Chapter 21
In too deep
LORIEN
He is still asleep when I leave.
The dim light filtering through the cavern casts shadows over Jude's body, softening the sharpness of him. He looks different like this. He’s unguarded, unworried, as if he has never had a reason to fight.
But I know better. I know the fire that lives beneath his skin, aware his defiance is laced through his every breath.
Yet, when he sleeps, he doesn’t fight.
And he didn’t fight yesterday. Not at all.
I allow myself one last glance, then turn away.
The ocean calls, and I cannot ignore it.
I have to make this journey for him to see if there’s something I missed the last time I was at the Temple of Helena.
I was thorough and I doubt it, but if there’s a chance that I missed the very thing that could keep Jude safe, then I cannot afford not to take it.
His aunt’s magic is still bound in him, and it’s like a whisper in the dark. I hear it when he sleeps, the subtle threat of terror that whistles through the night and brings dreams that scare men and children alike.
I should never have let the witch trick me.
I was a fool to believe that there wasn’t some loophole in the bargain she made with me, and now she’s endangered the thing I care about the most. I doubt she even cares that her victory means sacrificing the last of her bloodline, and the evil of that woman knows no limits.
The guards flank me as I move through the palace, and I dress in silence. Their eyes watch me, their hearts beating too loudly for calm men. They’re as concerned as the generals. As my advisors. And I do not care.
We walk to the deepest part of my palace, near where the ocean is quietest. I step into the water, and its cold rushes up to meet me as I sink into it and let myself catch a final breath of air. The waves close over my head and I exhale, letting the salt and silence take me as I swim forward.
There’s nothing like the pull of the sea; the way it welcomes me like it’s home. My body shifts and there’s a rightness to it, a sense of returning to what I am, and what I’m meant to be. My limbs lengthen and my muscles grow as my legs twist into the sleek power of my tail.
On land, I am a king.
Beneath the waves, I am something else. Something more.
It would take most mermen two days to travel to the temple of Helena, but I will cover the ocean faster than that.
Its ruins are deeper than most dare to go and it lies in the trench where the light does not reach, where the weight of the ocean crushes the unworthy.
It is the place where I last saw the last witch, draped in fury, her magic burning through the water like fire through oil.
My final battle.
My final victory.
The one her death has turned into my first defeat.
I push forward, my body cutting through the currents as I head east. The sea is restless tonight, the water thick with warning. Something stirs in the deep, something that does not welcome me. I feel it in the shift of the tides, the way the darkness ahead seems to breathe.
The ocean remembers blood.
And it remembers me.
The water thickens around me, heavy with things unseen. The currents whisper of old grudges, of wounds that salt alone could not cleanse. Shadows coil in the deep, shifting like they are alive, like they remember the taste of my soul and are eager for more.
This part of the ocean is not a kingdom. It is a graveyard. The bones of the drowned rest in the silt, their secrets lost to all but the sea. But not everything here is dead. Some things wait. Some things hunger.
Some things remember a debt unpaid.
And the deeper I go, the quieter the world becomes.
Above, the waters are restless, waves rolling with the wind. But here, in the fathomless dark, there is only stillness. The silence is thick, pressing in on all sides, broken only by the distant calls of unseen things.
I do not fear the creatures that dwell here.
They fear me. As they should.
But the temple is different. It’s a ruin, but it’s not a monument to the dead. Nor is it one to a fallen goddess or one who has lost her power. It is alive in ways the world does not understand. It breathes. It waits. And it does not forgive or forget.
I shed Helena’s blood here.
I should have killed her on holy ground.
I should have taken her magic for myself and committed the ultimate act of sacrilege.
I felt her power lash out, even as the light faded from her eyes. The water boiled with it, the sea screaming in protests as she started to slip into the darkness. She cursed me with what she thought was her last breath, and then she should have been gone, and I should have been left in peace.
I had my hand on her throat. Her magic burned at my skin, curling through the water in tendrils of raw, searing power, but she was losing. The light in her eyes was guttering. Another second and it would have been gone.
But something held me back. Not pity. Not mercy.
I’ve never understood what it was, but it was deeper and colder than my conviction. It didn’t belong to me and it was stronger than my will and reason.
The sea itself recoiled in that split second, as if it sensed what I did not. A shift, a wrongness, a fracture in the very order of things. Helena should have died. Instead, the water thickened, and the dark pulsed around us like a second heartbeat.
And I let her go.
She laughed as she bled, her voice raw and wet. “You think this is over?” she whispered. “You think you’ve won?”
I should have ignored her. I should have finished it.
Instead, I listened.
Her offer was simple—her life for an oath.
One sworn in blood that bound us both. I would leave her alone and her temple untouched, never setting foot in its halls again unless she was with me.
In return, she would take her vengeance elsewhere, holding back the kelpies.
The war would end and the ocean would rest.
I took the deal.
Now, as I move through the black, I wonder if she was right.
Something shifts in the current, a ripple that does not belong to me.
I slow. Turn.
The shadows here are endless, the dark thick enough to swallow whole ships, whole cities.
But I am not alone in it. The abyss breathes, slow and measured, as if something vast and unseen is waking.
A presence coils through the water, ancient and watching, its gaze pressing against my skin like a hand poised to pull me under.
There is something ahead. Something waiting.
And it does not want me to pass.
The current shifts again, stronger this time. A warning.
I do not slow this time. I’m in too deep and I cannot afford to drown in these waters. The tides threaten to consume me, and I swim against them, fighting to hold my own as their pull wraps around me and almost overpowers me.
The darkness thickens around me, swallowing what little light lingers from the world above. There is no path forward now, only instinct, only memory. The ruins are close. I can feel them.
But so can something else.
A shadow moves in the distance, too fast to track. Then another.
Not fish. Not predators.
Sentinels.
They are not creatures, not truly. They were made, sculpted from the dark places of the ocean, bound by magic older than the tides.
Their forms are ever shifting, with limbs that flicker between solid and shadow, eyes that glow like embers in the deep.
They do not think, and they do not feel.
They exist only to serve, only to guard.
And what they protect, they protect with fury carved from the abyss, with the hunger of the drowning and the cruelty of the tide.
They do not just kill; they unmake, pulling flesh from bone, thought from mind, until nothing remains but the echo of a life lost to the deep.
The first one strikes from below, a blur of movement, its shape fluid as the tide. I twist, just barely avoiding the sharpened limb—claw, fin, bone, I cannot tell. My tail lashes out, the force of it sending a shudder through the water.
It does not retreat.
Neither do I.
Another shape moves at my back. I turn too late. A strike lands, raking against my ribs, leaving a trail of numbing cold in its wake. My vision blurs for a second before snapping back into focus.
Poison.
The cold seeps in first, biting deep, numbing the flesh around the wound.
Then comes the burn, spreading through my veins like fire and frost entwined.
My body seizes, instincts screaming, but I do not let it take hold.
I force my gills wide, dragging in the current, siphoning the magic in the water into my blood.
The poison hisses against it, resisting, but I press harder.
A tremor wracks through me, and then there’s a snap, as if an earthquake inside me is breaking apart.
And then the cold is gone.
I bare my teeth, curling my claws, and lunge forward. My hand finds purchase, feeling solid flesh beneath shifting shadow, and I tear.
A sound ripples through the deep, high and sharp, like the echo of a scream.
The thing jerks back, its shape breaking apart like smoke in water.
But the others are already closing in. That sentinel vanishes into the dark, but another lunges, its body twisting in ways that defy logic, defy nature.
Its form is liquid, shifting between flesh and shadow, but its teeth, and its claws, are real.
Another comes from the side. I snatch its throat before it can land a strike, my claws digging deep, and I twist. The snap reverberates through the water, muffled but undeniable.
It writhes, its body splintering apart like ink dissolving into the sea.
But the blood—its blood—is real. It seeps into the water, curling in red ribbons, tainting the currents.
The others hesitate.
But only for a moment.
Then they surge, three, four, too many at once, a blur of movement in the abyss. A strike to my ribs. Another to my back. My tail lashes out, catching one across the midsection, sending it spiraling into the dark. But another takes its place.
They are endless.
I bare my teeth, snatching one by the arm, wrenching it forward as I drive my claws into its chest. There’s resistance and then something gives. A sharp, wet crack breaks through the ocean. It spasms in my grip, its body flickering between forms, before I rip my hand free.
The water is thick now. Too thick.
I move, but the ocean feels sluggish, as if the blood polluting it has changed it, turned it against me.
The water darkens, turning impossibly black, turning viscous, sluggish.
It clings to me, dragging at my limbs, slowing my strikes.
The blood does not dissolve as it should and instead it lingers, coiling like smoke, as though the ocean itself refuses to swallow it.
The currents shift against me, pressing down, resisting.
It is not just the sentinels that do not want me here.
It is the sea itself.
A shadow looms. A shape larger than the others.
The sentinels do not scatter, but they stop.
The silence stretches, heavier than before, and it almost swallows every last sound as it tries to consume the hum of the ocean.
The sentinels hover at the edges of the gloom, their bodies shifting, restless but waiting.
A deep, resonant beat vibrates through the water, more sensation than sound.
It presses into my bones, winding around my ribs like a warning.
The darkness ahead does not move, but it watches. It knows. And that is far worse.
Something else is coming.
I push forward, forcing myself to move despite the growing weight pressing down on me. The trench walls loom ahead, the temple ruins just beyond them.
Something ancient stirs.
I can feel it.
The sentinels shift, but they no longer attack. They drift backward, parting like a tide as the darkness ahead breathes.
My advisors were right to fear the temple.
Helena is not the only thing that never truly left.
I should have never come back.
And I might not be leaving it again.