A Precious Cornerstone – A Clattering in the Basement

Posted by natechen on December 13, 2025

To Cassandra Fairchild, going blind was simply a part of life.

Or that was what she had told herself over and over in the seven years that had passed since her father first sat her down and explained the nature of stone song. She had inherited his gift for the song and the accompanying fate of blindness. She had never really spent much time considering what that would mean for her practically speaking.

At first singing a song or two just made the edges of her vision blurry. As the years passed and her powers grew the cost became more pronounced. She would see spots or flashes of light as she sang. Then the world would turn fuzzy for a few minutes, then a few hours. Yet she could still see, even if it wasn’t with great clarity and that was some comfort to her. The fear of darkness was still a long ways away.

Certainly she had never once wished she couldn’t see.

Not once, that is, until a black hearted wizard dumped terror itself into her brain and it refused to leave. Then, it seemed, blindness might offer some respite from the fear. So she’d sung recklessly, seemingly endlessly, until the wizard fled and left the fear to pursue her into the dark. For a time she’d held it at bay, keeping herself busy. However, business in Riker’s Cove could only keep them occupied for so long and she’d been forced to make the long train flight back to Keagan’s Bluff in complete darkness.

During that time she learned what dread really was.

It took a full week for light to come back into her vision. Five of those days were spent blindly stumbling around Oakheart Manor, trembling at every sound. The panic von Nighburg set on her had faded as sight crept back in. The dread, however. That remained.

It made itself known at all hours of the day. In the sound of animals scurrying past the walls at night, in the roar of winds on stormy days. Even in the sound of footsteps passing down the hall or even stopping in the doorway.

“Morning, dear,” a bright, clear voice said, chasing the specters away and grounding Cassie in the present. “Did you sleep well?”

“Better, thank you, Mrs. Sondervan.” Cassie turned her face towards the sound of the housekeeper’s voice, imagining the woman’s round, pleasant face beaming with her customary smile. “I can almost see you this morning. Are you wearing blue?”

She tutted under her breath, something Gertie Sondervan was in the habit of doing when she was upset but didn’t want other people to know about it. Cassie knew Roy had explained her remarkable hearing to his employees when she first came with her brother but she wasn’t sure Gertie really understood what he was saying when he said she heard better than most. However, the woman didn’t mean ill so Cassie was willing to overlook it.

“More of a green dress, dear,” Gertie said in her normal tone. “Not to worry, though, the gentlemen aren’t planning to hare off on any errands today, once they’re back from Mr. Harper’s customary visit to the post. They aren’t likely to leave you here with such poor company as myself.”

“I’ve spent my time in far worse company, and recently.” Cassie closed her eyes and took a deep breath, letting her hearing slowly submerge her in the song of the stones. Pebbles trembled and sang. The dirt churned in the slow and ancient dance of the earth. A shovel cut through the ground outside as Georg Sondervan dug weeds from the garden and the pattering footsteps of Nat Sondervan echoed up the bluff as he scampered towards the river at the base of the hill.

Beyond that, the steel clop of horseshoes echoed on the dirt path up from Keegan’s Bluff. Cassie’s eyes fluttered open and she got up from the chair at her dressing table, extending a hand towards Gertie and said, “Could you take me down to the sitting room, Mrs. Sondervan?”

“Of course, dear.” A feminine hand with a surprisingly strong grip took her elbow and gently guided her through the hall and down the stairs. “The gentlemen aren’t back yet, though. Would you like to eat breakfast while you wait?”

“They’ll be back soon,” Cassie said. “And I’m sure your breakfast is delicious, Mrs. Sondervan, but I’m afraid I’m not hungry this morning.”

Another tutting came but Gertie didn’t say anything else as she helped Cassie navigate the stairs. At the bottom Cassie paused, a strange wave of foreboding washing over her. The songs of the earth had their own tone and tempo, far different from human music, but she knew them just as well. Yet for a brief moment she thought she heard an unnatural staccato among them.

The grip on her arm adjusted slightly. “Something wrong, dear?”

“No…” Cassie listened a moment longer but the strange rhythm didn’t repeat itself. “I just thought I heard something from the basement.”

“The basement?” Gertie sounded incredulous. “Nothing making noise down there when the gentlemen are out.”

“Might have been rats?” She’d heard rats in the pantries before and they didn’t sound like that. Then again, Roy had never told them what he kept in the basement, just that he kept it locked for a reason.

“Not likely,” the housekeeper replied. “Mr. Harper’s Armory isn’t a place the living would like spending a lot of time. I used to go down once a month to tidy up but it’s so very unsettling down there.”

Cassie frowned. It made sense that a professional firespinner like Roy Harper would have a large collection of weapons and a place to store them. It was strange that his employees would find them distasteful. Especially since she’d seen both the adult Sondervans carrying blades on trips into town. There were mountain lions living in the higher bluffs, after all.

“I see. Well, let’s hope we won’t have need of the Armory today, then.” She patted Gertie’s hand and they continued on to the sitting room, a warm room on the eastern side of the house. Cassie’s shoes sank deep into a thick, comfortable rug. A few steps later Gertie rested her hand on the back of an armchair and she found her way into the seat. “Thank you, Mrs. Sondervan.”

“Of course, dear. I’ll let your brother and Mr. Harper know where you are when they get back.”

The housekeeper bustled away and Cassie leaned back into the chair, listening to the hoofbeats in the distance. The quiet rumble of the men’s voices echoed off the bluffs. Between the walls and the wind off the highlands it was impossible to make out the words but she could guess they were only five or ten minutes away. She settled in and waited, taking deep breaths and trying to ignore the dread creeping back.

Something felt wrong. It might have been the last echoes of Heinrich von Nighburg’s malice but it might not. Maybe the temporary loss of her sight had made her more sensitive to whatever was in the Armory that made Gertie so wary. It was impossible to tell. Whatever it was, there wasn’t much she could do but keep her ear to the ground and listen for that strange staccato rhythm to come again.

Marius lowered the spyglass once Harper and his companion vanished inside the house. He didn’t know who it was the firespinner was riding with, everything he’d heard told him Columbia’s best mercenary preferred working alone. That was an unfortunate wrinkle. Marius was working on a very tight timetable and he hadn’t anticipated an additional fighting man at Oakheart Manor.

And the new man was definitely used to violence. He was enormous and carried himself with an air of comfortable power that made that clear. It was hard to tell when he was in the saddle but Marius thought he’d been favoring one leg once he dismounted, so at least that was something. There was still no getting around the fact his job had become much more difficult.

Making matters worse was the fact that he could not get the earth elementals around the house to answer when he called them. Some other working kept him from establishing a connection with them. That might explain the new face among Harper’s employees. The stories agreed that Roy Harper himself was not particularly skilled in magics of the earth.

Perhaps he had hired someone to offset that weakness. If a powerful lithomancer had done something that bound the local elementals to him it would make it much more difficult for Marius to summon them. There were countermeasures one could take, of course. The problem was that many of those countermeasures would make it obvious to the lithomancer that there was an interloper on hand. Much of Marius’ plan relied on speed and subterfuge.

Of course, he could also be reading too much into things. Elementals were finicky things where mercenaries set in their ways very much were not. Perhaps Roy Harper was just entertaining a friend from when he served in the Columbian Regulars and the stones were so deeply asleep they couldn’t be bothered with answering Marius’ summons.

Whatever had happened Marius would have to figure out how to respond to it quickly. He had given his word that he would sort matters out by the end of the month and a Menendez did not go back on his word. He collapsed his spyglass and tucked it into his jacket then scrambled away from the edge of the bluff he’d been observing from. He would cast the tiles on his lithomancy board again. Perhaps the stones would speak to him this time.

If not, there was nothing else to do but press forward.

Siren Song (Haunted Blog Crawl 2025)

Posted by natechen on October 18, 2025

“Bruce, Mira, I’d like you to meet my friend, Vincent Porter. We went to seminary together, he’s good people.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Garrison.” Vince shook hands with Bruce, a tall but very skinny man who looked like the kind of person who ate only vegetable protein and exercised more than was healthy. “I hope Ed hasn’t been giving you any headaches.”

“He’s wonderful,” Mira said, a warm tone struggling against her pinched expression and haunted eyes. “Our kids love him. I’m sorry, Reverend Porter, Edward didn’t mention which church you worked at in town?”

“I work for Lighthouse Recovery Center, ma’am.”

It hadn’t seemed possible that her worries could get more obvious but her right eye picked up a nervous tic that clearly broadcast a new level of concern. “The rehab center?” She turned to her husband. “Honey, you don’t think Danica is involved with drugs, do you?”

“No one’s saying that,” Bruce said, waving for Ed and Vince to follow him in.“It’s just that Mr. Porter is used to seeing people wander off and figuring out where they’ve gone and when Ed suggested he help us look around I agreed.”

“I’m happy to do whatever I can,” Vince said, looking around as they walked into a small hallway by stairs upwards. Dim lights in the living room on the left lit the hall and the smell of garlic and bacon wafted through from the kitchen at the other end. “You’ve got a real advantage over what I usually do, too. The police won’t spend a whole lot of time hunting for an addict that wanders off but they’ll all turn out for a fourteen year old girl who’s gone missing. Has an officer arrived yet?”

“We haven’t called the police yet,” Mira said, looking mystified. “I wasn’t sure we needed to and she hasn’t been missing for twenty four hours yet, anyway. She came home from school and disappeared before we could eat dinner.”

“Waiting a day is a myth. You need to call and report her missing right now.” The Garrisons hesitated, confusion evident in their expressions, and Vince realized they were probably still confused by the unfamiliarity of their situation. He spun to face Ed. “Call now.”

His friend was already pulling out a cellphone, putting an arm on Mira’s shoulder and gently pushing her towards the living room. “I’ll get you started, Mira, but the dispatcher will want to get some details from you.”

Bruce made a motion to follow them but Vince made eye contact and tilted his head towards the stairs to the house’s second floor. The father raised his eyebrows and said, “You want to see her room?”

He actually wanted to talk to them separately but that was best left unsaid. “If you don’t mind. I won’t touch anything, better to leave that for the police, but it sounds like she left in a hurry and she might have left something out that she wouldn’t usually.”

“Right.” He started up the stairs, saying, “Do you want to talk to her brother?”

“Not yet. Is he still eating dinner?”

“Doing homework, I think.”

Bruce led him to a decent sized bedroom decorated with a distinct nautical theme. The desk backboard was stylized like an old fashioned ship’s wheel and had the name Danica engraved on a stylized prow jutting over the drawers. A red headed mermaid decorated the bedspread. A guitar sat in one corner and a pair of flipper shaped slippers poked out of the closet. Vince looked it over but didn’t see much out of place.

Not much but not nothing.

“Is Danica your daughter’s name?” He asked.

“Yes, her brother is George.”

Vince crossed to the desk and glanced over it, frowning. “Has she ever left the house without her cellphone since you got it for her?”

“No…” Bruce peered over his shoulder, looking more concerned. “But we make them put them in their rooms during dinner and we confiscate them if they aren’t plugged in and out of their hands during dinner and homework time.”

“You check often?”

“Most nights before and after dinner. It’s been there since I got home tonight.”

“The light in the corner is blinking,” Vince mused. “She’s got notifications. Can you unlock the phone and look at them?”

“Mira and I can unlock all the cellphones in this house,” Bruce said, sounding a bit defensive. He picked up the phone and unplugged it from the wall, thumbing at the screen as he muttered under his breath. Vince noted the phone case had a finned warrior with a trident on it. He tried to place the source of the art but couldn’t so he filed that away for later, if it was important. “Strange. It won’t unlock.”

Bruce popped the phone out of its case and turned its unadorned black body over in his hand, frowning. “This isn’t her phone. We got her the green one.”

“Can’t you read the notifications without unlocking the phone?”

“Yes.” He turned it face up again and started slightly. “Message from Brandon?”

“Boyfriend?”

“George’s friend.” Bruce keyed something into the phone and shook his head. “This is George’s phone. Why is it here? George!”

In spite of his wiry build Bruce was still able to put the fear of dad into his children and George appeared in the doorway before the second syllable in his name died away. He looked to be twelve or thirteen. “What’s up, dad?”

“Why does your sister have your phone?”

“She doesn’t!” George looked offended at the idea that his sister had touched anything of his. “Mine is on my dresser.”

The three of them trooped down the hall to George’s room where a phone case sat face down on a chest of drawers with a charging cable running into it. When Bruce turned it over they discovered there wasn’t a phone in the case, the cable was just taped to the case so it looked like there was something plugged in there.

Vince snorted. “That’s a new one. She must have moved his phone so it would take you longer to notice hers was missing. At least we know she planned this ahead of time.”

“Why?” George asked, clearly mystified by the idea.

“That’s not my area of expertise,” Vince admitted. “In my field of work it’s usually pretty obvious from the get go. I don’t suppose your daughter had any major changes in behavior in the last month or two? Has she possibly changed the way she dressed recently?”

“She’s been pretty normal,” Bruce said.

“Yeah, except she’s obsessed with that stupid fish musical,” George put in.

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Normal. Except I guess she started wearing halter tops again a couple of weeks ago even though she normally complains about the cold. Her mother’s been worried about it.”

Eyebrows raised, Vince said, “Short sleeves? Well, that’s unusual but doesn’t really help me. If it was one of my clients I’d expect things to go in the opposite direction so she could hide her arms.”

“She’s not getting high,” George said with the kind of impatience only middle schoolers could pull off. “Unless watching Disney movies constantly counts.”

“Not as far as the law is concerned,” Bruce said. Then he pointed towards George’s desk in a meaningful fashion. “Now get back to work.”

“Yeah, I’m working,” George said, slumping into his desk chair in adolescent fashion, poking his homework suspiciously.

As they went back down the stairs Bruce asked, “Does any of this help you any, Mr. Porter?”

“Sort of. I can’t tell you why your daughter is doing anything but I think I can help you find her. She’s got her phone with her, right?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if we can get the phone company to locate it very quickly,” Bruce said. “Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“Maybe not, since it’s on your account,” Vince said. “Even if they’re willing to ping it for you it will still take a while to get ahold of someone who can, though. I think you can do one better. That phone was a Samsung, right? So your daughter must have a Google account.”

“Yes…” Bruce clearly wasn’t following what he was getting at.

“You can log into that, too, right? So pull her search history on her browser and Google Maps. Five times out of six we can tell where a client’s gone just by looking at their searches over the last twelve hours. Most people aren’t savvy enough to scrub that information.”

Bruce nodded vigorously, suddenly energized, and said, “Yes. That’s a good idea, let me grab my tablet.”

For the first time since arriving at the Garrison household Vince had a moment to himself. He took a deep breath and let it out, nerves jangling. He still wasn’t sure he should have let Ed drag him into this mess, he wasn’t a private detective. Sure, he’d gone looking for runaway addicts a few times but it wasn’t his favorite thing.

He glanced into the living room, to check on Ed and Mira, but found that they were still on the phone. Unsurprising, he hadn’t been upstairs more than a few minutes. He was considering going in to listen to their conversation when his own phone vibrated and chimed a soft series of musical tones.

He thought he’d set it to silent. Curious, Vince pulled it out of his jacket pocket and fumbled with the screen. To his surprise there wasn’t a notification on it. Maybe he’d cleared it by accident. He was about to unlock it when Bruce popped up carrying a tablet, saying, “I’ve got it here.”

Vince shoved his phone back in his pocket, assuming it couldn’t be that urgent, and said, “Let’s have a look.”

The search history didn’t hold much of interest but Danica had looked up a Lutheran Cemetery on New Jersey Street in Google Maps less than two hours ago. A shiver of nerves went down Vince’s back. “Do you have family buried there?”

“No.” Bruce looked incredibly annoyed. “This better not be some kind of Halloween thing. She said she was too old for trick or treating two years ago, you’d think she’d know she’s too old to hang out in graveyards.”

Vince looked at his watch. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet but the cemetery was on the other side of the river and it could take them as long as an hour to get there, depending on traffic. “Well it’s getting late. We’d better get there before it gets on towards midnight.”

“Let me tell my wife then we’ll take my car.”

They arrived at the cemetery a few minutes before ten, piling out of the Garrison’s comically overlarge SUV, breath misting in the autumn air. Ed and Mira were still at the house, waiting for the local police to make an appearance. That left Vince and Bruce walking up to the graveyard’s gate and letting themselves in. Getting through didn’t take a lot of work. At some point there had been a lock on the gate but time and moisture had taken a toll on the latch and it didn’t look like it closed anymore.

Not that they had any illusions about that. The gates were wide open when they arrived and the only reason Bruce hadn’t driven right in was Vince counseling against it. As they walked towards the gate Bruce turned back to eye his parking job on the side of the drive, clearly concerned about someone on the main road clipping his ride. “Is there a reason we’re walking?”

“I’m hoping this makes the car more likely to start later.”

“Right.” Bruce turned his discontented gaze to Vince. “Are you worried about some kinda superstitious mumbo jumbo? Just cause it’s Halloween doesn’t mean the graveyard is haunted.”

“Let’s hope you’re right, Mr. Garrison.” However, when Vince crossed over into the cemetery’s confines he felt the change instantly. The air grew still. The birds grew quiet. His heart beat faster.

Something was amiss.

There were certain things that followed along behind the supernatural and a lot of them were starting to line up. Vince shot a sideways glance at Bruce, gauging the man’s temperament. Ed had mentioned the Garrisons both worked for some kind of software developer so they were probably level headed, logical people. The question was, were they too logical?

“Try calling Danica, Mr. Garrison.”

“Good idea.” Bruce fished his phone out and tinkered with it for a few seconds while Vince did his best to watch him out of the corner of his eye. Things turned out a lot different than he’d expected.

After a few seconds of waiting a distant trill of notes started drifting over the graves from the northern part of the cemetery. Vince blinked in surprise. He hadn’t expected Bruce to even get a signal, much less connect with his daughter. The two men headed towards the sound, Bruce picking up speed as he shoved his phone back into his jacket pocket.

“Danica!” His voice echoed off the headstones. “What are you doing out here? Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in?”

As Vince jogged along behind him little details began jumping out at him. His feet were pounding on the ground yet they made no noise. The music in the distance kept playing in spite of the fact that Bruce had ended the call. The fact that the phone in the distance was playing the same tune his own phone had played when it rang at the Garrison house.

There was a strange, misshapen thing looming up at the far end of the graveyard, a dim light flickering near its base. The two men slowed to a stop on one side of a narrow dirt path, the noise and light coming from a structure on the other. It looked like a mausoleum of some kind, though it was hard to be sure. There were at least four pairs of pants draped haphazardly over the grave along with a mess of jackets and shirts. A line of five cellphones sat propped along the base.

One of them was still ringing.

Vince crossed the path and picked it up. It wasn’t green and it was still in a chunky, waterproof case so he guessed it wasn’t Danica’s. Tentatively he answered it saying, “Hello? Can I ask who this is?”

No one answered.

“I found this phone on the ground in a graveyard,” he went on. “Do you know who it belongs to?”

The phone chimed with the end of call tone. Confused, Vince looked at the phone but it had returned to the lock screen and he had no way of unlocking it and looking at the call history so he figured that was a dead end. He put the phone back on the ground.

Bruce was holding a glittery tank top and looking very confused. “Why would she take off her shirt in the middle of the night in a cemetery? With four other people? In October?”

It was a sensible enough question but Vince wasn’t sure this was the right time to focus on answering it. He dug through the clothes to get a good look at the mausoleum itself. As he pushed a pair of jeans aside he found himself staring at the stoney eyes of a mermaid carved into the side of the grave.

When he shoved the rest of the clothes to the side they tumbled to the ground in a rush of stale, greasy air. Vince swallowed hard. “Call Danica again.”

Bruce gave him a disbelieving look. “Again? Why! Her phone’s right there.”

“I want to hear the ringtone again.” By now the other man was looking at him like he’d grown another head but he pulled out his cellphone and dialed. A few seconds later a green phone started ringing. Vince pointed at the phone. “Have you ever heard that tune before? It’s not a default Samsung ringtone.”

“No, I don’t know the song,” Bruce snarled. “Is it important?”

“The other phone was playing the same tune when it rang,” Vince said, pulling his own phone out and looking at it. “When I was at your house mine rang with it, too.”

As he said it Danica’s phone stopped ringing, even though Bruce hadn’t touched his screen again. Confused, Bruce lifted the device to his ear and listened. After a few seconds he tapped the screen and shoved it back into his pocket. “Voicemail.”

“Sure.” Vince unlocked his phone and checked its volume. As he’d suspected, it was still set to silent. He put the phone down on the mausoleum and picked up the sleeve of a shirt, holding it to his nose and taking a long, deep breath. The smell of rancid bacon flooded his lungs.

Bruce yanked the shirt away from him, looking vaguely disgusted. “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t -” He paused and sniffed the air. “What is that?”

“Mr. Garrison, is there any reason you or your daughter might have visited this graveyard before? Or even this section of the river?”

Bruce stopped in the middle of lifting the shirt to his nose. “No? I can’t think of any reason for either of us to come here. She wasn’t a fan of the river, said it was too narrow for her. The closest she got was when she went surfing in the summer.”

Vince grimaced. “Stranger and stranger.”

Fog was creeping in from the river to the east, piling up around the gravestones and drifting past like waves in slow motion. The moisture in the air pressed down on them, soaking each breath and leaching warmth from the skin. It gave the world a dull, soft feeling. Yet it didn’t dull the senses quite enough to keep Vince from noticing the soft, distant sound of voices singing a familiar yet unknown tune.

He was running before all the implications had processed.

All that really mattered was that someone out there was singing the phantom tune and he was certain Danica was among them. As if to muddle the sound of the singers, all five phones behind him started ringing at once.

“Wait!” Bruce called, clearly wishing he could answer them. Maybe he hadn’t heard the song.

“Later!” Vince half wheezed, half yelled as he headed east towards the Sheboygan. “They’re by the river.”

The eastern wall of the cemetery was built of old, vine covered bricks stacked up to about shoulder height. He got a good grip on the top and scrambled over, his feet ripping leaves and branches down as they scrambled for purchase. The ground beyond the wall was lost to the fog. Vince pressed forward regardless, tripping over unseen rocks and gulleys, doing his best to see over the fog even though it was piling up higher and higher.

The stench of old meat and grease hung heavy in the air. His pulse pounded in his veins in staccato syncopation with his feet on the ground, his ears did their best to make out the distant melody over the competing percussion. He caught snatches of the lyrics.

“Forsake your legs and driest land… embrace the sea, never breathe again.”

The ground underfoot suddenly changed from dirt to pavement and Vince found himself charging across 17th Street. He caught a glimpse of headlights on his right. He wasn’t sure if Bruce was behind him but to be safe he yelled, “Car coming!”

A few seconds later he heard a car horn blaring behind him but no sound of impact so hopefully that turned out okay.

The fog cleared a little as Vince approached the river, rushing along some fifty feet beyond the road. The water churned, an unseen mass writhing just below the surface, and guttural sounds rumbled beneath the high, clear singing voices. Gasping for breath, he looked back and forth, hoping to find the source of the song.

There were four four kids clustered in the shadows of the New Jersey Street bridge, stripped naked and up to their waist in water.

If they had stayed bent down in the dark Vince would never have seen them. But when they hit a high note in the melody they jerked upright, dragging a thrashing girl up out of the water by her neck and shoulders, holding her there for just a moment as she gasped for air. Then they plunged her under again.

The shore of the Sheboygan River was all slick rocks and muddy grass, either sucking at his shoes or sending hims slipping and sliding as he ran. Vince had no idea how far it was from where he started to the bridge. What really mattered was that he didn’t cross the full distance before the malevolent presence that had watched him all night finally made itself known.

The pigs came churning up out of the water, growling and squealing in fury. The swarm of porcine demoniacs scrambled over each other as their short, stubby legs beat the river to froth with the slimy fins that replaced their hooves. In their beady, sunken eyes shone an ancient hatred.

Fear fell upon the river like a storm.

Vince’s sprint nearly became a retreat as sheer panic sank its fangs into his brain. He took a deep breath and begged for grace, not so much for himself as for the kids. Words boiled up out of him. “Enough, legion of the Gerasenes!” Rather than shying away from the pigs Vince strode out into the water among them, ignoring their shrieking calls. “Have you given up the refuge you were granted? Seek you again dry and arid places to wander while you wait for judgement?”

“It is not time!” He couldn’t see any one pig speaking, the words seemed to echo back and forth among the teaming throng. “It is not our time!”

The first rule of demons was simple. They didn’t matter. They could only distract you from your purpose. What mattered was those they oppressed. Vince fixed his eyes on the children in the water and slogged towards them. Forty feet. “You can be chained to your dungeon until your time.”

“We were given shelter here!” The pigs replied, pressing closer and closer to him yet never quite making contact. The water thrashed and a thick, viscous layer of putrid grease coated its surface, soaking Vince’s jeans, but the pigs themselves never touched him. “By what right would you take it away?”

“We were promised the right to such things, and even greater things than these.” Vince watched the dark patch of water ahead. Was it still churning as Danica struggled under water? Or had she gone still? What kind of damnable ritual were they trying to do?

“No power! No power!” The pigs screamed, churning the water white.

“Give me Danica Garrison,” Vince snarled, “or I will bind you to the driest wilderness until Judgement Day. I swear it on the name of Ya-”

The pigs plunged under the water so violently he was nearly thrown into the air by waves they threw up. The noise, the panic and the grease all vanished. Vince found himself in the shadow of the New Jersey bridge, a few feet from a girl floating face down in the river.

He immediately grabbed her under the arms, flipped her over and hauled her head up out of the water. Danica coughed and took a struggling breath. Vince began dragging her to shore, looking around frantically. When another pair of hands grabbed Danica he jumped, then realized it was just Bruce, wrapping his daughter in his coat. The man was white as a sheet but his grip on his daughter was solid. “Are they coming back?”

“They better not.” Even as he said it Vince knew that wasn’t a positive thing. “Danica, can you hear me?”

“Yes?” She said faintly.

“Let’s just get out of the water,” Bruce said.

Vince ignored him. “What are your friend’s names? I might still be able to break the hold on them with their names.”

“Oh.” The girl was still badly out of it but she managed to say, “RealmRazer47, Antigodz…”

He did his best not to cringe. It wasn’t the time for it. “Not user names, Danica, I need to know their real names. Did they ever tell you?”

She weakly shook her head, starting to cry.

“Then that’s the end of it. Let’s get her back to the car.”

Bruce gave him a curious look as they slogged up out of the river. “Is there anything we can do for the others?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’d have to find them, first. I know someone in the Sheriff’s Department, I’ll see what they can find out.” He dug his phone out of his pocket and tried to wake it up but the screen remained dark. Water trickled off of its case and the faint whiff of stale bacon came from it when he held the device up for a closer look. He sighed and put it back in his pocket. “Never mind. They finally got around to squashing our phones.”

The other man snorted. “This isn’t your first time with these things, is it?”

“Never met the pigs before.”

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“It’s enough for now. We’ll talk more some place warmer.”

They trudged through the graveyard, ignoring the ringing phones by the mausoleum, only pausing long enough to grab Danica’s clothes, then bundled her into the SUV and cranked the heater up to full.

Just before they climbed in themselves Bruce said, “She doesn’t look right. What did those things do to my daughter?”

“They tried to kill her, Mr. Garrison. I think that would be obvious.”

“Yeah but… is she, like, possessed or something?”

“I don’t know right now,” Vince admitted. “It’s possible. I’m not the best person to suss that out, to be perfectly honest. I can give you a couple of names of people better qualified to figure that out, if you want. Ed might know a few others.”

“But what about that thing?”

Bruce had more to say but Vince held up a hand. “You’re letting it win, Mr. Garrison.”

“What?”

“Every moment you fixate on that thing you’re ignoring your daughter. They want you to think you’re dependent on what they decide. It’s their greatest deception. The first step to healing from their influence is walking away from them. That’s as true for you as it is for your daughter. Now what do you think she needs right now?”

Bruce took a deep breath and nodded. “Right. Let’s get her home and talk to her mother. We’ll take it from there. Sound good?”

Vince nodded. “As good as can be. Let’s get going.”

Fiction as Refuge

Posted by natechen on September 13, 2025

Hello, hello, welcome back! It has…

Well. I can’t say I had a great couple of weeks off, all things considered. Still, I have vacated and now I am back so it’s time to get down to work. It’s time to talk about fiction and its purposes in our life, a topic which those who enjoy the creation and appreciation of fiction hold near and dear to our hearts.

However, I want to take look at it from a different direction. Generally the fiction aficionado loves talking about the creation of fiction, the care in construction, the integration of timeless truth with a transient narrative. The casual fictioneer looks at things differently.

That is not news. Anyone hardcore storyteller who has tried to discuss movies, TV or books with their casual friends has come to this conclusion. The structure and techniques of story rarely mean much to them. Yet if we want to be storytellers who can captivate a large audience we still need to understand why they look at stories the way they do.

That brings us to the topic of today’s post. Fiction as refuge is an idea I’ve been slowly coming to understand as I watch the gradual disintegration of the stories that formed the cultural zeitgeist for most of my life. This collapse of the narrative integrity of some of these tales is something I cared a great deal about. In this I was not alone. But over time I came to realize I didn’t look at the issue in the same way as many of my peers.

Again, this was not new to me. That’s the way things have been most of my life. Yet the reasons for these differences is something all storytellers need to grapple with, as I believe it is a significant part in what makes some stories last in the eyes of the public and others fade away.

I strongly believe that most people who appreciate fiction look to it as a place of refuge from the world.

Let me try to explain this using the classic TV franchise Star Trek as an example. The essence of Rodenberry’s vision of the future is that humanity would change and mature until they no longer suffered from internal strife and division. Instead, they would travel into the stars, using their newfound cooperation to learn, grow and conquer the stars.

Was this vision a bit naive? Hopelessly optimistic? At times painfully detached from reality? Certainly. However, when you are tired from the constant conflicts in life, slipping onto the decks of the starship Enterprise with your favorite crew to sort out some sort of nonsense science project without any of that drama is mighty appealing. You’re not looking for craftsmanship. You’re not seeking moral lessons or political insight. You just need to feel some sense of meaning with people you know and like. Fiction offers that.

Most fiction franchises rise or fall not on the strength of their plots or their twists or their moods. They stand on the strength of their characters. The crews of Star Trek are packed full of fun, relatable and memorable characters who often carried their TV shows through poor scripts and network hostility. The original cast won over audiences to the point that some of them survived the years after Star Trek was cancelled on the generosity of their fans. James T. Kirk, Spock and Leonard McCoy remain the measuring stick for effective ensemble casts to this day.

When Picard gathered the crew of the Enterprise-D together one more time fans rejoiced. It was a bit like slipping on an old, comfortable pair of slippers one last time. The comfort and relaxation provided by spending a little more time with long loved characters is a precious thing. The timeless nature of fiction makes it possible to find that respite at any time, even if all you can do is talk about stories with others who have enjoyed them with you.

Fiction’s power of refuge is special. It can be horribly misused, both by tearing down the elements of a story that offer shelter and by manipulating others through the way fiction lowers a person’s guard. Audiences can also be tempted to crawl into fiction and abandon reality entirely. None of that is healthy.

Yet, when the boundaries and purposes of fiction are properly respected, fiction as shelter is not just good, it is great. Don’t let the drive for that to replace all the other things fiction can do. Moral teaching, craftsmanship, timelessness, empathy and many, many other benefits come from fiction as well. It’s fine to work them into a warm, comfortable story. But if you want those other elements to reach as broad an audience as possible, studying your fiction as a source of respite may be the most important element of all.

The Drownway Epilogue – Rumors in Renicie

Posted by natechen on August 23, 2025

Previous Chapter

“I’m very glad to see you here, Signore Teodoro,” Grigori said, his smile warm and broad. “The trip across the Drownway must have been very trying for you but I hope my men made it as easy as possible.”

“I regret that they didn’t, Signore Borgia.” Teodoro sat on the chair in Grigori’s chambers with enough force that it seemed it would break. The bulky man paid it no mind. “I regret that I have not had the pleasure of hearing from you since our last correspondence a month ago. I am sure a man of your means has already learned the outcome of that.”

“Indeed?” It wasn’t surprising to him but disappointing none the less. Grigori studied the gray layers of Teodoro’s clothing, noting that he did seem unusually moist and bedraggled, even for someone who had gone through Nerona’s dampest passage. “Perhaps the unnatural waves that lashed the islands three days ago were the cause. By all reports they were quite violent.”

“That much I can confirm myself,” the other man replied, leaning back in the chair and staring into the distance. “I never felt as close to death as I did when I saw the water coming. It seemed like the whole Adriatic Ocean had come for my life, as if there were some score it had to settle with me.”

“Yet here you are.” Grigori settled into his own chair in a more restrained fashion. “Shall I send for something to refresh you? Or would you prefer rest?”

“I haven’t the time for either, I’m afraid, not if I wish to remain a free man.” He gestured weakly towards the outside world, presumably referring to whatever forces still sought to imprison him. “The successor to the Prince of Torrence may still be an open question right now but such matters rarely go unresolved for long. Whoever rules from the citadel next will eventually have to turn their attention to affairs of state. The murder of a Conde by one of his brothers will not be low on the list and I intend to be far from here by then.”

Grigori winced to hear such an important matter put so tastelessly. “Wise of you, Signore. I will not detain you then. Find Evincio in the stables, tell him you require the chestnut stallion and he will see you well mounted.” He motioned to Gunter and the Eisenkinder brought him a bag, small in size but heavy in the hand, which Grigori passed on to Teodoro. “This will see you well on your way.”

He weighed the bag for a moment, clearly debating whether he should examine the contents, then nodded and secured the bag in his belt. “Thank you, Signore. You have always been very kind to me. I hope we will meet again.”

“As do I, Teodoro. As do I.”

Gunter kept himself from scornful noise until after the door closed and their guest was gone. “What a nearsighted fool.”

Grigori sighed and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes and massaging at a sore spot in his stomach where a shallow cut was still healing. “Teodoro was a loyal man. Perfect for his role in every respect, save for his lack of imagination, and a very valuable weapon in the courts of Torrence. If he could have inherited his brother’s title it would have benefited us greatly. Pity he never made it across the Drownway.”

“If you say it then it must be so, Papa Borgia. Will Evincio need my help in the stables today, do you think?”

“No, no, Gunter, you always sell him short. Leave him alone and he will surprise you.” Gunter chuckled but knew better than to comment on his master’s joke. “Besides, I need you to go into the square today and start making inquiries among the bravos again. Our quiver is out of arrows and at the worst possible time, when Torrence is in chaos and ripe for the picking!”

“What about the Blacklegs? They are still here, aren’t they?”

Grigori cracked one eye open to glare annoyance at the Isenkinder. “I don’t need a whole company of condottieri to shield my investments, Gunter, I need a few arrows I can loose into the squealing runts of the herd. Besides, I have heard a dragon was spotted along the Drownway recently. The Prince will likely buy up all the large bodies of troops to mount an expedition against it and I have no desire to bid against him. What about those Hextons you know?”

Gunter scratched at his pale beard. “The Herakleans took a contract headed north a few days ago. I believe they were headed to Lome and from there to Fionni as caravan escorts. At wagon speeds it will be a month before we can expect to hear from them even if they were a good fit for the job you have in mind.”

“I haven’t told you what I want them for yet.”

“I’ve arranged hundreds of tasks for you over the years, Papa, and I can only think of three or four I would trust them with. They’re Hextons. Their conscience dictates far more of their behavior than is wise.”

“I see.” Grigori closed his eye again and considered his options. Three of his men lost waiting to ambush Teodoro on the Drownway, many of his others tied up dealing with business in Lome. He had not had as much need for bravos since he brought Gunter into the family and his connections among them were not as strong as they had once been. He ran down that list of names, quietly eliminating them one at a time, until he arrived at an unenviable conclusion. Grigori sat up and opened his eyes to the grayness of the world to find Gunter quietly watching him. “You know what that leaves us with, don’t you?”

“We wait a month to see what new options appear before us?”

“Fortune favors the bold, not the passive. Someone will succeed to the throne of Torrence and I will have a blade at his belly or my name is not Grigori Borgia! Now, bring me the Blind Man.”

Gunter let out a breath that might have been a sigh. “Very well.” He crossed to the chamber’s exit, opened the door and summoned a page, telling him, “There is a Blind Man enjoying the master’s hospitality in the kitchen. Fetch him here.”

There was a bottle of wine sitting on the sideboard and Grigori helped himself to a generous serving. “He was here already?”

“I was on my way to report it to you when you summoned me on account of Signore Teodoro. It didn’t seem wise to mention it while he wasn’t here.”

“Your discretion is praiseworthy. It can be difficult to know how to deal with things when I am not entertaining guests. Your own position became available because your predecessor couldn’t parse such delicate matters.” Grigori drained his cup and waited for the bracing warmth of the wine to hit him. He was going to need it.

The servants in his household were nothing if not swift and less than three minutes after Gunter sent him the page returned, knocking on the door and announcing, “The Blind Man requests an audience with Signore Borgia.”

Grigori fixed his eyes on the door and said, “Enter.”

The page stepped into the room, holding the door open for a man dressed in a simple gray tunic and hose with a gray cloth wrapped around his eyes. He held a rough wooden staff that came up to his leather belt. The man’s hair was dark, bordering on black, but streaked with silver. In a few years Grigori suspected the situation would be much the opposite, with gray the dominant color and the black fading into obscurity. In spite of his incredible plainness the newcomer had an unsettling air to him.

Grigori marshalled his full faculties, doing his best to attend to every small change he observed, but he still found no indication of when the Blind Man began seeing through his eyes. Perhaps he was using Gunter’s or the page’s instead. Grigori raised his wine cup in salute.

“Papa Borgia,” the Blind Man said, bowing deeply from the waist. “I hope I find you well on this blessed morning?”

“Well enough.” Grigori motioned the page into the room. “Pour my guest something to drink, boy.”

“I am content, Signore,” the Blind Man said, a thin smile on his lips. “If you enjoy your wine that is more than enough for me.”

Grigori ran his tongue along the inside of his teeth, wondering if his guest was picking up on that sensation as well. Then he waved the page out of the room and made eye contact with Gunter. The Isenkinder nodded. “I should see if Evincio ran into any surprises. Excuse me, Papa.”

Once they were alone Grigori turned his attention fully to his guest. “Well, Fabian. Here we are again.”

“You don’t seem very happy about it, Papa Borgia,” the Blind Man said. “Have I done something to displease you?”

“I can’t help but recall that every time you come to me it seems like I get swindled out of something.”

“I? Swindle the Prince of Plunder?” His expression turned to one of mock horror. “How could I? Who can cross you and live to make the mistake a second time?”

“Perhaps I should give you your eyes back after all.”

The Blind Man’s expression lost all hint of mirth as he said, “You would value them more if you could see as clearly as they did.”

“The color of a thing has little to do with its value. My eyes work well enough, as you can tell for yourself. If you don’t enjoy seeing the world as I do then you shouldn’t have paid your debts as you did. Or you could just visit less.”

“Have you heard the latest news from the Drownway, Papa Borgia? And I don’t mean Teodoro. Clearly you have already learned about that or Evincio wouldn’t be on Gunter’s mind.”

Grigori pursed his lips, annoyed at the way the Blind Man seemed to learn everything there was to know in Renicie the moment it happened. Even if he could listen with every ear in the city he couldn’t use them all at once. Could he?

“It seems you haven’t.” The Blind Man folded his hands around his staff and sat back in his chair, looking as satisfied as a pick pocket with his first purse. “Signore Marelli’s caravan has arrived at last.”

Grigori sat up straight as an arrow. “Have they? They’re more than three weeks overdue!”

“Well, not the entire caravan, no. The word on the docks is that they were attacked by the Benthic and the wagons were lost. But not the crown jewel of the collection.”

For the first time since Gunter mentioned his presence Grigori started to feel like he might get something useful from the Blind Man this time around. “Are you saying…?”

“There were three survivors from the caravan.” He held up said number of fingers and wiggled them as they were named. “A bravo hired as a guard. One of the junior merchants who was driving a wagon. And a young woman with eyes like sapphires. They arrived just after low tide this morning in the company of their rescuers.”

Just like that Grigori saw all his plans for Torrence coming back together in a new shape, possibly one that would bring him even greater returns. There was only one little detail that gave him some hesitation. “Their… rescuers?”

“It seems the surviving bravo had a brother who heard he hadn’t arrived and set out to rescue him. Touching, really. The people on the docks seem as excited about the Ironhand and his party as they are about the survivors that were rescued.” The Blind Man offered a helpless shrug. “So fickle. Just last week they were bemoaning the loss of all that good Fionni cheese Marelli was dealing in.”

“They must be an impressive bunch if they managed to rescue prisoners from the Benthic, survived a falling star with the waves it raised and made it all the way here afterwords.” Grigori rubbed at his bottom lip, considering the facts. Given his current position and the fact that these bravos had somehow retrieved a key weapon he’d thought was lost he couldn’t afford to ignore this development. What he wasn’t sure of was why the Blind Man had brought the matter to him. News this significant would have fallen in his lap sooner or later. “Do you know where these bravos are?”

“Of course Papa Borgia.” The Blind Man got to his feet, his covered eyes still pointed towards Grigori’s own. “Would you like me to bring them to you?”

“Yes. As it happens I was in the process of searching for just such skillful individuals.”

“Then search no longer.” He sketched out another bow. “I shall return with them in a day or two, if not before.”

“I look forward to good news, Fabian. Until then.”

The Blind Man let himself out, the thin smile back on his lips, passing by Gunter as the Isenkinder returned with his usual impeccable timing. He made sure the door was firmly closed behind the Blind Man then approached Grigori’s desk. “That one may be reaching the end of his usefulness, Papa.”

“Reaching the end, Gunter. But not there yet.” He took a sip of his wine, wondering what his next move ought to be. “Evincio?”

“It’s a shocking thing, Papa. It seems he found a horse thief who broke into the stables! Thankfully they have kicked the villain to death but, alas, his skull was cracked like a chestnut in the process. His face is unrecognizeable. I fear we’ll never know who he was.”

“Tragic. The horses?”

“In good health. Unfortunately it seems Evincio was hit by one of the mares. His arm is broken.”

That was one problem settled and another in its place. Grigori got up and headed for the door. “Start putting together a sling, Gunter, and we’ll go and look in on poor Evincio. I leave for Lome in ten days and I need those horses in their best shape. I will take the break so he can return to work.”

“Of course, Papa. Of course.”

If only every problem House Borgia faced could be handled so easily. Still, there were new bravos at hand. If they proved sharp enough they might be a worthy weapon for the next duel. Time would tell.

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Seven – The King of Stars

Posted by natechen on August 16, 2025

Previous Chapter

Cassian washed up on shore on a wave of exhaustion and bruises. The moon was setting overhead and, if he closed his eyes and ignored the four Benthic scattered along the sand, he could almost imagine their entire trip beneath the ocean hadn’t happened. Almost.

He flopped onto his back and put one arm over his head, hiding from the stars overhead. If he was going to slip into total fantasy he might as well try to pretend that Cazador hadn’t gone missing in the first place and all he had to do to find him again was head home to the farm. Problem was, that fantasy wasn’t going to help anyone. Not himself. Certainly not Cazador. So Cassian rolled onto his front and slowly pushed himself up onto his feet.

“Are we all here?” He asked. “All alive?”

“Can’t be alive,” Adalai croaked. “Hurts too much.”

“The dead don’t feel pain,” Marta replied. She had a lot less trouble getting to her feet than the rest of them. Cassian wondered if she knew that she’d grown a thin layer of scales holding her shield against the rush of water that came in when the cavern under the ocean collapsed. He wondered if they were permanent.

“I beg to differ.” Adalai refused to move anything other than his lips. “If this is life it’s too miserable for anyone to survive it.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” Verina said, looking down on him from a perch on top of the Linnorm’s head.

He finally lifted his head up off the sand but only to glare up at her. “Pedantry.”

“Stop wallowing,” Cassian said, reaching down to grab him by the collar of his doublet. “Just because you died once and Returned doesn’t mean you can become a whiney misery for the rest of us.”

Adalai finally started moving for himself, brushing Cassian’s hand away and pulling himself upright. “What makes you say that?”

“The whining, mostly.”

“No, what makes you think I Returned from Eternity?”

Cassian blinked once, wondering if the other thought he was some kind of idiot. “I watched it happen. Adalai, your body vanished from the cavern for at least five minutes then the mists parted and you popped out of them like a spring saying the King of Stars was coming. I’m not a deeply religious man but even I can figure that out.”

“When you put it that way it does sound awfully compelling,” Adalai murmured. “I wasn’t exactly dead, though. That place was nothing like the outskirts of Eternity.”

“How is this place still here?” Verina said, her voice echoing over the sodden beach as the Linnorm lifted her higher and higher so she could survey their surroundings with her own eyes. “How are we? That star fell and the waves were like mountains! They should have ground us on the rocks like a millstone and shattered these islands as well.”

Cassian glanced at Trill, who still hadn’t moved, and said, “I wonder if they have anything to do with it. The Stellaris have some kind of pact with the King, perhaps he arranged to spare them.”

“Well either way we should probably get them back into the sea,” Marta said. “I don’t know how long it’s been since we washed up here but they have to be running low on water to breathe by now. After all they did for us I’d hate for them to die in such a pitiful way.”

“Of course. Stupid of me not to think of that. Are you in any shape to help, Adalai?”

“Give me a minute.”

In point of fact Marta and Cassian managed to get all four Benthic back in the water before Adalai rallied enough to move about. It was hard to hold it against him. Regardless of what the others might think, Cassian was fairly certain Adalai had died and Returned in that cavern. That kind of ordeal would leave anyone exhausted.

Trill and her guards came around after a couple of minutes in the ocean which was a bit of a relief to Cassian. “We’re all alive,” he said, sitting on the seabed so he would stay submerged with them. “So are you. I hope that’s enough to convince you we bear you no ill will because I have no intention of going back to the Ursus Nest with you.”

Trill made a dismissive gesture. “At this point I don’t believe there is much to be gained by bringing you back with us. If you were a threat to the Stellaris you’d have shown it by now. In addition the dragon you killed was a threat to us, so I suppose we also owe you a favor. Return to your arid lands. All I ask is that you take the time to ask for permission before entering our waters again.”

“Wait.” The Benthic paused on the brink of departure. Marta struggled for a moment as she tried to frame her question. Finally she just blurted out, “What about Braxton? He has been your prisoner far longer than is just and his own people need him back.”

She needed him back, although Cassian wondered if there was a future for her with the man she was so obviously smitten by now that fate had conspired to make her devour part of a dragon. However, whether or not that would matter was largely up to the Benthic. Trill did little to set the issue to rest. “I will do what I can,” the Benthic captain said. ”But I can’t make you many promises.”

Cassian cleared his throat, which didn’t sound quite as impressive under water, and said, “Forgive me for being a pessimist but are you even sure Ursus Nest still exists? After that star fell I have to wonder. The islands in the Drownway absorbed far more of the impact than I expected them to but the waves still must have dealt terrible destruction to anything in or along the Gulf.”

Trill swished her tail to cut off the Hexton woman’s protests. “Worry not, Marta Shieldbearer. Ursus Nest is quite safe, as is anything along your shores. Matriarchs are far more powerful tide turners than the normal Benthic. The reason these islands remain here instead of being swept into the Gulf is most likely because the Matriarch we saw put the whole force of her power into calming the waves caused by the star’s fall.”

“Your people have that kind of power?” Cassian asked, disturbed by the notion.

“We couldn’t survive without it,” Trill replied. “Stars fall in the ocean far more than upon the arid lands. Even without a Matriarch the Stellaris have found the power to turn back larger waves than these. We will be well. In time, when the needs of the treaty are upheld, we will return your Baron to you.”

Cassian returned the speaking pearls to Trill and they parted ways. As he waded through the surf back towards shore he glanced at Marta and frowned. “You’re still showing scales.”

She rolled up one sleeve and showed him the reptilian patterns there were fading. “I think it will go away with enough time. I’m not sure why they chose just now to finally make an appearance.”

“I have an idea or two but it’s pointless to guess blindly. In the forge we would have to hammer things out and I suspect this will be much the same.” Somehow, in the midst of all the insane underwater antics, he’d managed to keep ahold of his bag. Once he opened it up and looked he found his map was still in its oilcloth. Not a huge stroke of luck but he would take it.

As he waded the last few feet to shore he unfolded the map and tried to match the contours of the shoreline to the outlines on the page. He took the position of the stars. He looked east, then west, then east again. Finally he came to a stop, still ankle deep in water, staring blankly at the paper.

Adalai came out to meet him there. “Are you okay, Cassian?”

He kept staring at the map, unseeing. “Where… where do I go, Adalai?”

The other man took him by the elbow and gently dragged him back towards shore. “How about we go to Renicie?”

“But… the caravan… we haven’t found the caravan yet, I can’t even pay any of you and…” The map swam in front of his eyes.

“It’s all right, Cassian,” Marta said. “We all take some losses here and there, this is just one of them.”

“But…”

“You can’t stay out here searching for him forever,” Adalai said. “Come on, it’s time to head back to dry land.”

The map slipped from his fingers and crinkled softly as someone folded it again. Cassian staggered forward as the full weight of the day settled in on him. They had found dozens of Clayhearts like Cazador in the dragon’s lair wrapped in coral and, while they hadn’t looked at every one of them, it was a foolish fantasy to think his brother wasn’t among them. A caravan was a natural target for a dragon. And if Clayhearts were a part of whatever sorcery or ritual the creature was undertaking that made Cazador’s group even more of a prize. They had gone missing in the same general area the dragon hunted.

Now the dragon’s lair was destroyed by star fall.

A flash of rage cleared his vision and Cassian spun around, ripping his breastplate plate off with his Gift. “What a stupid…”

The breastplate skipped more than a dozen times of the waves. “Waste…”

He ripped off a gauntlet but before he could throw it Adalai grabbed him in a bear hug, dragging him back from the water line. “Let me go.”

“Calm down, Cassian.”

“I have to -”

“There’s nothing left to do. It’s time to move on.”

He finally let himself stop, staring out at the waves as they rolled in endlessly, rippling with the reflection of the heavens. Perhaps the King of Stars had come to Return Adalai, perhaps to destroy the Benthic’s gods. Perhaps it was just his duty to guide Cazador and the others into Eternity.

“Let go of me, Adalai.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. You’re right, it’s time to head back to land.”

The other man relaxed his grip and stepped away, leaving Cassian unsteady but upright. The rush of anger that energized him a moment ago had vanished, somehow leaving him even more tired and sore than before it arrived. He sighed and squinted at the ocean, absently wondering if he could catch the gleaming of his metal armor. All he could see was waves. Then he caught a brighter point of light that he focused on it. But it didn’t have the glimmer of metal he’d come to associate with the dragon sight he’d inherited from the sea dragon.

It was more of a cluster of lights. Seven of them. They were rushing inland and quickly separated into a seven pointed crown that raised itself up out of the ocean, seeming to reach all the way to heaven. Beneath them was the outline of a man. Terror washed over Cassian as a living representation of forever stepped up and out of the ocean, steam rising off a body filled with the power of the constellations, and bent down to the shoreline. He shrank back from the entity as one closed hand came to rest on the ground.

The fingers flexed, full of blazing comets and shimmering starlight, then opened to deposit three unconscious human forms on the sand. Then the King of Stars straightened up, paused for a moment to look at the four people who watched him in frozen awe. Then his body vanished and his crown stretched upwards until it merged with the stars above.

Cassian wasn’t sure how long he stared up after the King before he came back to himself. At the very least it was still night when he did. He wasn’t sure why they’d been chosen to see the vision, nor did he care. There was only one thing that really mattered to him.

Reenergized, he dashed forward to the bodies on the beach. It was clear at once they were all breathing. One was too small to be an adult and the second had long, graying hair so Cassian ignored them. The last was the right size. Before any doubt could build in his mind he grabbed the man and rolled him over so he could see his face.

That was how Cassian Ironhand found his brother at last.

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Six – The Inevitable

Posted by natechen on August 9, 2025

Previous Chapter

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.

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Five – The Matriarch

Posted by natechen on August 2, 2025

Previous Chapter

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…

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Four – The Deep

Posted by natechen on July 26, 2025

Previous Chapter

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.

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Three – The Knot

Posted by natechen on July 19, 2025

Previous Chapter

For a brief moment Adalai let himself fantasize about the Mists in the Deep having a totally scientific, material basis that Benthic mythology had distorted into a legend over time. It was the kind of thinking most people back home had indulged often. Over the years since he’d left home he’d spent many a wistful night wondering what his life might have been like if it was true and there were no personal avatars of the inexorable forces of nature. Definitively shorter, for one thing.

However his life had not been short because death, at the very least, had spokesmen. He wondered what the Mists in the Deep actually spoke for. Nothing good, if what Trill said about the Benthic life cycle was accurate.

He wasn’t a huge fan of the way the Stellaris dragged them everywhere underwater but he did appreciate how quickly his Benthic minder got him down to the stone structure they’d discovered. He’d barely started examining it when Trill said, “It looks like the Sign of Folded Water.”

“That’s the primary Benthic god, right?” Cassian asked. “Is that good or bad?”

“The Stellaris don’t venerate any of the creatures the other Benthic worship,” Trill said. “But it was the Lord of Folded Waters who supposedly raised us up from eels and gave us minds and the power to control the tides.”

“I don’t suppose you know anything about the Mists in the Deep?” Adalai asked.

“No. Nothing of their songs or prayers were brought into the Stellaris when we were founded.” She stared blankly at the stone knot for a long moment then shook her head. “I doubt either of them will look on us with favor now.”

“If the Lord of Folded Waters thought it was a good idea for Benthic women to eat all their sisters I’m not sure his favor is something you want,” Verina said. She let herself drift down until she was on the bottom next to the stone formation.

Adalai settled next to her. “Do you see something?”

“No…” But her voice suggested just the opposite.

“Does the Linnorm see something?”

“I’m not sure. It’s not answering my questions right now, which happens every once in a while. This is the first time it’s happened when I’ve been in some kind of immediate danger, though.” She stuck a knuckle between her teeth and chewed on it.

“Have you been in danger a lot in your life?”

“The Slavs are lost, Adalai. I fear we’ll all be in danger until we find our home again.”

There was more truth in that than he wanted to admit so he ignored it. “So I guess we’ll have to figure this thing out on our own.”

“Why are we figuring it out?” Marta asked. “We could still try to bottleneck the Benthic up at the entrance.”

Adalai shook his head. “I’m not sure that’s going to work now. What was it you said back in Fionni, Verina? This whole job has the touch of inevitability to it, right? I think this is why.”

“I did ask you to come on this job because you have a Gift that gives more insight than the norm,” Cassian said. “However, in this case I’m going to need more than ‘a touch of inevitability’ to go along with whatever you’re suggesting.”

Adalai chewed on his lower lip, trying to organize his thoughts. “It’s not as simple or straightforward as you might like, Cassian, but I’ll try my best. The Kings at the Corners are revered in Nerona but they’re not from Nerona, if you see what I mean. Where I’m from we had a name for them but we didn’t have anything like the orders of Heralds, for example.”

“The Slavs are much the same,” Verina said. “But what does that have to do with this?”

“It’s the same concept, I think. The Mists in the Deep are revered by the Benthic but it doesn’t mean said Mists have no influence at all on the rest of us. Or that we have no value to them. Trill says they’re associated with volcanic vents which are created by liquid stone. Clayhearts can turn to stone and the sea dragon had a whole mess of them captured in its lair. A place that also had a scrying pool in it which I am certain was connected to this thing somehow.”

Cassian shook his head. “That doesn’t feel very concrete at all, Adalai.”

“I know, I know. There might be more I could get if I used my Gift on it but I’m fairly certain that if I did I wouldn’t live long enough to share any of it with you.” He rubbed his gloved palm with the tips of his fingers, wondering if he was about to say something foolish. “The worst part is I’m fairly certain those Clayhearts are dead, or close enough to it. I’m afraid that if your brother is up there we’re not getting him back.”

The other man had gone dangerously still. “Why do you think that?”

“Because when I looked into that scrying mirror I saw the King of Stars and I don’t think he was just there because a scrying shows you omens of things to come. Those pearls…” Adalai tasted bile in the back of his throat as he thought of them. “I think those pearls extract the Clayheart’s souls for some purpose. I’ve no doubt that at some point the King will have to take those souls into Eternity and that was the real reason he was there.”

“You can recognize the King of Stars just like that?”

“We’ve met.”

“Yes…” Trill said softly. “You said the only one you hadn’t met was the King of Dawn.”

Cassian ignored her. “You don’t know that-”

“No, I don’t.” Adalai let himself drift up from the seafloor and grabbed the other man by his shoulders. “Your brother may be alive. He may not even be one of the dragon’s prisoners, we didn’t have time to look at all of them. That thing over there might have nothing to do with the Mists in the Deep. But we’re out of options here. We can try and fight that Matriarch and her Benthic, however many there might be, or we can tamper with that thing, whatever it might be. But those are our choices. Only one of them seems like it might get us out of this alive.”

“So let’s get up to the entrance and barricade it before the Benthic get down here,” Marta said.

“He means this,” Trill said, pointing to the stone knot. “Matriarchs can have hundreds or thousands of daughters. There’s no way we can kill them all, even with the strange and unpredictable way human Gifts work.”

“That’s insane,” Marta snapped. She thrust the head of her mace at the knot. “We don’t know what that is and we don’t know how to manipulate it. If we fight the Matriarch at least we know what we’re fighting and when we’ve won, we touch that thing and we might not even realize when it’s killed us.”

“Marta.” It took a second for Adalai to realize who was talking. There was a chill in Cassian’s voice that made him sound like an entirely different person. “Look around. You’re not tired but that makes you the only one. Summoning the Linnorm in water took a lot out of Verina and I doubt she’s going to be able to pull it off again more than once. Adalai has used his gift a lot in the past few hours on top of the puking. Trill and her troops have been dragging us all over the ocean floor for half a day in addition to fighting with the Benthic earlier. Me? I suppose I just don’t have your stamina.”

The last one was the only one that didn’t have a basis in reality. Adalai watched Marta’s face as she looked around her and slowly realized it was true. “Fine. Fine. How are we getting into the middle of this thing, then? I can’t swing a mace fast enough underwater to smash it.”

Cassian peered at the stone, running one gloved finger along it, his sudden grim mood receding for the moment. “It’s not metal, so I can’t help.”

Marta glanced at Trill. “Can you four breathe air at all? I know the ones the dragon enthralled stayed on land for a good while.”

“We can hold water in our chest and breathe from it for nearly one hour if we don’t move much,” the Benthic replied.

“Better suck all that in, then. The rest of you, hold your breath.” Marta unslung her shield and raised it over her head. The metal scale pulsed with light. Unlike with most of the shields she created with her Gift this one did not simply appear at the size she desired. Instead it bubbled out slowly, pushing the water out from a central point and expanding around any solid object that got in the way.

Adalai wasn’t sure why she said to hold their breaths until his ears slipped inside the shield dome and suddenly heard nothing. There wasn’t any water inside the dome she’d created. There also wasn’t any air. It was a vacuum. They were going to have to try and smash the stone knot as fast as they could because he couldn’t breathe water from his chest for nearly as long as a Benthic.

Based on the strain visible on Marta’s face one of the rest of them was going to have to swing her mace for her. He doubted she had the energy to spare. So he reached down and grabbed it, only to drop it again when the Linnorm’s heads peeked into their world. They appeared as soon as there was space, their eyes gleaming with some emotion he couldn’t describe.

The spirit latched both its jaws onto the stone coils and chewed, spectral muscles on its necks standing out in ropes. He shot a look at Verina but she seemed just as surprised to see it as he was. The Benthic fell back from the Linnorm, shielding their faces against the heat they doubtless expected from it. Of course, in a vacuum they were in no danger but he didn’t think people in Nerona encountered those very often.

Adalai tried to find an angle where he could look under the dragon’s jaws. If it needed help prying the stone apart the mace was still near at hand and he wasn’t above contributing his own arm strength to the endeavor. Thanks to that he got a front row seat to the stone structure breaking apart.

It did not look like he’d expected.

Instead of a violent shattering or a sudden crumbling the loops of stone gracefully unfurled, at least at first. It reminded him of a flower blooming. Except halfway through the Linnorm got a solid grip on two of the petals and ripped them right out of the flower with a silent snap. The remaining three loops continued to unfurl until they pointed out and up towards the ceiling like curled fingers.

In the center of the newly created flower was a dull red thing that looked like clay yet glowed with its own light. It released a torrent of white, roiling mist into the vacuum. With no pressure to contend with the mist immediately boiled out to fill the dome, washing over Adalai and obscuring everything around him.

As soon as he was surrounded by mist Adalai noticed three things. First, he could hear again, which meant he was standing in the air or the water once more. Second, the mists were warm but not as hot as one might expect if they were coming out of a lava fed steam vent. Third, he was being watched again.

It had the same feeling as the thing that had watched him when he looked into the scrying mirror. Just much closer. To drive that point home the watcher chose that moment to speak to him.

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Two – The Chamber

Posted by natechen on July 12, 2025

Previous Chapter

“You think we have a problem?” Cassian stopped himself from giving vent to six or seven possible come backs to that ludicrous statement. “What problem are you expecting, if I may ask?”

Instead of answering right away Adalai grabbed the box he’d been asking about earlier and shoved it into his shoulder bag. Then he brushed the seven pearls out of their niches and into the shallow pool in their center. “This is a scrying mirror,” he said as the gemstones plunked into the water and rolled along the bottom, their glow becoming oddly dispersed. “I think the dragon was using it to communicate with something.”

“Something? Not someone?” Adalai jerked back from the water, horrified, and Cassian instantly drew his sword, expecting yet another problem to deal with. Turned out it was just the pearls dissolving in the bottom of the pool. “Were you expecting them to melt?”

“They’re not melting.” Adalai leapt up, dashed over to the dragon’s shelves of treasure and came back with a huge rug and an armful of candlesticks. With a single smooth motion he unrolled the rug over the pool saying, “I think that is an altar to the Mists in the Deep.”

“Sounds like a Benthic god,” Cassian murmured.

“Exactly. I couldn’t say for sure but I’m willing to bet it’s the source for all these pearls. Maybe it was bribing the dragon with them.” The candlesticks went around the edge of the rug to hold it in place.

“Bribing a dragon doesn’t make any sense,” Cassian said. “You can’t offer dragon’s treasure to get them to behave as you wish, they’ll just take the money and do whatever they wanted in the first place.”

“Maybe that’s what it would do with a human bribe. Dragons can easily overpower people, no doubt, but would they have such an easy time with something that qualifies as a god?” Adalai finished anchoring the rug in place and dusted his hands off. “It’s even possible the dragon was in thrall to the god the same way the Benthic were in thrall to the dragon. Either way, it’s time we got out of here. The Mists know we’re here now. They may have known we were here all along, although I doubt we’ll ever figure that out.”

“Lovely.” Cassian grabbed Adalai and pushed him towards the water. “Trill is here already and she says the ocean Benthic are already on their way in force. Says they brought something called a Matriarch. Head back the way we came, we’ve already put together a plan to get out of here we were just waiting for you to cool your head.”

The other man didn’t waste time apologizing, just put his head down and ran. Compared to their trip into the lair they got through the water and back to the entrance tunnel in fairly short order. That’s where their good luck gave out.

The tunnel down was already full of hostile Benthic, piling out of the entrance two or three at a time. Four of them were dead, impaled on the spears of Trill’s warriors. Another half a dozen were pushing Trill and her troops back with spears of their own. The water around them shook and trembled under the invisible influence of the Benthic’s wave shaping powers, adding an invisible layer of danger on top of the obvious conflict underway.

“Trill!” Cassian called, stretching his pearl out in front of him to amplify his voice. “Trill, back off! We need to dive!”

“What about these stale eggs?” Trill snarled.

“We can deal with them.” He caught Verina’s eye. “Boil it.”

For a moment she was confused then realization dawned and she nodded.

The quartet of friendly Benthic shot away from the tunnel mouth, grabbing Verina and Marta as they dove deep as quickly as they could. Adalai and Cassian were left to swim after them as fast as they could. Cassian spared a moment to see how the deep water Benthic responded and, as he hoped, they waited as more of their own number massed at the tunnel entrance.

That was their undoing.

Watching the Linnorm manifest under the water was a surreal experience. One moment there were eight Benthic swarming around the mouth of the entrance tunnel. Then there was a flash of green light. The water bent and rippled, distorting the Benthic until they looked like dolls made of string, then it exploded into a wall of white hot steam. Trill’s soldiers grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the chasm.

The screams of cooking Benthic receded into the distance as they made their way into the chasm’s darkest reaches. They paused for just a moment so Trill and Burp could fish small glowing anemones affixed to some kind of seaweed strap out of a belt pouch. These were tied around their necks.

It didn’t create a lot of light but it was apparently enough for Trill to navigate by so they continued down at a more sedate pace. Cassian quickly took stock of their situation. Marta was looking around, fine by all appearances, while Adalai let the Benthic drag him along, his brows furrowed in thought. Verina was pale and a little shaky but she hadn’t passed out like she had when the Linnorm got doused by the sea dragon.

All in all they weren’t in bad shape given the circumstances. “Trill,” he said, “how sure are you there’s an opening down here?”

“Not certain.” She pointed to the glossy black stone walls. “These were probably created by liquid stone bubbling out of the ocean floor in times long past. It may have poured out in other places creating other exits. Or the chambers the stone once ran through below the ocean floor may have currents of their own that we can sense from here.”

“How likely is it these chambers have liquid stone in them now?”

His answer came from Sputter rather than Trill. “No one has seen signs of liquid stone in this part of the ocean for hundreds of spawning cycles, since long before Lum the First created the Stellaris. If we find chambers below there’s no danger we will find liquid stone there. It’s far more likely they simply never connect to the open ocean anywhere else and we will be trapped in them until we starve.”

Cassian winced. “Wonderful.”

Her comments got Adalai’s attention, pulling him out of whatever thoughts had consumed him since using the scrying mirror. “Do you know exactly how long it’s been since-”

The walls of the chasm shook and an impossibly loud impact rippled through the water, hitting Cassian with more force than he would have thought possible. “Speed up!”

“We can’t go any faster,” Trill snapped. “We can only see so far. The flow of stone isn’t even, any of these walls could have sharp spurs on them that can maim or kill.”

“Don’t worry about that, the walls are smooth for hundreds of feet.” Cassian squinted slightly, his vision blurring and focusing as he strained to work out how to see in the dark while surrounded by light. After a few seconds of concentration the tunnel snapped into focus. “I’ll warn you if I see any change.”

Trill gave him a skeptical look. “And how will you do this? Humans cannot see in darkness any better than the Benthic.”

“I told you. We ate a dragon. I don’t know what that does to a Benthic but it changes humans quite a lot.”

A second impact shook the chasm and that was apparently enough to convince Trill to take his word as she sped up until they were moving almost as fast as they had in the open ocean. “If there’s no liquid stone in the chambers,” Marta asked as they rushed along, “then what is that sound?”

“The Matriarch,” Trill said. “She is trying to smash a way in to reach us.”

“What is this Matriarch?” Cassian asked. “I assumed since there were so many female Benthic your leader would be female as well but that sounds like something a lot bigger than you.”

“You assumed correctly,” Trill said, a dark note in her voice, her frills and fronds lying flat. “A Matriarch grows huge by devouring her sisters. In time she will be the only one left from her brood and she will spawn thousands of eggs to hatch the next generation so that the violence may be repeated. When Lum fled the deep oceans to found the Stellaris it was this cycle he sought to break.”

A third impact shook the chasm and a sickening crack echoed overhead. Cassian spared a look upwards. A thin beam of light split the darkness there. “It does sound bad. At the moment it definitely gives them the advantage.”

“What do they want?” Marta asked, also directing her attention upwards. “If they wanted the dragon’s treasures they already have them. We haven’t done anything to them, other than pass through their waters, so why is the Matriarch of the Tidallais here pounding on our walls?”

“They’re after the Mists in the Deep,” Adalai said.

“The altar is also up there,” Cassain said. “Or are you just saying they haven’t found it yet?”

“They aren’t looking for the altar, they’re looking for the magma tubes.” Cassian didn’t recognize the word ‘magma’ but he didn’t want to interrupt. “In places where it bubbles out of the ocean floor it creates steam. Mists in the Deep.”

Burp, the Benthic that was pulling Adalai, twitched violently, her fronds waving wildly in the water. “Are you saying we’re swimming into the grasp of the Cursed Mists?”

“No. I’m not sure of anything here. But it would go a long way to explain everything we’ve seen so far.”

“Enough!” Trill cut off the conversation with a violent slash of her tail. “Perhaps we journey into the Sky Below, perhaps the dry borne speaks of things he knows nothing about. Either of these may be true. Neither may be.”

“Both may be,” Cassian added.

“As you say,” Trill admitted grudgingly. “Regardless of what else is true, the only way out of this for us is down. We will just have to deal with whatever is beneath us.”

About a minute later they discovered that what was beneath them was a huge, egg shaped cavern with smooth walls. Cassian guessed the chamber was a good three hundred feet from one end to the other but only a third that height. The chasm emerged near the center of the chamber’s roof. Even with his dragon enhanced eyes Cassian couldn’t see any signs of weeds or anemones growing along the chamber walls. They were perfectly smooth.

Except for the very bottom, near one end of the chamber. A strange series of stone loops passed over and around a weird, reddish brown object that shed a dim light.

Marta pulled her shield around to a ready position. “Is that liquid stone?”

“Not possible,” Verina said. “The water is far too cool for that. The Great Linnorm once lived on a mountain of liquid stone, it knows the signs well.”

“You can see this whole chamber, Ironhand?” Trill asked.

“Everything except what’s under that thing. And before you ask, no, there’s no other exits.” He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to weigh which was the greatest danger they faced. “Think the Matriarch will leave if we kill all her troops?”

Trill made an indifferent motion. “Perhaps.”

“We could try and bottleneck them back at the entrance. Verina, how many times could you manifest the Linnorm?”

“No.” Adalai shook free of Burp and started swimming towards the strange object. “They want that thing, whatever it is. We get rid of it, they leave us alone.”

Unfortunately for him Burp was much faster in the water than he was and grabbed him again right away. Cassian frowned. It wasn’t like Adalai to act so impulsively. Trill caught his confusion and asked him, “What are you thinking?”

He sighed. “I hired him to come on this job because he’s good at reading things and he’s the one who looked at the altar in the dragon’s lair. If he thinks we should get rid of it we should at least try.”

“Then we will try.” But she didn’t look happy about it.

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Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Tag Archives: fiction

A Precious Cornerstone – A Clattering in the Basement

Siren Song (Haunted Blog Crawl 2025)

Fiction as Refuge

The Drownway Epilogue – Rumors in Renicie

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Seven – The King of Stars

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Six – The Inevitable

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Five – The Matriarch

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Four – The Deep

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Three – The Knot

The Drownway Chapter Twenty Two – The Chamber

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