26. Artemis
ARTEMIS
Arthur slammed into Hadrian again, stone cracking under the impact, and my heart lodged somewhere behind my ribs and refused to move.
I couldn’t just stand here and watch.
I tried. I really did. But every hit Arthur took felt like it landed in my own body, and standing there screaming his name was not going to save him. My brain did what it always did when terror crested too high.
It grabbed for information.
The journal thumped against my back as I ran, dodging the edge of the fight, the hiss of fire, the echo of claws on stone. I was suddenly very glad for my water-resistant leather pack.
I ducked behind a fallen column, ripped the book free, and flipped it open with shaking hands.
Please. Please. Say something useful.
The language blurred at first. Ink and symbols and half-poetic nonsense that felt designed to keep its meaning just out of reach. I skimmed hard, skipping anything that felt like ritual or genealogy, hunting for structure. For patterns. For cause and effect.
Something slammed into the wall behind me. I flinched, crouched lower, and forced myself to keep reading.
I remembered something I had read previously.
Power is never born, only moved. The heart directs the current.
My pulse roared, and I looked up.
The thing chained at the center of the chamber shifted.
Its monstrous form rippled, shadows folding inward, jaws dissolving into smooth planes. The chains tightened, groaning, and the shape resolved into something almost human. Tall. Luminous. A body made of flowing water and pale light, features just wrong enough to trip every instinct I had.
It was uncannily beautiful. It was goddamn terrifying.
It turned toward me.
Arthur roared as Hadrian drove him back again, blood spraying across the stone.
I didn’t think.
I ran.
The entity watched me approach, its surface rippling like a disturbed reflection. When I stopped at the edge of the dais, it tilted its head, studying me with eyes that did not blink.
“What do you want?” I demanded, my voice shaking despite everything.
Its mouth opened, and the sound came from inside my skull instead of the air.
What do you offer?
My stomach dropped. I fumbled the journal open again, scanning desperately, flipping pages too fast to read properly. Words leapt out at me in fragments. Exchange. Balance. Memory. Cost.
Arthur cried out.
I looked up just in time to see Hadrian slam him into a pillar, Arthur’s wings flaring as he barely kept his footing.
I wouldn’t lose him. I wouldn’t.
Then it clicked.
The Atlanteans had not fed it gold or blood. They hadn’t worshipped it. They had fed it knowledge.
I dropped the journal.
It hit the stone at the foot of the dais with a dull thud.
“I offer this,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt. “Knowledge forgotten. Systems lost. The truth of what you were used for.”
The entity went still, then its chains rattled softly. The voice slid through me again, intimate and cold.
I shall give you knowledge in exchange for knowledge. Do you accept the deal?
Every alarm in my body screamed. But Arthur’s blood was on the floor. I didn’t have time.
“Yes,” I said, holding out my hand.
Light swallowed me, invading my senses.
Information slammed into my mind in cascading layers. Images. Diagrams. Flowcharts of water and stone, pressure and current. I gasped as the world fractured into systems, every channel suddenly visible, every wall buzzing with purpose.
I didn’t realize I was floating until the ground vanished beneath me.
I fell back hard, breath ripping out of my lungs, vision swimming.
The water from the previous chamber was still pouring in, but now I could see the channels carved into the stone, directing the flood into two massive mechanisms tucked into the corners of the room. Turbines, crude but brilliant, spinning faster as the water surged.
Electricity prickled across my skin, and I tasted salt from the water that splashed onto my face.
I scrambled to my feet, hair lifting, static snapping faintly at my fingertips.
“They had power,” I whispered. “They studied hydrology. They knew how to move energy.”
I looked at Arthur.
“Punch the wall,” I yelled. “Anywhere. Now.”
He hesitated for half a second, confusion flashing across his dragon’s face, then he turned and drove his hind leg through the stone.
Saltwater exploded into the chamber.
I felt it instantly. The change in conductivity. The way the air shifted.
“Keep fighting,” I thought into his mind, already climbing the nearest pillar, hands slipping on wet stone as I hauled myself up. “Don’t let him near the turbines.”
Arthur moved like he was tethered to my thoughts, trading blow for blow with Hadrian as I climbed higher, watching the water rise, calculating angles and timing with terrifying clarity, thanks to my AuDHD brain.
The turbine sparked.
“Arthur, fly to the ceiling. Now.”
He launched upward without hesitation.
Hadrian lunged, claws catching Arthur’s leg for a split second.
Arthur kicked hard.
Hadrian fell, hitting the water just as the flow reached the turbine.
Lightning tore through the chamber.
Hadrian convulsed, body arching, the electricity dancing across his scales in a brutal, blinding web. For one terrible second, he looked like a living storm.
Then he went still.
The water calmed, and silence crashed down around us.
I sagged against the pillar, lungs burning, heart hammering so hard I thought it might split me open.
Arthur landed hard on the dais, eyes flying to me.
I slid down the stone and stumbled toward him, shaking all over.
He shifted.
“It’s not over,” I gasped. “The water’s still rising. We need to stop it.”
The entity loomed behind him. The form it wore rose taller than the dais, elongated and wrong, as if someone had taken the idea of a body and stretched it past usefulness.
Its surface looked like liquid stone shot through with light, veins of slow-moving luminescence pulsing beneath something that was neither skin nor scale.
Where a face should have been, there were only impressions.
Hollows suggesting eyes. A mouth suggested by a fissure that never quite closed.
It was restraint made visible, power compressed into a shape that could be bound.
The chains were everywhere now. Coiled around its torso, looped through its limbs, anchoring it to the stone in half a dozen places. They glowed faintly, runes biting deep, holding it in place not by strength alone but by agreement. By rules older than either of us could comprehend.
The entity did not strain against them; it simply watched patiently, as if it knew time would finish the work for it.
“We have to trade again,” I said, fear clawing up my throat. “The water won’t stop without another exchange.”
Arthur stepped closer to me, placing himself between me and the thing without even thinking.
The water lapped at the edge of the dais.
And the entity smiled.