Chapter 10 #2
"Red squad!" a Sergeant bellows, swimming toward our cluster of recruits. He’s a heavily scarred, brutal-looking veteran mer with half of his left ear missing. "You heard the Commander's order. Front and center right now. Let us see those bright colors shine."
"He stays right here with his assigned squad," Mira argues fiercely, placing her armored body directly in front of mine.
The Sergeant laughs. It is a dry, humorless bark grating against the water. "He stays exactly where I put him, soldier. Unless you want to take his place out there in the dark? Do you have any bright red scales hiding under that breastplate?"
He looks mockingly at her dull, brown-green camouflage armor. "I didn’t think so. Move your tail, Red Prince."
He reaches past Mira, grabs my bare arm, and hauls me forward out of the ranks.
"Vaelis!" Mira cries out in pure panic, trying to swim after me.
Taren quickly grabs her shoulders and holds her back. "Mira, you have to stop. You will get him executed for insubordination before the battle even starts."
I don’t look back at her tears. I let the Sergeant drag me away from the safety of the main line.
There are exactly six of us.
Six Royal Reds.
I recognize two of the other conscripts.
Kailen is a very young, terrified male from the merchant district who always painted his bright red scales to look darker and more respectable.
Elara is a striking red-haired female who used to perform acrobatic dances in the central plaza during the summer festivals.
She is weeping silently, her tears washing away into the cold.
We look at each other. There is no brave camaraderie among us. There is only a shared, silent, paralyzing horror.
We are undeniably the brightest things in the entire ocean.
"Spread your line out," the Sergeant commands coldly, his fingers jabbing toward the empty abyss. "Stay exactly twenty lengths apart. Hover precisely ten lengths above the main infantry. Make sure the enemy sees you."
Ten lengths above the shields. Ten lengths of nothing between me and the crushing dark. We are going to be floating, isolated targets.
I swim slowly out to my assigned position, my tail still moving with a mechanical rhythm.
I hover in the open water, dangerously exposed on all sides.
Far below my fins, the main army hunkers down in the jagged rocks, their dark armor rendering them invisible against the basalt.
Their heavy spears are ready to strike from the shadows.
I am nothing but a worm on a hook.
The Vanguard squad retreats into the jagged rocks far below me.
They vanish completely, melting into the shadows.
I am alone. The isolation is deafening. My fingers grip the useless knife at my side.
My knuckles turn bone white against the rusted metal.
The freezing water numbs my skin, a slow creeping death.
My racing heart pounds a bruising rhythm against my ribs.
I search the pitch black void. My golden eyes strain to find shapes in the empty water. Every floating piece of kelp mimics a jagged dorsal fin. Every shifting shadow mimics a set of jaws. The waiting is psychological torture. The Council left me here to die. The dark takes its time to claim me.
Somewhere out there in the freezing black, they are waiting for us.
The Basalt-Kin.
My heart hammers.
Kael, I send the desperate thought into the void. Are you out there?
If he’s swimming in that dark swarm, will he even recognize my face?
Or will his venom-silenced mind only register a bright flash of red in the gloom and strike on pure, feral instinct?
Maybe it would be a profound mercy if he did. Maybe it would be better if his jagged teeth finally ended this nightmare. At least then, the very last sensation in this brutal world would be a touch I recognized.
"Movement in the dark!" a high sentry yells from the upper ridge.
The terrified cry cuts through the freezing water like a thrown spear.
"Twelve o'clock! They are coming in low!"
I squint my golden eyes into the pitch black.
At first, there is nothing. Only the gray, churning shift of the heavy deep-sea waters.
Then, the shadows detach themselves from the dark. They propel themselves. They cut through the heavy water with terrifying, muscular efficiency.
Massive gray shapes emerge from the gloom. They are completely silent.
Dozens approach. Maybe hundreds.
They are not swimming in a structured, predictable military formation. They are a chaotic, swirling swarm. They are a terrifying wall of pure muscle and jagged teeth moving upward as a single, hungry entity.
My breath catches painfully in my throat.
They are horrifyingly beautiful.
Even now, while terrified out of my mind, I see the brutal, ancient elegance of their bodies. They are the honest things Kael talked about in the cave. They are the violent, undeniable truth of the deep ocean.
And my people are the fragile, glittering lie about to be swallowed whole.
"Hold the line!" the Vanguard Commander shouts from the rocks far below me. "Do not strike until they engage the red signals!"
Engage the signals. The Commander's order is a vibration of death through the water.
The order is for me.
The shark-mers close the distance with terrifying speed. They are faster than I remembered from the collapse, faster than my nightmares could conjure.
The lead shark breaks from the pack. He is a terrifying Great White, significantly larger than the rest, a monster of muscle and scar tissue.
His fins are deeply notched from a hundred territorial battles in the trench, a brutal tally of his violent life.
He angles his head upward, his heavy gray body a spear aimed at the sky.
He spots the bright red scales.
He spots me.
His flat black eyes lock directly onto mine.
There is no recognition of a shared sentient nature.
There is zero hesitation in his posture.
There is just the cold, predatory calculation of strike distance and kill speed.
He flares his gills, a sudden, terrifying flash of deep red, and accelerates straight toward my chest.
The rest of the swarm eagerly follows his lead.
The entire wall of sharks turns sharply upward, rising rapidly like a devastating gray tide to meet the six glowing red lures floating in the open water.
I don’t raise my trembling hands to defend myself.
I hover in the freezing water and watch the teeth come for me.
Come on, a thought forms, slowly closing my eyes and releasing my final breath. Just make it quick.
I wait in the crushing dark for the brutal impact. I wait for the agonizing tearing of my flesh, the final, brutal embrace of teeth.
But the fatal impact never comes.
Instead, an alien, deafening sound tears through the water.
It is a sound I have never heard in my entire life, a sound that has no place in the ocean's natural choir. It’s the horrific, earth-shattering shriek of grinding stone and tearing iron.
It sounds like the ocean floor is being ripped in half, the very bones of the world cracking under a pressure it can’t withstand.
And the terrifying noise is not coming from the swarm of attacking sharks. It’s coming from the crushing depths of the abyss. It is coming from directly behind the shark vanguard, from a place where only silence should dwell.
My eyes snap open, my heart hammering against my ribs.
The charging swarm hesitates as one. The Great White faltering in the water, breaking his perfect attack vector as his heavy head snaps around to look behind him.
The hunger in his black eyes is momentarily replaced by a raw, primal confusion. The entire wall of teeth and muscle wavers, a predator momentarily unsure of its place in the food chain.
Something colossal rises from the pitch-black abyss.
It is a towering, mountainous shape made entirely of gathered ocean wreckage.
It is a golem of the deep, a nightmare constructed from the debris of a thousand shattered ships and the bones of forgotten leviathans.
Rusted hulls of ancient surface vessels are fused together with jagged rock formations.
Torn nets and iron chains wrap around the structure like constricting serpents.
It rises slowly, impossibly, a monstrous silhouette against the deeper darkness, a phantom of the deep given terrible form.
A massive, spiraling shell drags itself up the steep side of the continental shelf. It’s a Trench Titan. An ancient Goliath Hermit the size of a central plaza spire. The beast's colossal shell is covered in petrified debris, rotting ship nets, and pieces of rusted iron.
The deafening shriek rings out again. It’s the terrifying sound of the Titan itself scraping against the basalt shelf as it climbs.
And glowing brightly from deep inside the dark opening of the shell, pulsing with a furious, electric blue bioluminescent light, is a familiar silhouette.
The terrified vanguard sharks scatter, disoriented and panicked by the water displacement caused by the Titan's sudden ascent.
The Goliath groans under its own immense weight, tilting its shell upward toward the battle lines.
And then, a lone figure shoots fast out of the Titan's glowing opening.
He is small compared to the ancient shell, but he’s still heavy and dense compared to me. He’s pale and gray. He’s covered in brutal white scars. His hair is unkempt. And he’s impossibly fast.
He shoots straight up through the freezing water, placing his broad, muscular body directly between the scattered sharks and the line of floating Red lures.
He stops. He hovers there with his heavy arms spread wide, facing down the entire shark swarm alone.
I do know that silhouette.
I do know the heavy set of those broad shoulders. I know the jagged white scar slashing across his left flank.
My heart leaps into my throat.
Kael.
He is alive.
He is right here.
And he stands between my body and certain death.
He opens his heavy jaws to roar a territorial challenge to the Great White. He prepares to vibrate the water with the dominating resonance of the deep.
But no sound comes out of his throat. He screams a bloody challenge at the swarm in absolute silence.
And in that devastating moment, watching the mer I love fight a brutal war he cannot speak to, two profound truths clarify.
First, he fled into the dark because I had unwittingly stolen his voice.
And second, I am going to murder every creature in this ocean attempting to lay a single hand on him today.
I grab the tiny, useless ceremonial dagger from my patrol belt.
"Kael!" I scream. The desperate sound tears itself from my burning throat.
He doesn’t hear me.
But he feels the displacement of the water as I dive toward him.
I cease hovering in the open water. I abandon my assigned post. I am no longer a passive, bleeding signal waiting to be consumed by the dark.
I am a descending missile.
And I am burning brighter than the sun.