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The Mists whistled and howled like a thousand tea kettles, the deafening cacophony battering Adalai worse than any physical thing he’d seen along the Drownway. He wished he was back in the vacuum of Marta’s shield. It took several seconds before he realized the Mists were actually speaking to him. The discordant shrieks did a good job of obscuring the more sibilant sounds and the words had a breathy quality that made picking out individual syllables more difficult than it should have been. But there were definitely words in there.

Adalai Carpathea, the Mists howled. Have you at last come to return what was taken?

“I don’t have anything of yours,” he yelled, spinning around and trying his best to locate exactly where the voice was coming from. The mist deadened the sound and made his hearing unreliable.

Not so, not so, the voice hissed. Once you have evaded us and twice you have stolen yet you come to us now and plead ignorance. No more! Return what is ours and we may yet forgive the rest.

The tone and cadence of the voice changed from one statement to the next and Adalai briefly wondered if the ‘we’ the Mists spoke of was a royal we or something more concrete. It wasn’t that important, though. So instead he turned about, trying to locate the rest of his group. Whether by chance or by deliberate design it turned out that there was no sign of Cassian or Marta, or even the Benthic. He did catch a brief glimpse of a winding, serpentine form that might have been the Linnorm, although whether that meant Verina was nearby or the spirit was just visible through the obscuring vapors the Mists had conjured was an open question.

There was also a possibility the Mists were, in fact, a dragon themselves. That was something he didn’t want to think about.

Do not think you can deceive us, Adalai Carpathea. The voice had shrunken to a whisper. We can smell on you the touch of the Mist. You pollute it and us with your filthy, mortal flesh and we will have it from you. From all of you. It never should have been given to the likes of man.

The image of the glass box came to his mind like a thunderclap. At the same time he remembered the moment, just before he was sent to Nerona, when he had met with the King of Stars. It couldn’t be that simple, could it?

Adalai slowly reached into his bag, digging for the box, as his mind cast about for a way to stall. “Why do the great Mists in the Deep show so little charity? Certainly it is a small thing to spare for the low and mortal-”

It is your very mortality that offends! The voice returned to full shriek. Why should the life of Mist Eternal be shortened to that of vanishing mortals, creatures that pass into Eternity with nothing to their name, not even their very flesh? We were made for so much more than this!

“Well if it’s Eternity you’re concerned about you could just ask the Kings directly,” Adalai said as his fingers closed around cool glass. It was the wrong thing to say.

A wave of sound crashed over Adalai, knocking him down. It was impossible for him to describe what he heard, the sheer volume of noise battering his ears into uselessness. He felt, rather than heard, the cacophony. On the other hand he still heard everything the Mists had to say, as strange as that might be.

The Kings, you say? Nothing more than mortals who have strayed from the very things that made them special. They should have known their place. What have they done instead? Meddled with the order of things, taken and returned on their own whim and doomed those such as you to suffer the trials of life far longer than is just or proper.

Adalai flailed his free hand about, trying to find purchase to get to his feet again. To his consternation he discovered there weren’t any solid surfaces anywhere around him, not even in the direction he had thought of as ‘below.’ Was he lost in a vision again? It would explain why he hadn’t seen or heard from the others since breaking the stone knot.

Not that he was hearing very much at the moment.

“I’m not that upset about the trials of life at the moment,” Adalai said, trying to feel the words as they rolled off his tongue. Hopefully the Mists could understand him regardless of how his words sounded. He pulled out the box and held it aloft. “If taking and returning is what really bothers you I don’t know why you want this back so bad.”

The pounding pulse of the Mist’s rage faded away, replaced with a chilling sense of malicious attention. What have you done to it?

“Nothing. It was like this when I found it. What makes you think I did anything to it?”

Adalai could practically feel a watching eye boring into him from somewhere in the Mists, moving around from in front to behind him like a stalking tiger. It is constrained. Unnatural. You have perverted our nature. Set it free.

“It was like this when I found it. I have no idea how it got in here or how to get it out.”

It is your crime that has imprisoned it. The voice grew softer and softer, setting Adalai’s hair on end. You must set it free.

The box didn’t have a lock but it did have a latch, a small silver flange that swung down over a little post. Opening it wasn’t exactly difficult. On the other hand, whatever was speaking on behalf of the Mists didn’t seem to understand the lives of so-called “mortals” very well. Perhaps that was enough to thwart it.

On the other hand, perhaps it needed permission to take what it wanted.

“If it was really yours, why do you need me to set it free?”

It was stolen. The voice spoke as a parent to a particularly stupid child. It must be returned.

Adalai studied the box, wondering if his new intuition was correct. Cassian hadn’t been able to see the mist within, which suggested it wasn’t a normal mist. Shortly after handling it he’d seen the King of Stars in a vision. The King claimed that vision was an omen yet it wasn’t a sign of things to come, which was the generally accepted nature of omens, but rather a vision of things that had been. The explanation didn’t seem to explain.

On the other hand, the scrying pool that showed Adalai the vision was tied to the Mists in the Deep and the King spoke as if the Mists were at least somewhat aware of his presence. Had that forced the King of Stars to speak in riddles? What had he really been trying to say?

Most of all, why did the mist in the box seem familiar? Was it because he’d looked into the scrying pool and his Gift of Arms had allowed him to pick up some sliver of intention from the Mists in the Deep?

Or was it because he had seen this mist before? Not just anywhere, but in the hands of the King of Stars when he was offered a second chance at life?

Adalai looked up from the box and swept his gaze across the fog surrounding him. “Are you certain you want this?”

Certain? If he’d been hoping the Mists would show some sign of hesitation he was disappointed. Why would I question my desire for what is mine?

“Because it’s not yours. It’s not even a mist.” He flipped the latch open, lifted the lid and reached to take the Gift within. “It’s a cloud.”

When the King of Dreams gave Adalai the Gift of Arms he hadn’t really noticed much change at first. It had taken months of practice before he was able to make much sense of it. The Gift of Clouds was the opposite. As soon as the cloud merged with his hand Adalai became aware of the mists surrounding him, feeling them drift and turn almost as if they were a large, lightweight head of hair.

Except he could feel them. It was like every drop of mist was a raw nerve and a thrumming muscle, waiting for him to direct them. It was overwhelming. For a brief moment he hesitated and, in that moment, the Deep struck.

There was something malevolent among the mists, something seething with fury, burning hot and demanding control. It was the Deep, truly, but had nothing to do with the mists. They did fear the Deep, however, and as it moved they fled before it. Perhaps the Deep had hoped that Gift would give it the control it desired, perhaps it just resented others having control over what it delighted in terrifying.

The mists whipped around Adalai, panic and dread spreading through them and reaching their fearful tendrils towards him as well.

“Enough hiding.” Adalai spread his hands apart and called the clouds to himself. The mists rolled together into tighter and tighter clumps until they were nothing more than a pile of woolly mounds around his feet. All around him was a dark and empty void. The only other thing present was a single eye.

It was as huge as a house and yellow, with an odd, rectangular red pupil that stared with fiery intensity. It gazed at him from the same plane at first. Then it lifted itself higher and higher, rising up to reveal a strange, insectoid face over a mouth with flat, grinding stone teeth. The Deep was far greater than anything Adalai had ever seen.

His heart hammered at his ribs wildly, as if it could burst free of his chest and flee from that stare. His grip on the mists slipped and the clouds began to billow up again. His legs felt weak and tried to back away from the soul shaking figure before him but there was nothing to stand on. No place to find purchase.

You should not have looked. The Deep continued to rise higher, sending him tumbling further and further down. Now you will die and another will return what was stolen from me.

“Clouds don’t hide the depths,” Adalai stammered. “They hide the sky.”

The Deep’s single eye blinked slowly, as if it failed to understand. At the same moment, far above it, seven points of light glimmered into the void.

Adalai had a hard time following what happened next, not only because it happened so quickly but because the scale was so vast. One second the Deep’s head was slowly turning upwards. The next a spinning galaxy in the shape of a man, a crown of seven supernovas on its head, crashed into the Deep. The King of Stars beat the Deep with meteoric fists. The Deep struck back, wrapping his starry body in serpentine limbs burning with deep, red fury and dragging the two of them down.

The clash unleashed a horrifying shockwave that blinded Adalai. His ears, still ringing from the Deep’s previous screaming, were battered once more. Crushed under the weight of unfathomable battle raging around him he felt his consciousness slipping away. By all rights, that should have been the end of him.

So he was quite surprised to open his eyes and find himself surrounded by jagged shards of stone, lying on a still warm chunk of the ocean floor, his eyes and ears once again working normally. Instead of clashing cosmic forces he heard Cassian shouting orders as Trill’s Benthic gathered up water from the sea floor.

The Mists in the Deep may be dealt with but that was only the beginning of their troubles. Adalai grasped around until his hand fell on the hilt of a sword and he dragged himself to his feet.