Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1136: Sea and Sky

A white speck of light appeared in the darkness and then everything was blazing white.

Joan came back to herself in pieces: the roar of water first, then the sensation of spinning, then the slow understanding that she was not spinning — that the water was, and she was caught in it, tumbling through a collision of currents that struck each other at angles she could not predict. The deep-sea stillness was gone. The pressure was gone. In its place: chaos, and noise, and the feeling of being weightless in something that would not hold still.

She was mermaid enough not to drown. She was not mermaid enough to simply ignore being thrown.

The currents drove her upward. She helped them, her tail working in the spaces between surges, and when she broke the surface she gasped a breath of real air and opened her eyes.

The Shadow Islands were gone.

Rock enclosed her on three sides — wet, close, the surfaces dark with age. She was in a channel, not an open sea. A hundred meters wide, perhaps two hundred. The water roared through it and kept roaring, the sound bouncing between the walls until it became a single undifferentiated pressure. Above her: a narrow strip of sky and the glare of light at one end.

The current is running toward that light.

She tried to reconnect Camilla. Nothing answered on that end — the channel had the texture of a severed rope, frayed at the cut, no resistance on the other side.

She tried again. Nothing.

Swim up and get out, she told herself. That comes first.

The current carried her toward the glare before she had to work for it. The walls fell away. The roaring amplified once more and then —

She was flying.

For one impossible moment she floated in open air, her body arcing upward with the water itself, the spray exploding into the sunlight around her. Below: the surface of the open sea, a very long way down. The rock she had been inside jutted from the ocean on her left, enormous, dark.

Then gravity remembered her.

“Ya — ya — ya — ”

She hit the water. The impact drove the breath out of her. She went deep before she could stop herself, then reversed and kicked back toward the light.

She surfaced gasping, treading water, and looked up.

The rock was not a rock.

It hung in the air.

Joan floated and looked at it for a long time. It was difficult to look at in the usual sense — there was no angle from which she could see all of it. What she could see was a cliff face hundreds of meters tall and an estimated hundred meters thick, its underside running with water, dozens of cracks in its face from which that water poured in long white streams that fell and fell and hit the sea around her in columns of spray. The nearest waterfall struck the surface thirty meters to her left. The sound of all of them together was the sound of continuous thunder that did not stop.

Clouds moved across the rock’s upper surface. She was looking at what was, to all appearances, the side of a mountain. The mountain was not connected to anything.

She drifted for a while, letting herself process this.

Lightning had told her once that the world was a sphere. From that, Joan understood, it followed that the ocean had a far edge somewhere. This thing was at or beyond that edge — the kind of geography that existed outside the maps the Fjords explorers had drawn, which meant no one in Neverwinter knew it was here, which meant she needed to go back and tell them.

The question of how to do that felt briefly very large, and then she set it aside. She was alive. She was a mermaid in open water. She had survived things before that should have killed her.

She turned west, confirmed the direction from the angle of the sun, and began to swim.

She had gone perhaps two hundred meters when something fell from the sky.

The sound reached her first: a deep concussive splash, much larger than her own had been. She stopped, treading water. The splash site was maybe a hundred and fifty meters behind her, between her and the base of the floating rock. She watched the surface for a moment, then dived.

The thing was large.

At first she thought: wreckage. The shape was wrong for a ship but the scale was comparable. Then it moved.

Four fins, each the length of a good-sized fishing boat. The body between them was a ribcage — not resembling one, but literally constructed like one, curved struts visible through a translucent membrane housing what appeared to be internal organs. The whole assembly pulsed as it swam. It reminded Joan of something that had been eaten and not quite finished.

She watched it join a formation.

Five of them. Ten. More at the edges of her vision. They were arranged in columns, the spacing between them precise — not the loose scatter of schooling fish but the alignment of a fleet that had traveled together before, that had standing orders. They moved east, toward the sunrise, and disappeared into deeper water.

Joan surfaced.

She checked the direction they had gone, then checked her own heading. West. Away from them. Good.

She stayed in the water and thought.

The witch instinct was not a mystical thing; she had come to understand this living in Neverwinter, where people discussed abilities the way craftsmen discussed tools. It was pattern recognition that operated faster than conscious thought. The pattern here was: large organized group moving with purpose, and she was a single small thing, and those were not circumstances to invite contact.

She began swimming again.

Don’t force yourself. Your friends are waiting for you.

The words surfaced from somewhere under the noise of the water. Camilla had said them before Joan dove, and they had seemed like the ordinary cautions people offered before dangerous things. They felt different now. They felt like a fact she could navigate by.

Lightning’s face. Maggie’s enormous pigeon-form waddling across the courtyard. Lorgar’s serious expression when she was explaining something she thought was obvious. The warmth of the dormitory in winter, the smell of the evening meal coming up from the kitchen, the particular quality of belonging that she had not recognized as rare until she had been suddenly removed from it.

She wanted to go back.

The wanting was physical, a pressure in her chest distinct from the cold of the water. She had felt many things in the years she had lived in the ocean, but not this — not the specific weight of somewhere to return to.

She swam harder.

The Swirling Sea was vast. But the world was a sphere. And she had time.

Three days.

Camilla had not moved from the railing in any meaningful way since the channeling broke. She ate when food was brought. She looked at the water.

“We have to go,” Thunder said.

He stood beside her at the rail, not quite touching. The fleet moved behind them with the small sounds of anchored ships — water against hull, rope under tension, the creak of wood settling.

“She’s not back.”

“No.” He looked at the same stretch of water she was looking at. “Three days, Camilla. Waiting here doesn’t change what happened below.”

“I dropped the channel.” She said it flatly. Not as accusation. As fact.

“You passed out. That’s different.”

She made a sound that was not agreement.

“Two reasons a channel breaks,” Thunder said. He had been listening, clearly, even when she thought she was speaking only in her own head. “Distance, or death. You told us both. If it’s distance — if Joan is far enough away that the range gave out — then waiting here puts us farther from her, not closer.” He paused. “You’re not helping her by staying at this railing.”

Camilla’s hands were white on the rail.

“The east side of the Sealine,” she said. “That’s where I would start looking.”

“The fleet goes east,” Thunder said. “You go back. Roland’s orders, standing ones — I bring you home after the Shadow Islands regardless of what happens. He needs your report. He needs you alive for the fight.” He said it with the evenhandedness of a man who had delivered hard news before. “Joan is special. She has lived in the open ocean for a decade. She will not drown.”

The fleet’s anchor chains clattered.

Camilla looked at the Shadow Islands one more time — the dark pillars, the mist threading between them, the surface of the water that gave nothing back. Somewhere below that surface there was either a girl swimming west with her tail, or there was nothing, and waiting at this railing would not determine which.

She straightened.

Two hours later the Snow Wind’s whistle sounded, two long blasts, and the fleet separated on the open water: Thunder’s columns heading east toward the Sealine, and one ship turning back toward the ports of the Fertile Plains. They shrank in each other’s views and were gone.

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