Chapter 35 #2
We are not fish. We are Void-born. Children of the first currents.
I take a careful breath, unwilling to insult these creatures to the point of them dragging me back into that terrible water. “I’m not exactly well-versed in Void etiquette. Where I’m from, we mostly worry about keeping our crops alive.”
The eels swirl in a synchronized dance, their bodies forming intricate patterns that seem almost ceremonial. The largest one dips beneath the surface, then emerges with something delicately clasped between needle-like teeth.
It deposits a small object onto the stone beside me: a token, no larger than Vehloria’s currency, but this is carved not from soul-imbued copper but from what appears to be bone.
Symbols are carved into it, glowing weakly with soul-light due to the amount of green algae and small barnacles attached to its sides.
I pick it up, turning it over between my fingers.
It’s surprisingly warm, like it’s been cradled against living flesh for years rather than submerged in frigid water.
There’s enough left untouched for me to make out that the runes aren’t the neat, orderly ones that adorn the academy’s archways.
These are jagged lines and spiraling curves, forming patterns that shift when I’m not looking directly at them.
Just like the soul-glyphs on Falcen’s skin.
“What is this?” I ask, running my thumb along the sharpest barnacle.
The old language, the eels answer.
I squint harder and press my thumb against the largest barnacle to break it off so I can make out more. After a brief but painful bite against the pad of my thumb that draws a bead of blood, the shell-piece falls into the water with a soft—
The eels go wild.
Writhing bodies erupt out of the water, their sleek forms thrashing with such violence that I’m sprayed across my face and cloak even as I scuttle back. The eels twist and coil around each other, their movements no longer elegant but panicked. Hungry.
“What did I do?” I gasp, clutching the token to my chest.
The eels’ collective consciousness slams into my mind with the force of a battering ram.
Blood of the ancient ones, they keen in unison. You are marked. You are known to the Void.
The largest eel surges upward, its body rising impossibly high from the water, looming over me like a striking serpent. Its crimson eyes fix on my bleeding thumb, tracking the single droplet that slides down my knuckle.
We have waited decades for one such as you.
My vision fractures, splitting into a dozen perspectives at once.
I’m seeing through their eyes, all of them, viewing myself from multiple angles: a pale-faced girl with wide green eyes kneeling beside their tank in a sodden black cloak, blue light threading through her veins in rhythm with her racing heart.
Vessel, they answer in perfect unison. Catalyst. Destroyer.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper, pressing my wounded thumb against my lips to stop the bleeding. The taste of metal floods my mouth. “What am I to you?”
The eels undulate in the water, their bodies weaving a pattern that reminds me of the way Ember moves inside me—fluid but purposeful.
Trapped.
I press my bleeding thumb harder against my lips, as if I could take back the single drop that put the eels in such a frenzy.
You carry the key, the eels chorus.
“Key?” I look down at the barnacle-crusted token in my palm. “You mean this?”
The marks you bear in your blood match those carved in bone. The door will recognize its kin.
Before I can ask what, exactly, I bear in my blood, the eels begin to sink beneath the surface, their bodies melting into the black.
“Wait!” I call, leaning dangerously far over the water. “Which door? Where?”
As an answer, a final image invades my mind. Not fragmented memories like before, but a single, coherent vision playing out in high definition.
A woman wearing an Elite uniform, tall and regal with blond hair, struggles against two Hollows dragging her toward the very corridor I seek.
Her face is familiar. She’s part of the eels’ earlier vision, and here, her eyes aren’t blindfolded, but wild with panic as she fights their grip. Despite her Elite status, she’s weak, her body trembling with exhaustion or illness, I can’t tell which.
“Not again,” she begs, her voice cracking. “Please, I’ve given everything.”
The Hollows grip her arms with bruising force, their blank faces turned to the front as they march her past the tank. She’s not fighting them anymore, not physically, but her eyes dart around with frantic intelligence, searching for escape.
Her gaze lands on something at a Hollow’s belt, a bone token identical to the one in my palm. With movements so quick they’re almost invisible, she slips it free, clutching it in her fist as they continue dragging her forward.
She pauses just long enough to lock eyes with something beneath the water’s surface. With a flick of her wrist, she drops the token into the water.
The eels force my attention away from her and thrust my mind’s eye through the corridor and down stairs that end in a massive doorway carved into the rock of the academy’s foundation.
This door isn’t made of wood or metal, but something that resembles polished bone, yellowed with age and carved with the same unsettling, spiraling glyphs as the token in my hand.
My breathing slows as the Elite woman’s last act of defiance fades out of my mind. Her eyes, light in color, flashed as she released the token, letting it sink into depths where Hollows and Veil Keepers can’t follow.
But initiates can.
She knew she was fated to go through that corridor and through the bone door, but she ensured that someone, someday, might gain forbidden access with this key.
An in-ground aquarium full of starved Void eels probably wasn’t her first choice, but it was her only one, and there was always the impossible chance an initiate might find it, even while blindfolded and their wrists chained behind their back.
I stare down at the token, where barnacles and algae have begun to crumble away, revealing more of the glyphs beneath.
I guess her plan worked.