant. He wanted to understand the magic that kept the ocean from swallowing him whole.

  He remembered Celeste saying that remembering was the curse. He got it now. If he remembered all the good things—or maybe they weren't even that good, but nothing could truly be worse than fighting sea monsters in the dark—the realization that there was no escape plan would kill him faster than the pressure ever could. In this cursed water, the only way to survive was to forget what you were missing.

  To remember the surface was to realize how far he had fallen. To remember the sun was to admit he might never see it again. It was better to be hollow, like the abyss itself, than to carry the weight of a world he couldn't return to. Every blurred memory he tried to grasp only made the magic around him feel heavier, and the water colder. He let the images go, letting them sink back into the silt of his mind, until there was nothing left but the rhythm of Celeste’s tail and the terrifying gold light of her skin.

  The more they went, the more the uncomfortable weight in his chest increased. At first, he tried to tell himself it was just the nerves, the lingering shock of the Siren’s scream, but it had quickly moved past the stage of ignorable. It felt like a thick, invisible hand was slowly closing around his lungs, squeezing the capacity out of them.

  He looked down at his trembling arms. The golden veins that had been etched into his skin, the glowing map of the magic Celeste had poured into him, were flickering. In some places, the light had already snuffed out, leaving behind nothing but the pale, cold grey of his own flesh.

  The magic was fading and he was fucking running out of time. Every breath he took felt heavier than the last, like he was trying to inhale lead. He wanted to tell Celeste but he couldn’t burden her even more. Not after everything that just happened.

  Beside him, Celeste was acting strange again, her movements becoming jerky and frantic, her head snapping toward the dark as if she were hearing things that weren't there. She didn't have that smooth, effortless grace anymore. She twitched at every shadow like she saw a ghost.

  “You hear it too?”

  Her voice was a muffle in his head because of how loud the water was. She was moving with a frantic, jerky speed that made his head swim, her head snapping toward the dark every few seconds.

  “I can’t hear you properly if you are going to rush like that,” he grunted out. He rubbed a hand over the center of his chest, trying to massage the ache away. Fuck. It was getting worse. The water was getting worse.

  She slowed, drifting back until she was close enough that her indigo glow illuminated the panic on his face. “I asked if you hear it too.”

  “Hear what?”

  “A buzzing.”

  A buzzing? In this unforgiving water? Rowan strained his ears, but all he got was the rhythmic thrum-thrum of his own frantic heart and the oppressive roar of the currents.

  “Must be your system or something,” he wheezed. The effort of speaking made the spots in his vision grow darker.

  “No.” Her eyes flitted in all directions, the lavender slits of her pupils blown wide. “It’s not the system, I swear. It’s coming from the shelf ahead. It’s mechanical.”

  “I hear nothing other than the water, Celeste.” Rowan’s fingers dug into his own ribs. He wanted to tell her that his chest felt like it was being flattened by a ton of lead, but he didn't have the breath to spare. “I hear nothing... and where the fuck are we going.”

  “We need to get there,” she said, her voice tight and clipped. She didn't look at him. She was focused on a point in the dark that he couldn't see, her body angled forward like a spear.

  “Get where? It’s getting fucking— hard to breathe.” Rowan’s voice broke on the last word. The golden light on his chest was now just a faint, shivering ember. The weight was no longer just a pressure but a blockade in his throat.

  Celeste didn't answer him. She simply lunged forward, and dragged him toward a massive, jagged fissure in the trench wall, a gap so narrow it looked like a wound in the earth.

  “Celeste, wait— I’ll fucking die!”

  The water didn't carry his voice this time. As they entered the fissure, the magic was almost dead.

  The silence that followed was terrifying. It was the silence of the deep. Rowan’s shoulders slammed into the cold basalt, and the impact sent a jolt of pure, unadulterated pain through his frame. Without much magic to cushion him, the rock felt like a blade. The cold was the next thing to hit. A bone-deep chill that felt like it was freezing the marrow in his spine.

  He tried to gasp, but his mouth only filled with the metallic tang of the abyss. He was drowning. He was actually, truly drowning.

  Then, his feet hit something that didn't give. It was flat. It was hard.

  The hollow, metallic clank vibrated through the soles of his feet. Celeste was already ahead of him, her claws screeching against a massive circular wheel of a hatch. She looked even more terrifying in the dark, her indigo blood casting a ghastly, flickering glow against the rusted iron hull of a structure that shouldn't have existed.

  She hauled the hatch open with a guttural scream of effort. The water rushed in, dragging Rowan with it as she shoved him into a cramped, dark airlock. She scrambled in behind him, the hatch slamming shut with a heavy, final thud that echoed in the tiny space.

  For a heartbeat, there was only the sound of their frantic, underwater thrashing. Then, a mechanical groan shuddered through the floor. The pumps.

  Rowan felt the water level drop. It retreated from his hair, his eyes, his nose. The moment his mouth cleared the surface, his body reacted with a violence he wasn't prepared for.