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Chapter 233: Ancient Ruins

The further east they sailed, the thinner the fog became—but the sky stayed grey, as though the sun had been told it was not welcome here.

The reefs grew taller as they advanced, becoming stone pillars of increasing height and solidity. Ashes could not understand why the ship remained level while the water continued to drop around them. Even the waves had lost their ambition; they lay flat and glassy, spray dissolved into stillness, the sea as calm as an inland lake on a windless morning.

“Why not wait for the lowest tide before entering?” Tilly asked. “Then you wouldn’t need to fear the rocks—they’d all be exposed.”

“Because by then we couldn’t see the Ghost Red River,” Thunder said. “The pillar-islands you see around you are not fixed—with each ebb and flow, their positions shift. And the seawater swallows most of them entirely anyway, so they cannot be used for navigation. The Red River is the only channel marker. Without it we sail blind.”

“Ghost Red River?” Tilly repeated.

“Look—there—” Thunder whistled and pointed.

In the dark water ahead, red figures flickered and vanished—ghost-pale, there and gone. Then two or three appeared together, close enough to make out: fish. Red-scaled, the color of garnets in firelight.

“Fish?”

“The unique red-scales of Shadow Island.” Thunder stroked his chin. “Wait until you see what becomes of them.”

More came. Then more. The small clusters became groups, the groups became schools, the schools became something else entirely—a movement without individual members, a current of red bodies flowing in the direction their stern was pointing. Ashes stared ahead and the words left her.

The whole sea had turned red.

Dense as a carpet, extending to the limits of sight, the shoal filled the channel from bank to bank and beyond. The ship moved through them and from below the waterline came soft sounds of contact—the hull passing through living flesh. The dark blue water had vanished completely; they were sailing on top of the fish.

If they had been moving in the same direction, she might have believed the ship was being carried.

That’s it. She understood now—this was the river. Not water. An entire shoal of fish following a route they had followed before she was born, before her parents were born, before anyone living had a name. The Ghost Red River.

“Why do they do this?” Tilly asked.

Ashes had wanted to ask the same thing. She had never seen anything like it—not in Graycastle, not in any kingdom she had passed through. The grey sky, the stone pillars rising from fog, the red river of fish carrying them forward. For the first time in a long while, she felt the size of the world.

“It’s the main island,” Thunder said. “Triangular, like a spire, with a massive cave running through its center. The red-scaled fish spawn there and give birth. When the tide goes out and the cave emerges, the fish that have been living inside feel the water level change first and come flooding out. Follow the river and you follow the fish—and the fish lead directly to the ruins.”

“Captain! Obstacle ahead—it looks like a mountain!”

“We are arriving.” Thunder shook his pipe clean. “Ladies, welcome to the Shadow Islands.”

The main island emerged from the water by degrees, revealing itself: a vast triangular form, wide at its base and narrowing to a peak, its surface startlingly smooth for natural stone—almost too smooth. The exposed section was already the size of half of King’s City, and the cave running through its middle was large enough to swallow the Tower of Babel the Church had raised at Hermes.

The sea continued to retreat. Water poured from the cave mouth in a continuous torrent, and the red-scaled fish covered every part of the island still emerging—the whole sea dyed scarlet as far as the eye could reach. Millions of them.

They waited as the sky darkened, the sea withdrawing steadily, exposing the cave floor. Thunder ordered the anchor dropped and a thick hemp rope secured to a copper stake already set into the rock—old iron, green with age.

“These stakes—did you leave them from your last visit?” Ashes asked.

“No. They were already here when I first came.” Thunder studied them briefly. “Whoever built the ruins put them here.”

“And the ruins themselves—where?”

He smiled and pointed upward. “Above us. We are standing at the entrance.”

What followed could be described in a single word: inconceivable.

They entered through a stone gate set in the cave wall and began climbing—stone steps carved into the spire’s interior, spiraling upward through absolute darkness, water still trickling down along the risers. Everyone carried a torch, but the flames illuminated only a narrow cone of air; the staircase’s end remained invisible somewhere above, and the bottom was already gone below.

The darkness pressed in like something with weight.

Tilly gripped Ashes’ arm. The composed, untroubled expression she wore in the open air was not available to her here. This is the princess I know, Ashes thought. In the palace she had always gone her own way, confronted every challenge with her chin level—she had only one weakness, her fear of darkness. Even at court, her rooms were kept lit through the night. After their escape from the palace, on nights when candles were impossible, she had asked Ashes to stay beside her until she slept.

Climbing through the wet dark of the spire, Ashes found her mood improving considerably.

There were no traps, no demonic beasts—and if there had been mechanisms, the long immersion in seawater had dissolved them. The only obstacle was the stairs themselves; the climb was long enough that by the time the steps ended, half the group was breathing through their teeth. The sailors’ cheers when the staircase finally gave way to a landing were genuine.

The final door was metal rather than stone, its surface still bright enough to throw back the torchlight. Thunder placed both hands on it and pushed. The panels opened with a sound like something being torn from silence.

Ashes entered first, sword in hand. She swept the room, corner to corner, before allowing Tilly and the others through.

They hung torches along the walls and got their first clear look at the hall.

It was wide and nearly empty. Stone tables, stone stools, green with algae, seaweed draped across every surface. One glance reached every corner.

“This is the ruins?” She cleared moss from a stone table with her palm. “Besides the furniture, there is nothing.”

“I told Her Highness as much before we set out,” Thunder nodded. “The ruins have slept under the sea too long. Only stone keeps.”

“Where did you find the red stone?” Tilly’s voice was measured, but her eyes were already moving across the room. “You said they were scattered across the floor.”

“Right there on the ground, dozens of them. But by now every explorer who has come here has taken what there was to take.”

The floor was covered in slick seaweed—nothing else. Tilly was not deterred. She raised her torch and worked through every corner and shadow, especially the dark patches where she asked the sailors to bring additional light. Molly summoned her servant and spread it across the floor as a cushion for the exhausted climbers. Ashes stayed at Tilly’s shoulder, watching her feel along the walls.

“Hey—” Tilly stopped. “What is this?”

The stretch of wall at her hand was thick with algae—but something beneath it caught the torchlight in a way that stone didn’t.

Tilly tore the algae away.

A gem emerged, half-set into the wall: prism-shaped, nearly as thick as an arm, deep scarlet in color, mounted in a golden frame like a card locked into a slot. The gold was as clean as the day it was cast, untouched by seawater or time.

She tried to pull it free. It did not move.

“Let me try,” Ashes offered.

Tilly shook her head. She placed her hand flat against the prism’s face and closed her eyes.

Light burst from the crystal’s center—brilliant, instantaneous, then gone. Ashes almost dismissed it as a trick of the torchlight. But then a sound rose from behind the wall: a deep mechanical rumbling, as though something enormous and long-motionless had been asked to remember what it was made to do. The sound spread. It came from everywhere at once.

Then the wall lit.

Soft light appeared at the upper edge, spread to the ceiling, filled the hall. The sailors lurched to their feet and drew their weapons, looking in every direction for what they were supposed to fight. Molly enclosed them in her servant’s embrace.

No monster came.

When the sound settled, the hall was bright as afternoon.

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