Twenty Six
The first breath is not a breath at all.
It is salt, entering in a single, devastating rush, burning on the way in, flooding every hollow space behind my teeth.
The sea is so black it doesn’t even bother pretending to be water.
It feels like falling straight into the absence of everything.
I try to scream, but only muffled bubbles escape.
My body remembers drowning. From the dreams. Every cell in me is primed to thrash and fight, to claw my way up—but there is no up, and I don’t know how. There is only cold, and hands that are not hands closing over my face.
The world has always been full of noise, more so here than anywhere else: a rumbling, a humming.
The first thing I notice—before even the seeping cold and the choking—is that the hum is gone.
For the first time since I crossed the sea to the Heartlands, the Mother Shard’s power is cut off, severed from the inside of my skull.
The silence is so profound it almost makes me forget I’m dying.
I sink deeper. The water is so cold it burns at first, then numbs, then disappears altogether. My senses are reduced to a single point, the image of Kael’s hand, always reaching for me, and then, not even that. There is only the dark, the salt, and the weight of the world trying to put me to sleep.
Time slips sideways. Maybe I am already dead.
The further I sink, the less the water moves.
The ocean becomes a liquid coffin—so still I’m not sure if I’m floating or falling, or whether the water is simply parting to make room for my descent.
Light seems a distant memory. Sound becomes something only whispered about.
All my pain seems to fade, replaced by the patient chill of the sea.
The hum is still absent, so there is nothing to remind me I’m alive.
Then—impossibly far below—a faint blue-white glow opens its eye.
It is not a light in the sense of Mana, or fire, or even the sun. It is the suggestion of light: a memory of it, leaking up from the abyss. It has a colour that belongs to nothing I’ve seen before.
I do not move. I cannot move. The ocean will not let me.
But the presence in the deep begins to stir, slow and deliberate.
It is unlike anything I have ever seen or dreamed.
It is old, older than the world, and so tired it can barely carry the syllables it speaks.
The voice is not words but a pressure against my skin, a series of shapes pressed into my mind.
Child of my blood.
I shudder. I try to say no, or yes, or what are you—but I am water, and I have nothing.
The glow intensifies. It pulses once, twice.
Every beat is like a heart that has not worked for generations, pumping nothing but memories through the waters of the world.
Then, slowly, it resolves into something like a form—not one you could draw, or even one that could exist, but a succession of images blurring together all at once.
Antlers, vast and branching, fractal and endless like veins or vines, each one drenched in crystal that catches the blue-white glow.
Chasms of bone and teeth, overlapping, woven with flowers and dying light.
A body in chains, so large the water warps around it, the chains themselves made of ice or glass.
A name rises through the water.
Shardfather.
Not spoken. Remembered.
Dozens of eyes blink open one after another. They are not eyes in the human sense. Each one is like a sun in the sky, fading.
The pressure speaks again.
Not in sentences, but in fragments, each older than the last.
The world was... was... once alive.
The world was whole once... balanced.
Godhood was not divinity, but a vessel—a machine, a clock.
Every Dominion was a pulse, a vein, a promise.
The world failed as the Crowns tried to become the heart.
A Crown should not last.
A Crown should be cast off, again and again, like old skin.
Mortals cheat.
They keep their crowns to make time stop.
Before the...
Before...
The world fractured, and the god did too.
Pieces in the ocean, pieces in the land.
Creation, order, change.
The cycle corrupts itself.
The Mother starves, and the world starves with her.
She eats her children, to maintain the world.
Only for herself.
The Rites are a perversion.
I do not remember...
The word...
Defile... Defilement.
They devour.
I want to ask why I’m here. I want to ask if I’m dead.
The water around me crackles with the cold, and the chains in the deep rattle, as if my thoughts are too much even for the voice to hold.
You are the last.
Bound no longer.
Your mother was not cruel.
She remembered. She knew.
Not in her...
Not in her mind, but in her blood.
She filled herself with the wound, so the world would never know you.
So you could live.
But the Mother knows now.
The presence shudders. The presence shudders. For a moment, I see the entire skeleton chained to the ocean floor strain against its bindings, trying to move. But the chains are absolute. My grip on reality is gone. I do not know life from death.
You need not win.
But you must remember.
I don’t understand, and the presence knows this.
A deep vibration travels up my bones.
You will remember what a god is.
You will remember the true count.
I imagine myself turning to ice, here in the abyss, but the presence shifts, turning its attention upward, to the surface of the water, to something far beyond my sight.
There is something else.
Something I did not expect.
I feel something for the first time since I went under: recognition. It is Kael. I know it is.
The shadow and the light. Together.
The presence laughs, low and growling, like a landslide at the bottom of the ocean.
So, the wound remembers itself.
Before I can ask, before I can even think, the silence ruptures.
The hum returns with a scream. The world above reasserts itself, a pressure so sudden and so total that it forces breath and water from my lungs.
The immeasurable cold turns to pain, and then to panic.
I am pulled up, as though rejected by the ocean itself.
I rocket through the darkness, twisting and spinning, every cell in my body trying to spit out the memory of the deep.
The last thing I hear, as the world dissolves into noise and chaos and the return of the Mother Shard’s endless humming, is a pressure behind my skull. One phrase, garbled but unmistakable:
She will fear what you become together.
Then the world is a burst of white, and I am spat back to life, the taste of blood and salt in my mouth, my body burning with the cold.
My first breath isn’t relief, only more pain—a long burning seizure as my body coughs up water, blood and memory, splattering it all over the ground. The sand beneath me is wet and sharp, glittering with the remains of obsidian shells.
Kael’s hands are everywhere—my back, my ribs, my jaw, checking for breaks, for blood, for proof I’m still alive. He shakes me once, hard, like someone trying to wake the dead. His voice is raw, torn at the edges.
“I’ve got you, little rabbit. I’ve got you.”
I try to answer, but all I can do is hack up salt and spit.
My body doesn’t know which way is up. The sky looks bruised and black, strobing occasionally with pink flares as the Mother Shard’s crown awakens above the death counter.
It’s still at fifteen. The number is pinned there, refusing to budge.
Kael’s face is close. His hair is soaked, blood streaked across his brow in a line I do not remember.
His eyes are pure black, the whites gone, but I know him—I know the worry in his jaw, the way he glances left and right, then back to me, unable to decide whether to watch the dark or give me all of his attention.
“Stay with me,” he says, voice quiet now.
I grip his forearm, nails digging into his skin, as I drag myself to my knees.
“I know what I am,” I manage to say, but it comes out as a slur, a question more than an answer. The words feel borrowed from the deep, and I do not know if I believe them.
Kael’s eyes go wide, but before he can reply, fire splits the world in half.
It happens so fast, there is no time to think—a sheet of orange-white heat barrels down the shore, carving the world into shadow and flame.
Kael’s grip tightens. He tries to shield me with his own body, but the blast tears him off, hurling him backwards into the waves. I hear him hit the water and vanish.
I am alone.
Atheron stands by a stone pillar, perfectly composed. His right arm is a ruin; the hand gone, wrist burnt to a scarred, angry stump, but he holds it up as if daring me to pity him. Fire crackles along his arm, feeding off the wound, flaring wherever he gestures.
He walks towards me with the leisurely confidence of a man who has already won.
“Pathetic,” he says flatly. “You really have ruined him.”
He crosses the beach in slow, measured steps. I try to crawl backwards, but the sand is soft, sucking at my heels, and my arms won’t cooperate. The world is still spinning, my pulse misfiring in my throat, the afterimages of the blue-white ocean light filling my head.
Atheron closes the distance and plants a foot on my chest, pinning me to the sand. He crouches, his face inches from mine. The heat of his flames is unbearable, every breath drawing fire into my lungs.
He places the burnt stump under my chin like a grotesque knife at my throat. “Did you really think you could win this? That you could matter?”
I can smell my skin burning, but not yet catching fire.
He glances out at the water, where Kael is nowhere to be seen. “I do hope the Prince can swim,” he says, almost fond. “He was always meant to be the last.”
He sounds tired of this whole affair, as if even the violence is boring now. “But you ended up being very interesting.”
His eyes rake over me before settling on my face. “A piece left over from a darker time.”