Chapter 8
Everything in my ocean belongs to me.
I’d been sitting with that for hours. Or what I assumed were hours, since there were no clocks on this ship, no windows in any traditional sense, just the shifting glow of the walls pulsing their slow, patient rhythm.
I’d eaten more of the purple fish. Drunk more water.
Sat on the couch and stared at the translucent partition where the creature’s half of the ship flickered with deep blue light, and I’d turned that sentence over in my head until the words stopped meaning anything.
His ocean. I was in his ocean. Did he think that made me his property?
I fell asleep at some point. I didn’t mean to.
My body just decided to shut itself off, and I woke up curled on the couch with a crick in my neck and no idea how much time had passed.
Through the translucent sections of the hull I could see darkness outside.
Wherever we were, it was night, and the ship’s glow was no longer competing with daylight.
It was beautiful.
The ship came alive in the dark in a way that daylight had muted. Every surface pulsated and shimmered, patterns of light cascading in slow waves that moved from bow to stern, cycling through shades of blue and violet. It looked like the inside of a living thing. It looked like being swallowed.
Then I felt it.
A shift in the ship’s movement, a subtle downward tilt and the hum of the engines changing pitch.
And then a sound, soft and enveloping, like the hull was pressing through something that resisted and then gave way.
And beyond it, water. The sound of water everywhere, rushing along the hull in a muffled roar that vibrated through the floor and into my feet. We were sinking.
My heart rate spiked. I stood up too fast, but I barely registered the pain because the ship was going down, into the ocean, the dark water closing over us, and through the translucent hull I could see the surface receding above us, a shimmering silver ceiling getting farther away as we plunged deeper.
Do not be afraid.
“Easy for you to say,” I said, and my voice cracked on every word. “You belong here.”
The ocean opened up around us. Through the hull, now glowing at full intensity against the dark water, I could see it. Not everything, the ocean was vast and deep beyond anything I could measure, but enough.
Light everywhere. The same living glow as the ship but scattered across the ocean in every direction.
Structures rose from the depths below us, massive formations of coral and crystalline stone, all of it threaded with veins of light that moved in patterns I almost recognized.
Schools of creatures I had no names for swept past the hull in shimmering clouds, their bodies flashing with their own internal glow, moving in synchronized formations that broke and reformed around the ship.
And in the distance, between the towering coral structures, shapes moved. Large shapes, with tentacles.
I could see them in the distance, their silhouettes drifting between the formations, massive and slow, tentacles trailing behind them in long spiraling arcs. Some carried their own bioluminescence. Others were dark against the glow, visible only by the shadows they cast.
I pressed my good hand against the hull and stared.
My breath fogged against the translucent surface.
An entire civilization was out there in the dark water, a world that had existed long before I fell into it and would exist long after I was gone, and I was watching it through the skin of a living ship. What are they?
Ishka.
I frowned. “What?”
The word sat in my head, offered without context. A name? A place?
“Is that what your species is called? You’re the Ishka?”
No. I am Ishka. The Leviathan.
He paused, and then:
We are the Veylith.
What is the Leviathan?
King.
The ship started filling with water.
Pores I hadn’t noticed widened across every surface, and water began streaming in through a thousand tiny gaps, pooling on the floor, rising fast. It reached my ankles in seconds. My knees in seconds more.
“What—“ I backed away from the wall. Tripped over the couch. Caught myself with my bad hand and the pain ripped a sound out of me that was half shriek, half gasp. “What’s happening? What are you doing?”
The water hit my waist, then my chest.
I took the deepest breath my broken ribs would allow and the water closed over my head.
The tentacles came from everywhere. From the walls and the floor, from somewhere behind me.
Thick and powerful coils that wrapped around my arms and torso.
I couldn’t see past them. They blocked the light, turned the water into a wall of dark muscle and smooth bumpy skin.
I was engulfed. The tentacles tightened, not crushing but securing me and I felt myself being pulled.
I fought. Every survival instinct I had left fired at once and I thrashed against the grip, clawing at the tentacles with my good hand, accomplishing absolutely nothing.
I was a child fighting a current. The tentacles didn’t even tighten in response.
They just held, patient and enormous, and carried me through the water.
My resistance was so negligible it didn’t register.
They carried me out of the ship and into the open ocean.
The cold hit me first, not freezing but cooler than the ship’s interior, alive with current and motion.
Then the scale. The ocean stretched in every direction, fathomless, and the bioluminescent city I’d glimpsed through the hull was here, all around me, massive beyond comprehension.
Coral towers rose hundreds of feet from the ocean floor, threaded with gold and blue light.
Spiraling formations that looked grown rather than built clustered between them.
Veylith moved in the distance, shapes the size of buildings, tentacles trailing like banners.
My lungs were on fire. My vision going gray at the edges. I’d been holding my breath for thirty seconds, maybe forty, and the tentacles were still pulling me through the water, deeper, faster, toward a structure that loomed ahead of us like a mountain.
A palace. That was the only word for it. Massive, built from coral and crystal. Archways the size of hangar doors opened into its interior. The tentacles carried me through one of them and into a space so vast the walls disappeared into azure darkness.
I felt myself passed between grips. Shapes moved around me in the dark water, other Veylith I thought, smaller ones, moving fast. Something pressed against my mouth.
A tube, rigid, organic, forced between my lips before I could clamp them shut.
I gagged. The tube pushed deeper and I felt something flow into my lungs.
The flesh of my neck opened on the right side of my throat, and water rushed into the wound.
I fought. I kicked and thrashed and screamed around the tube in my mouth and nothing came out but bubbles.
The tentacles held me. I couldn’t see who was doing this or why, and I was so far past terror that my body had looped back around to something almost calm, a flat white static place where nothing made sense and I stopped trying to make it.
The burning spread outward from my lungs and down through my ribs, and I felt bones move, not break but move, realigning and fusing in ways that sent dull rolling waves of pressure through my torso.
My hand. My shattered hand was on fire, the fingers straightening, the knuckles cracking and resetting, and the pain peaked so hard my vision went completely white.
I passed out.