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One of the rarest Gifts given to men was the Gift of Artifice, the power to take a bit of another person’s Gift and hide it away in an object so that anyone could use it. In his brief time in Nerona Adalai had seen two such Artifacts. To the average person such a thing was indistinguishable from any other object of their kind but to someone with the Gift of Arms they were quite obvious.

The sword he’d grabbed was an Artifact.

There were other hints it wasn’t his sword as well. It was a touch heavier than his rapier, the blade was short, leaf shaped and made of bronze and his own weapon was still in its sheath. In fact, if he hadn’t been so disoriented he might not ever have grabbed it. Now that he was holding it he was more disoriented than ever.

To an Arminger an Artifact was even more complicated than a normal object, since normal stuff only picked up powerful impressions if they were used constantly by a single person for a decent period of time. If a thing changed hands the old users’ impressions faded away while the new slowly overwrote them. An Artifact contained traces of at least two people all the time, the Artificer who made it and the person who’s Gift was used to create it.

To make matters even worse, most Artifacts needed to be recharged. That required an Artificer as well as another instance of the Gift stored in said Artifact – and they didn’t have to be the same two people who created it originally. Those distinctions didn’t make much of a difference to most people. To an Arminger they could make the Artifact basically unusable, as the conflicting impressions drowned out any other thoughts from the Arminger’s mind.

Fortunately the sword he’d discovered among the remains of the Deep’s prison wasn’t that complex. He only caught the afterimage of two people from it. The sword was also quite old, so he wasn’t able to tell much about either person, whether they’d been male or female, young or old. The only thing he knew for sure was one of them was a Thunder Hand, as that was the Gift the blade contained.

That said, he strongly suspected the blade belonged to someone who hated the Benthic. As soon as he stepped out of the fog and his eyes landed on Captain Trill he felt a surge of hostility flow out of the sword. He’d never felt such a powerful impression from any object before, Artifact or not.

A hand fell on his shoulder and he spun to find Cassian staring at him with a bewildered look. “What happened to you?”

Adalai opened his mouth, about to explain the vision he’d seen, then stopped himself. “It would take too long to explain.”

Cassian glanced up and Adalai followed his line of sight to discover an enormous, bloated Benthic dragging the last of its hundred foot long tail through a newly formed hole in the ceiling. “I hate to say it but we probably won’t have time for it anyway. Marta’s keeping us dry for the moment but if that thing breaks her shield the Linnorm’s getting doused and that’s our best weapon off the table.”

The sword was incensed. Adalai glanced down at it and realized it was a tool created for exactly this kind of situation. At first he wasn’t sure what it was trying to do, the concept didn’t make a lot of sense to someone who wasn’t used to an electrical Gift like the Thunder Hand, but he had a sudden flash of insight when he glanced at Marta to see how she was doing. As he looked at her he thought of Braxton.

Who was a Thunder Heart, who could breathe under water somehow because his body was living lightning. That was when the pieces clicked into place.

“Have Marta let me out then shrink the dome down to a bubble and make it as solid and layered as she can. It’s going to get bumpy.”

Cassian gave him a skeptical look. “You have an idea?”

“Not an idea.” He hefted the bronze blade. “This.”

“Well… better than nothing.” The Ironhand didn’t look convinced but he moved off to do as he was asked.

There were many things Adalai had learned back home that the people of Nerona were totally ignorant of, a shortcoming he’d learned not to hold against them. Their Gifts gave them the power to see and do many things he’d never dreamed of, either. Yet more often than not it turned out that the science he’d learned in school and the preternatural gifts of Nerona overlapped in the most unexpected ways.

Electrolysis, for example.

He wasn’t sure how masters of Nerona’s lightning wielding Gifts had discovered the fact that water contained oxygen and that you could use electricity to separate the air from the water. Much less how they’d done it without exploding all the hydrogen created as a byproduct. Yet someone out there must have put all the pieces together because the longer he held onto the sword the clearer its function became. Some mad Artificer had built it for the sole purpose of cleaving water into air, allowing its owner to breathe and fight the Benthic on equal footing.

Adalai wasn’t sure how exactly it did that. Fortunately Artifacts didn’t need him to understand all the details of their function. He just needed to tell it to start cutting water and it would. Just as well since the bronze blade didn’t have the same feel to it as a sword that had spent years in the hand of a fencing master. It couldn’t guide him through a duel.

Yet it did still have some guidance for him. Adalai could tell that this wasn’t the ideal situation to use it in, for example. His own understanding of chemistry and physics told him that the stunt he was thinking of pulling was going to be pretty rough. He might not survive it.

For a second Adalai wondered if the Linnorm still smelled inevitability clinging to him. It had been a long time since Karoushi told him he would find his way home if he continued down the path he’d chosen. He wasn’t sure if he was still on that path.

Years in Nerona had changed him quite a bit. And if he did still carry a touch of the inevitable about him there was no telling if it came from the same promise Karoushi made him at the corners of Eternity. Perhaps he walked a different, equally inexorable path to a far different destination.

There was an easy way to find out.

He stepped out through Marta’s shield bubble, letting the cold water of the deep sea pass over him for a brief moment, then raised the sword and nudged it to life. The blade cut through water with a sharp crack. He pushed it to do more. For a moment foam filled the water around him then Adalai flinched as the water around him lit up, a brilliant lightning bolt filling the cavern.

The original purpose of weapons like these was to be thrown into the water just ahead of its user. They would burrow into the water leaving a corridor of breathable air. Adalai couldn’t tell how the man who originally carried the bronze blade intended to keep the water from replacing all the air once it was created. Presumably there was another Artifact or someone with a Gift to handle that.

Regardless, Adalai found himself almost throwing the sword out of his hand as he used it since it wanted to bury itself into the seafloor again. He had to actively work against the impulse as he cut the water around him into its component gasses. It got worse as the pressure around him built.

It was impossible to guess how much liquid the massive lava chamber held but what Adalai was certain of was that the water would take up much more room as gas than as liquid. With only a comparatively small hole in the roof to escape from, things got tricky fast. Adalai felt his ears pop once, then twice, as he swung the sword around him in larger and larger arcs and the pressure in the chamber built. He felt a strange sensation, as if the ocean floor hiccuped. Then there was an abrupt sensation of movmenet and he felt himself being swept up in a rushing current, as the sound of crackling electricity was replaced with a roaring waterfall.

Adalai felt himself tumbling along, water around him and to his back, blade still cleaving apart the sea. He would have lost it if he hadn’t already grabbed the hilts in a two fisted death grip earlier. He wasn’t sure how long it went on. Looking back on it, maybe twelve seconds passed from the moment he began slicing apart the water to the moment he willed the sword to stop cutting. In that time a lot changed.

For starters, when he opened his eyes he found he’d been thrown out of the cavern over the sea floor. The explosive rush of air and water had not only broken the roof of the cave it had thrown everything within across half the ocean. Marta had formed a solid, shimmering sphere out of her shield. It looked like she had shrunk it enough that the seven of them inside were kept from jostling and, although no one looked comfortable, they also didn’t look like they’d broken anything from jostling as they rode the geyser.

The Benthic that didn’t have the benefit of Marta’s shield hadn’t been so fortunate. One drifted in the water a few dozen feet away, her body unmoving, twisted into a painful spiral shape. The Matriarch had been more fortunate, perhaps because of her greater size. She drifted by the gaping opening in the sea floor a few hundred feet away, dark eyes glinting with sinister reflections in the murk of the ocean bed.

To his horror she reached out one oversized hand, grabbed the corpse of one of her daughters and shoved half of it into her mouth. As she chewed her eyes turned up and met his.

Adalai twitched himself around in the water and pointed the bronze blade at her. It was a show of force, yes, but an empty one. He could tell the Artifact had lost most of its potency. It might contain enough power to cleave a few more gallons of seawater but no more. The majority of the weapon’s power was spent and it wouldn’t be restored until another Artificer and another Thunder Hand collaborated to recharge it.

Unfortunately the Matriarch didn’t buy his bluff. She pushed the last of the morsel into her mouth and lifted her imposing bulk up off the ocean floor and started towards them.

Marta’s shield bubble vanished and Trill’s guards zipped out of it, one breaking off to collect him, then all eight of them made their best time upwards towards the surface. As they drew close together Cassian called out, “Was that supposed to kill them?”

“Mostly I was just hoping we’d get out of there,” Adalai admitted.

“Well it worked but we’re not out of the woods yet.”

“What are we not out of?” Trill asked. “It didn’t translate.”

“Just swim,” Cassian replied. “Unless you think the eight of us can kill a Matriarch.”

“We can. One or two of us may even survive.” She pointed towards the stone spire that housed the dragon’s lair. “Better to fight from arid land. She is too large and heavy to fight well out of the water, even my troops will be able to outrun her there.”

“Doesn’t leave us much room to maneuver,” Adalai muttered.

“We can deal with that,” Verina said. “The advantages are still mostly on our side.”

They breached the surface a few moments later and the humans began to help the Benthic up away from the waves. It was late in the evening and the stars were beginning to show. Adalai took them in for a moment, wondering if the King of Stars had left a new omen there for them.

“Get up as high as you can,” Cassian said. “I assume a Matriarch can throw water as well as the rest of you and the more we make her work the better.”

“Get back in the water.”

He froze. “What?”

Adalai pointed upwards, towards a gleaming star far brighter than the others that pierced through the dusk. “Falling star. Get back in the water before it hits.”

Marta followed his finger and squinted. “Shooting stars almost never fall to earth, I wouldn’t -”

“I saw the King of Stars not five minutes ago and he was not happy, get back in the water before he gets here or I’m not responsible for what happens.” Without waiting for a reply Adalai scampered across the small stone island towards the far shore. It took less than a minute. In that time the falling star had grown noticeably larger.

Once he got down to the water again he pulled off his cloak and tied it around his waist, since it looked like he would have to swim on his own. He managed to wade out to knee deep before Cassian called out, “Wait!”

The others were coming over the crest of the island behind him. “Change your mind?”

“The Matriarch surfaced long enough to look at the sky and left again,” Trill said. “If she isn’t willing to stay here, I’m not.”

“Then let’s get going.”

“Where?” Cassian asked.

“Far away.” Adalai looked up to see the falling star had already grown to the size of his thumb. “Let’s hope it’s far enough.”

They made it half a mile when the star hit the spire and a wave the size of a mountain swept them away.