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When the Mists rolled over Cassian he readied himself for every conceivable outcome other than none. So, of course, that was exactly what he got. Other than a light coating of moisture nothing of note came out of the strange rocks at all. After several days underwater he didn’t even notice the damp anymore.

Cassian tapped Verina on the shoulder and motioned towards the Linnorm. A moment later it disappeared and Marta was able to let her shield collapse, surrounding them with breathable water again and wiping the mists away all at once. “Trill,” he snapped, pointing towards the tunnel in the chamber’s ceiling. “Let’s get up there and-”

“Adalai’s gone,” Verina said.

That was absurd. Yet when Cassian looked around he realized it was also true. A moment ago the Arminger had been right there beside him, not more than six or seven feet away, and now there was no sign of him. “Did anyone see anything?”

“He was beside me,” Burp said. “Then, when the Mists in the Deep passed between us, he disappeared.”

“Of course he did,” Verina yelled. “That’s what mist does, you overgrown fish, it makes it impossible to see.”

“Verina!” Cassian tried to stare her down but she had turned away and knelt among the rubble of the stone knot, sifting through it desperately. Frustrated he turned to Trill. “Could the Mists in the Deep have moved him somewhere else? Is that something it does?”

“I don’t know Cassian,” the Benthic captain replied. “I told you, we didn’t bother to remember much about these things. It was the King of Stars that solemnized our treaty with Nerona and changed us so we no longer had to be born of a Matriarch. We didn’t want to keep worshiping gods that made us kill our whole family just so we could hatch children.”

“You could have kept some notes so you were ready to fight one if it ever showed up.” It was an unreasonable thing to say and he knew it but he didn’t feel it was that much more unreasonable than anything else they had to deal with at the moment. “Verina, he’s not there. Get up.”

She spun about, fury in every inch of her face. “What is wrong with you?”

“I’m going to die some time in the next hour. I’d like to do something useful before then.” Because he had his gaze locked on the tunnel mouth Cassian spotted the exact moment the first Tidallais Benthic entered the cavern. It carried a spear of coral and glass and looked exactly like all the others they’d seen so far. It even had a grayish pearl in its forehead. He pointed her out to the others. “Here they come.”

“Any chance they’ll just leave when they see we broke the thing back there?” Marta asked.

“Makes it more likely they’ll stay to get even with us,” Trill said. “They don’t get anything by leaving. Their sisters would probably take it as an opportunity to kill and eat them for their failure.”

“Wonderful.” Cassian glanced around, trying to figure out the best way to deal with the coming onslaught. “Get up, Verina.”

“I cannot conjure the Great Linnorm here for long, Cassian. What do you want me to do?” The Slavic woman’s voice was slow and weary. She was still rummaging through the rubble of the stone knot but her movements were as listless as her voice.

“Marta. Build a shield. We can let the Benthic in one or two at a time and the Linnorm and I will deal with them.” He gestured to Trill. “You can keep drawing in water with the Benthic so we can breathe.”

“That won’t work for long,” Marta said. “There’s no way I can hold up that kind of shield for more than a minute or two. It would be hard enough to hold up a shield with this much water overhead and only air inside. But there’s no air here. A watertight shield with nothing inside is even worse.”

“We can put air inside,” Trill said. “The Lord of Folded Waters gave us the power to turn the tides when it created us, with that power we can turn water to air. It’s difficult but we’ve had a lot of practice. How do you think we made the air pocket under the Ursus Nest?”

Cassian allowed himself a brief smile. Their odds of living through this still weren’t good but at least he could die breathing air rather than water. “Get to it, then. Keep water in your lungs and air in ours and we’ll do the fighting as long as we can stay alive.”

“Well.” The water around the Benthic began to bubble and foam, the turbulence making Trill hard to hear. “At least we know for sure now.”

“Know what?”

“You did kill the dragon after all.”

Cassian snorted. “It only took eight of us running to our deaths to prove it. Given that I think I could have gone without the credit.”

Trill burbled laughter and bowed her head towards him. “I’m sorry you couldn’t find your brother.”

The air formed a solid, singular bubble around them and Marta raised a glowing dome over it to keep it in place. The last few drops of water gathered themselves in pools around the Benthic. Verina got to her feet and tossed a last piece of rubble aside, her tattoos sparking and sizzling as the water evaporated off of them. “What a waste,” she murmured. “Slew a dragon, defied a god and nothing to show for it at the end. The least we could have done is boiled the sea and taken the Benthic with us but I can’t sustain the Linnorm that long and there’s no liquid stone to help us along the way.”

Cassian glanced down at the floor, wondering if he could make that possible somehow. Unfortunately there was no sign of the angry red glow the tales said hinted at liquid stone, just the sparkling gleam he had seen here and there since gaining a dragon’s eyes. He suspected it was some kind of ore. He’d begun to wonder if his Gift had fused with the dragon sight and created some kind of new ability but he hadn’t had the time to explore it. It looked like he never would.

“Look on the bright side,” he said. “If we killed all the Benthic here there wouldn’t be anyone left to tell our story after we’re gone.”

“Not how I was hoping to be remembered anyway,” Marta replied.

The Tidallais had gathered themselves into a phalanx a dozen strong and now they swooped down towards the seven of them, brandishing their weapons. Cassian glanced at their Shieldbearer. “How many of them can you keep out?”

Before she could answer Verina cut in, saying, “Let them all in.”

Cassian flexed his fingers, setting his daggers and sword floating as he calculated the odds. Even with the Linnorm, twelve against eight was difficult. It turned out the Tidallais evened the odds for him, splitting into two groups moving in opposite directions. Half of them continued towards Marta’s dome, the others spun around and headed back up towards the cavern entrance at top speed.

He wasn’t sure what they were doing but there were more pressing matters to deal with. Marta did as asked and let the Benthic through her shield, doing her best to keep the water out when she let them in. She succeeded, to a certain extent. The Tidallais had gathered some of the ocean under their sway before they passed through her barrier and they managed to get that through but the rest of the sea remained outside. They flopped through the shield a few feet above the ocean floor and charged as soon as they picked themselves up.

Cassian immediately chose four of them and sent a blade flying at each. One dodged, another batted his sword aside, his aim was off on a third and the dagger glanced off the coral and carapace armor she wore. The last dagger slammed home in its target’s throat.

Two of the remaining Benthic threw boulder sized orbs of water at him and he scrambled, getting clear of one before the other slammed him into the rock below. He lay there, head swimming, then webbed hands grabbed him and hauled him to his feet. Burp and Trill were helping him up as the other two Stellaris reclaimed the water that hit him. As he was dragged out of the way the Linnorm appeared and swept in.

Cassian had always assumed that having two necks and two heads to keep track of must have been a huge liability in battle. Clearly that was not the case. One of the Linnorm’s heads focused on the Tidallais, blasting a constant stream of fire at the fishy creatures that they warded off with their rapidly dwindling water supply. The trapped sea boiled and foamed, filling the dome with steam.

One of the Tidallais Benthic used the clouds as cover, moving out from behind the water wall and throwing a smaller globe of the liquid at the Linnorm. However the second head spotted it and evaporated most of the projectile with a snort of flame. Cassian stretched out with his Gift, whipped his sword off the ground and plunged its point through the attacker’s side. The Benthic dropped to the ground, thrashing.

In spite of the way the numbers had turned against them the Tidallais pressed forward, their supply of ocean dwindling as the Linnorm wore away at it. Cassian retrieved his sword and daggers. He took a traditional dueling stance, allowing his extra daggers to drift along beside him, and advanced in tandem with the Stellaris to meet them. The translation pearls apparently didn’t work without water as a medium. However Trill still made her intentions clear with a flexing of her jaws and chopping gesture with one hand.

Cassian nodded and shouted, “Hold the flame!”

The Linnorm’s mouth snapped shut and the heat died away; then the five of them charged the four Tidallais, meeting in a brief, sharp melee. Cassian let Trill’s troops go first, using his Gift to sling daggers at calculated moments, tipping fights in their favor one by one. Forty seconds later, all the Tidallais were dead.

Cassian lowered his blades, breathing hard, and took stock of the situation. The Great Linnorm shimmered overhead, transparent but still close enough at hand to instantly join the fray once things started up again. Verina’s bound spirit was clearly the best asset they had to hand. Yet her ability to use the two headed menace was entirely dependent on keeping it dry, or at least mostly dry. He glanced at Marta. “How much longer?”

The Hexton woman had a thin sheet of sweat forming on her face, her breathing steady and deep like a laborer dragging a heavy load. “A while.”

“How long is a while?”

“Longer than soon. I don’t know, Cassian, I’ve never had to hold something like this so long and there’s strangeness going on up there. It feels like we’re stuck in a storm.”

Cassian looked up, wondering what she was talking about. He discovered that the six Benthic that remained outside their air pocket had been joined by others, bringing the number up to at least ten. They swam in a large, vertical oval. One end of the shape was near the middle of the chamber the other was at the tunnel entrance overhead. Each Benthic seemed to be throwing something at the tunnel as they swam past.

There was something coming down from the passage, too, something that glimmered in his dragon sight. He scowled. “What are they doing?”

A cool touch rested on the side of his head, startling him, and Cassian looked down to find Trill had come close and connected their heads with a tunnel of water. She placed her translating pearl in the water and said, “The ocean eats the stone. It is our way of shaping rock. Soon they will have weakened it enough that the Matriarch will be able to come through.”

“How long will that take?”

The answer, as Marta might say, was soon. Although her shield kept them separate from the shockwave Cassian could still see it buffet the Tidallais when the chamber’s ceiling caved in. A huge hand had broken through there. It withdrew and an equally enormous head pushed into the new opening.

It was a strange mix of human and eel features with eyes far larger in proportion to its skull and an underbite so pronounced Cassian briefly thought the creature was injured somehow. Fronds and tendrils as thick as bundled hay drifted through the water behind it. Its huge hands clawed at the opening, tearing more and more of the stone away as the Matriarch dragged its bulk further into the cavern. A score or more additional Tidallais swarmed in around her.

Cassian heaved out a deep breath and readied himself for the next assault, once again taking stock of his allies and their situations. As his eyes swept through the bubble he noticed the steam drifting past. Or not drifting, per se, but all gathering together at the center of the bubble, where the stone knot had been. It settled until it formed a shallow pool, rippling and churning like a storm about to burst.

Then the mists parted and Adalai stood up from among them, a strange, bronze sword in one hand, and the mists rose up behind him…