Chapter 1295: Guardian
Joan’s face opened with the kind of relief that has nowhere else to go.
This was the second person she’d encountered who understood the mermaid’s language — the other being Maggie, whose comprehension was genuinely uncertain. Maggie made “coo” sounds, which were harder to read than “ya” sounds, and their exchanges had always been limited to short words and gestures.
But who was this guardian?
Joan made her sounds carefully. “Are you guarding the large pit? Where am I?”
“It isn’t a pit,” the woman said, smiling. “It’s a bridge.”
Joan looked at the smooth, sheer walls dropping away into unknown depth, the vines and packed mud lining the sides, the absence of any road or step or surface to walk on. “I’ve seen bridges before. They don’t look like that.”
“Not everyone can use this bridge. Only the ones with keys.” The woman’s voice was patient, as though she had explained this before — to herself, perhaps, over a long time. “You don’t have a key, so you can’t see the bridge.”
Joan considered this. All right. But why block it at all? The builders could have simply — let people pass. Even without a key, anyone could walk around the pit, cross the island, keep going.
The guardian’s expression shifted into something rueful. “Yes, they could. But this is what I have to do. I wait for the person who holds the key and grant them passage.”
Joan studied her. Something about the woman’s stillness, the quiet weight she carried — it asked a question by itself.
“You aren’t chained.”
“What?”
“You aren’t chained,” Joan said again, pointing toward the mist at the island’s edge. “There’s a continent not far from here — I could see it from the water. It isn’t far. You could swim there. Since you aren’t chained, I could take you.”
The guardian was still for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Never mind me. You’re injured — were you attacked?”
Joan didn’t understand the change of subject but answered without hesitation: “The monsters in the sea scratched me.”
“Come and lie down. I have medicine.”
For no reason she could name with certainty, Joan trusted her. She lay down on the grass, and the guardian produced a small jar of cream, spread it over her palm, and began working it into the cuts in Joan’s scales. The cooling sensation arrived immediately — not the sharp cold of seawater but a clean, still coolness, like shade in the middle of a hot day, like the first breath after surfacing.
“Ya—”
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” The guardian tore strips from her dress and wrapped each wound after the cream. “Where are you headed next?”
“Home,” Joan said. “I want to go back to my friends.”
“Then don’t go toward the black shadow. There is a continent there — but it isn’t somewhere you should go.”
“Do you know where Neverwinter is?”
The guardian thought about it. “Probably on the opposite side of the black shadow. But traveling there by land would be dangerous. You’d be better off swimming.”
“Really?”
“Yes. But rest first. I can feel that you’re shutting down.”
Joan hadn’t realized it until the woman said it — how the exhaustion had been present every moment without her naming it, the way a person stops noticing a constant noise until someone else points at it. It broke over her all at once. Six months of fighting sleep on the surface of the water, of half-waking at every sound, of being never fully under and never fully out.
She closed her eyes.
The guardian’s hand moved slowly through her hair.
“I’m not chained,” the woman said softly, “but people can be restricted by things other than chains. Sometimes words are more binding than iron.”
“I — don’t quite understand.”
“That’s fine. Neither do I, entirely.”
The voice grew distant, soft, a sound threading through the gap between waking and not-waking.
“Perhaps I should ask someone to explain it to you. Someone smarter than me — Miss Anna, perhaps. Or His Majesty…”
“Really? Then — thank you.”
“We’ll meet again… won’t we?”
“Yes. If we get the chance…”
Joan woke in darkness.
She sat bolt upright. How long — how long had she been asleep? She looked around in a sudden panic, and found herself alone. No guardian. No stone tablets. Nothing but the empty meadow, the huge smooth pit at the center, and the flat-topped mountain in the distance with the mist dispersed around it, as though everything she had witnessed had been the architecture of a dream.
“Was that a dream?”
But her wounds had been dressed. She unwrapped the bandages and found the cuts healed over — clean, sealed, no residue of cream on the scales, no trace of the parasitic wounds that had been festering for weeks. She pressed her fingers against the skin, searching for evidence of what had happened, and found only the fact of recovery.
She sat for a moment, puzzled.
A roar in the distance.
The mist had pulled back from the island entirely, and now Joan could see the black shadow clearly for the first time.
It was a mountain — but not like any mountain she knew. Too high, proportioned wrong, as though it were not rising toward the sky but piercing through it. And too wide: from where she sat, it was broader than all the Fjord Islands combined. No trees on its face. Only inky darkness, dense and complete. The top was wreathed in Red Mist that pulsed and expelled crimson liquid in rhythmic jets, staining the water below.
And at the mountain’s foot: monsters.
Swarms of them, massing on the shoreline, ejecting venom into the black soil that collapsed under the pressure, enormous rocks sheering off and plunging into the sea. The ocean itself seemed to boil. Each creature was small against the mountain, but together they were eating it, slowly and without stopping.
They met resistance.
In the channel between the monsters and the open water, thousands of Sea Ghosts — those enormous things that turned sailors pale — were fighting another kind of creature. Joan stared for a long time before she understood what she was seeing: the other creatures were demons. The actual demons. The Sea Ghosts, which had seemed so terrifying in sailors’ stories, were failing against them — thrown back, scattered, unable to break the demons’ line — but they kept coming, endlessly, crossing over the ship-shaped creatures and driving toward the bank.
Joan’s hand went to her mouth.
There’s a continent there, but it isn’t somewhere you should go.
On the opposite side of the black shadow.
She turned. Across the mountain lay only open ocean, no land visible in any direction. Joan stood on the beach for only a moment. Two instincts arrived simultaneously: the danger was enormous and immediate, and the guardian had not lied to her.
She ran. She hit the water at full speed and left the roar of two armies behind her, driving hard in the opposite direction, into the open sea.