Chapter 21 #2
The betta-mer is not fighting for survival—she's fighting for the chance to be seen, to be loved.
Oona throws her head back and laughs, the sound bouncing off the glass walls, amplifying its cruelty until it seems to shake the very foundations of the cavern.
"Love," the witch mocks, her voice dripping with contempt.
"You mers are all the same. You trade your souls for revenge, for power, for vanity.
And when the bill comes due, you weep about love. "
Oona swims closer, her body displacing the water with sickening slowness.
Her barbels writhe like serpents tasting the air.
"I have fed on the regrets of a thousand mer.
I have watched brothers poison brothers over a scrap of territory.
I have witnessed mothers selling their young for a handful of pearls. You are no different."
The witch's words confirm my darkest suspicions. She actively feeds on the destruction of our kind, nourishing herself on our suffering.
Mira straightens her spine despite the pain it clearly causes her.
"I learned my lesson the hard way," she says, her voice ringing with newfound clarity.
"I broke free from the Council's rigid control.
I finally see the world for what it is. But you?
You are truly evil. You sit in the dark and prey upon the desperate, offering false hope while feeding on their despair. "
I swim forward and grip Mira's arm, pulling her back as Oona's face twists into an expression of pure malevolence.
I turn, my body shielding Mira from the witch's sight. "We are leaving," I declare, the words carving through the water. "There is nothing for us here."
Oona's smile is a gummy crescent in the gloom. "Yes, swim away, little fish." Her voice is a wet, slithering thing. "You should have died from the potion. Your very breath is an insult."
Her attention travels over Mira. "Ten years, perhaps? If you're lucky," Oona purrs, relishing the cruelty. "The Abyssal Draught is a gift that keeps on taking. You are already a ghost, waiting for the shell to crumble."
A fire ignites in my gut, hot and immediate. My pupils expand, swallowing my irises as my vision sharpens.
"You parasitic growth," I snarl, the sound cracking the silence like a whip. It rattles the rows of glass prison-trophies on the shelves.
Oona's chin lifts, a challenge in her milky eyes. "And what will you do, beast? Kill me? Prove her right?"
My muscles bunch, a coiled spring of fury. Every instinct screams to lunge, to tear, to feel her life cease between my teeth.
But I hold fast, a dam against the torrent of rage.
"Karma is a current far stronger than you," I rumble. "And I... I do not need to be the hand that drowns you."
"But I do," Mira whispers, her voice a sliver of ice.
I glance down.
The frailty is gone, replaced by a terrifying clarity in her eyes. She is a flicker of movement, a flash of gray skin.
She lunges, not at Oona, but at a shelf of glowing blue concoctions. Her hand closes around a heavy vial.
With a scream that is equal parts pain and triumph, she hurls it against the central pillar of the cavern.
It detonates.
A violent, sizzling bloom of white foam erupts from the impact point, a cloud of chemical rage that dissolves the very water around it. The acrid scent of burnt magic fills the space.
Oona shrieks, a sound of genuine terror, her silver mirror clattering to the floor.
"My work! You fool!"
Mira is already moving. She sweeps an entire row of jars from a low shelf. Glass shatters. Preserved organs, strange floating appendages, and foul-smelling brine erupt into the water, a chaotic soup of stolen lives.
"Stop!" Oona screeches, scrambling forward like a crab. Her fingers latch onto Mira's shoulder, digging in with a sound that makes my heart drop.
Mira screams.
My arm shoots out, a blur of motion. I grip the loose, clammy flesh at the nape of Oona's neck and wrench her backward.
I throw her, sending her crashing into the far wall of the cave with a sickening crunch.
A small shower of brittle bones and dust cascades from the impact point.
Mira gasps for breath, a raw, ragged sound, but her eyes are burning. She turns to me, a wild, unhinged grin splitting her face.
"She doesn't know," the words tear from her throat, a trembling finger stabbing the air. "She's no alchemist. No Witch. Just a greedy, soul-sucking con artist sitting on a hoard of stolen shine. I used to want to be like her—like Vaelis, Thalos, Persephone with the perfect hair—"
"I don't understand," the words leave me in a rush.
Her eyes are wild.
"I'm an old betta-mer who paid for her blindness with the currency of years. But I am still Mira. And I know what real alchemy looks like."
Her hand clamps around a large, opaque container, its surface etched with faded symbols of elemental opposition.
With one last, desperate surge, she hurls it down.
This time, no light blooms. An impenetrable, oily darkness bleeds from the shattered vessel, snuffing out the witch's baubles, one by one. The world holds its breath.
Then, silence.
But I see what Mira sees. There is a subtle ripple in the black void where two opposing compounds meet, where oxygen-depleted brine meets the phosphorus-rich fluid from the shattered blue vials. Mira had orchestrated this perfectly, combining Oona's careless storage of her ingredients against her.
Then, a spark.
The precise chain reaction Mira calculated.
A tiny ember ignites in the black void, where the chemicals meet. It grows, a hungry orange flower that consumes the darkness with furious intensity.
A concussive BOOM rocks the cavern, far louder than the others—a thunderous chemical cascade that Oona could never comprehend.
The water itself seems to recoil, shimmering with a toxic, corrosive heat as incompatible elements violently bond.
I look up. A jagged crack spiders its way across the ceiling. Mira's alchemical knowledge has become a weapon of devastating precision.
"The whole place is coming down!" I roar, grabbing Mira and pulling her toward the fissure, our only escape.
From the darkness behind us, we hear a sound that is not a shriek, but a gurgle.
Oona, the witch, choking on the very air she polluted, a victim of the volatile alchemy she prized above all else.
"Wait!" Mira's voice scrapes against my grip, sharp enough to cut through the thunder of collapsing stone. Her eyes burn, fixed on a high shelf near the fissure. "I need this. This is what I need!"
She twists in my grasp, a flicker of desperate energy in her failing frame.
Her withered fingers stretch, clawing at the rock.
She snatches a human-made syringe from its perch—a cruel instrument of clouded glass and rusted metal, filled with a swirling, viscous purple that seems to absorb the dying green light of the cavern.
She clutches it to her chest like a sacred relic, her knuckles white against the glass.
"Got it," she wheezes, the words barely audible over the groaning rock.
No time for questions. I wrap a powerful arm around her waist. My tail drives us forward, a single, explosive thrust of pure force.
We shoot through the narrow fissure, the rough rock scraping against our skin, right as a slab of stone tears free from the cavern ceiling with a sound like the world ending.
We clear the gap by the length of a hand.
A deafening CRASH shakes the very water behind us. A cloud of dust and pulverized rock, a churning vortex of grey, erupts from the fissure. The force of it hurls us tumbling into the perpetual dark smog of the Silt District.
The rocks settle with a final, grinding groan. The entrance to the glowing green tomb is gone, buried under tons of solid stone, a tomb sealed from the outside.
The Trench Witch is entombed in her own ruined museum.
I check on Mira. Her breathing is a ragged, desperate rasp against my chest, but she is whole.
I lift her frail body into my arms, her weight light, and carry her through the dark, murky water toward our waiting shell.
A strange vibration starts against my chest. A faint, high-pitched sound.
Mira is giggling.
I look down. In the gloom, her face is a pale oval, but her shoulders shake with a quiet, breathless laughter. She clutches the human syringe like a dagger.
"You have completely lost your mind, old mer," I grumble, the sound deep in my chest. "Though I am not entirely sure you ever had it to begin with."
Mira wipes a tear of mirth from her milky eye, the gesture surprisingly delicate.
"I assumed there was no antidote for me," she confesses, her voice a ragged whisper that barely disturbs the water. "There is no hope for me. But with this... there is hope for an old friend."
I stop swimming, my body going rigid. I look to the strange, sharp human tool in her hands. The purple liquid within glows faintly, a sickly luminescence against the oppressive smog.
"Who?" I ask, my tone dropping low with suspicion. "Or is this a strange way of saying you're planning to poison me again?"
Mira shakes her head, a slow, deliberate movement. The manic light in her eyes softens, replaced by a look of deep, profound empathy that seems ancient and weary.
"No," she says, her voice firm despite its weakness. "I need to help someone else. Someone who has been cursed by my kind to be forgotten."