Chapter 1135: A Drastic Change
“The Swirling Sea is large,” Thunder said. “It’s natural it has unusual geography. I’ve seen stone formations in the Kingdom of Wolfheart — weathered rock pillars, taller than they should be, standing without apparent support.”
“Wolfheart has wind,” Camilla said. She left the rest unspoken.
“Wind?” Joan’s voice surfaced abruptly in her head. “There’s wind here.”
Camilla’s focus snapped inward. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t—” Thunder began.
“Not you. Joan.” She cut him off without apology; she had learned to. “Joan says there’s wind at the bottom.”
The deck went quiet.
“I can’t feel it,” Joan said. “But I can hear it. Listen.”
Camilla concentrated, narrowing into the channel until she was as close to Joan’s senses as the ability allowed. Immediately she heard it: a thin, sustained howl threading through water the way air screams through a fractured wall.
“I’m going deeper,” Joan said. “I need to change position first.”
Through the channel, Camilla felt the transition — the small displacement of weight as Joan untied her dress and allowed her legs to fully touch the water. Blue scales crept from her ankles upward. The mermaid tail unfurled. Then the pressure changed, and the cold became something else entirely: ease. The water was not resistance anymore. It was medium. Joan’s tail drove her down and forward with an efficiency that made every breath above the surface feel wasteful.
This is what she actually is, Camilla thought, and said nothing.
“Two hundred meters,” she reported aloud to the deck. “The wind sound is louder. The pillars continue. No change in structure.”
“Four hundred meters. Completely dark. Joan can still see. Stone pillars extending below her. New ones appearing at the periphery.”
“Can you pay out more rope?” someone asked from the back of the crowd.
“Six hundred meters. Or eight hundred — Joan has lost track.” Camilla’s voice flattened. “The pillars—”
She stopped.
“What?” Thunder said.
The cold had climbed from her fingertips to her wrists. She said slowly, “The pillars have no bases.”
The deck erupted.
“Vanished? What do you mean vanished?”
“By the Three Gods—”
“Woman, are you certain—”
“Silence!” Thunder’s voice cut through the noise. The shouting stopped. “Are all the reefs affected?”
“I don’t know. They vary in length.” Camilla pressed her free hand flat against her sternum, steadying. Through Joan’s eyes she could see only the midpoints of the stone columns — their upper surfaces catching faint filtered light, their lower ends simply absent, shorn off by some boundary she could not name, hanging in open water with no visible anchor to the seafloor.
“We haven’t reached the bottom of any of them yet.”
Joan was slowing. Even the mermaid body had thresholds.
Then Camilla noticed the pillars directly beside Joan.
The patterning along their faces was wrong. Regular columns displayed uniform barnacle clusters, round-shaped, consistent spacing — the ordinary arithmetic of marine growth. The columns nearest Joan showed something different. The barnacles were oval. Stretched. The pillars themselves appeared to have elongated, as though something had taken hold of them from below and pulled with insufficient force to break.
Three meters away, the normal columns. Here, at Joan’s depth, distortion.
“Joan.” Camilla kept her voice even. “Do you see the barnacles beside you?”
“Yes. They look strange.”
“Can you take a closer look?”
“Be careful,” Camilla added, and heard the redundancy of it, and said it anyway.
Joan moved toward the nearest column. She reached out and touched one of the oval barnacles —
Her fingers stretched.
Not far. Not grotesquely. But unmistakably: her scaly fingers elongated, the proportion of each joint briefly wrong, and then snapped back when she pulled her hand away.
“What is that?” Joan held her hand up, turning it. “Is it an illusion?”
Camilla opened her mouth to speak to Thunder.
A movement caught Joan’s attention first. A silver eel, arm-length, ordinary — the kind caught daily by Fjords fishing crews. It crossed in front of Joan’s face from right to left.
As it entered the zone beside the distorted pillar, it stretched.
Not gradually. Instantaneously, the eel went from arm-length to five meters, then ten, then it continued elongating as it plunged — fifty meters, seventy, the silver body thinning and thinning until it was a thread and then the thread vanished into the darkness below and was gone. The entire sequence lasted three seconds.
Every hair on Camilla’s body stood up.
“Out,” she said. “Joan, come back now. Come back right now. The exploration is finished—”
Joan was already moving. Her tail beat hard, driving upward. For two strokes she gained.
Then she stopped gaining.
Camilla felt it through the channel: the tail pushing but the body descending, the two forces unequal. Something below had Joan’s tail and was pulling with a patience that did not tire. Joan’s upper body stayed vertical. Her tail below the waist stretched down into the darkness like a rope pulled taut.
“What do I do?” Joan’s voice had gone thin. “Camilla, what do I do—”
“Kick harder. Don’t stop. You can do this. Kick harder—”
But Joan’s torso was stretching now. Her arms. Camilla watched Joan’s hands reach toward her in the channel, fingers long and wrong, and then everything went white.
Camilla opened her eyes to the deck planks.
She did not remember falling. She was on her hands and knees and sweat was dropping from the tip of her nose onto the back of her left hand, tap, tap, tap, a very small sound in a very quiet space. Her whole body was damp. The kind of cold that comes from the inside out.
Thunder crouched in front of her.
“Joan—” Camilla started.
“Easy.” He helped her upright. His hands were steady. “What happened?”
It took a long moment for the deck and the daylight and the distance to reassemble themselves around her. She was on the Snow Wind. The Shadow Islands. The fleet anchored to a reef. Joan was two hundred meters below the surface, or eight hundred, or somewhere she could not measure.
“The channeling was disrupted,” she said. Her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
“Why?”
She had told them already, hadn’t she? Or only in her head. “Two reasons a channel breaks. Either the connected person is dead—” She stopped. Breathed. “Or the distance between us exceeded the range.”
She said nothing further. Neither of them did, for a while.
Above them the mist moved in long slow streamers across the stone pillars. The fleet rocked at anchor. Somewhere in the distance, the Ghost Shadow Red River still ran its unceasing circuit through the dark water. Joan was somewhere below all of it, and Camilla had no way to know which reason applied.