I stripped down to my underwear and stretched, preparing to enter the water. I didn't look to confirm, but I had a feeling that two sets of eyes were fixed on me.
The breathing device tasted like rubber and bad decisions, the same as it had in the Ebon Maw. Some things, apparently, didn't improve with repetition.
SCRUB clung to my back, secured with a length of rope Kael had insisted on tying in a configuration he called "nautically sound." I had no way to verify this. I chose to trust him.
The stick I'd grabbed back at the river felt absurdly inadequate now that I was actually submerged with it.
The water closed over my head, and the world went quiet — not silent, just muffled, every sound arriving a half second late. Sunlight filtered down from the surface in pale, broken shafts that didn't reach very far before the lake simply absorbed them. I kicked deeper.
The shallows had been full of ordinary life. Small silver fish, unbothered, darting in loose clouds that scattered and reformed around me as I passed. A few frogs. Something that might have been a turtle, judging by the shape of it, disappearing into the silt. Normal. Forgettable.
The deeper I went, the less of that there was.
The water grew darker, colder, the light from above thinning to almost nothing. I could feel SCRUB's small motor humming faintly against my back, some internal mechanism working to track our depth or orientation or something I didn't have the vocabulary for. It was the only sound besides my own pulse.
That was when I saw it.
It was hanging motionless in the water ahead of me, suspended like it had simply stopped mid-thought. Three feet of pale, mottled flesh, fins that didn't match each other, a scatter of dull, unfocused eyes along its flank that didn't track me the way eyes should. Its mouth hung slightly open. Too many teeth for the space available, crowded and overlapping, locked in a permanent, ragged grin.
I could only assume that this creature was some poor fish that had come in contact with Mossback excrement. I shuddered.
It didn't move.
I didn't move.
We held that position for several long seconds, two creatures contemplating their next moves.
Then it came at me.
It was fast. It crossed the distance between us faster than something that badly assembled had any right to move, mouth working, those too-many teeth catching what little light there was. I got the stick up between us on pure reflex, more block than weapon, and felt the impact of its jaw closing on wood instead of my forearm.
I shoved. Hard. Twisted the stick and drove the blunt end into the cluster of milky eyes along its flank.
It recoiled — a full-body flinch, fins flaring in every direction at once — and fled into the dark, faster than it had arrived, trailing a thin cloud of disturbed silt behind it.
I floated there for a moment, breathing too fast through the device, watching the place where it had disappeared.
Then I kept going toward the den. I didn't look back.
The lake was simultaneously deeper than I could've imagined and shallow enough that I was relieved to see the bottom. Even with a device helping me breathe, I could feel the heavy pressure of the water in my chest. I would have to ascend slowly when the time came.
The den was unmistakable the moment I saw it.
A wide hollow had been carved into the lakebed, deep enough that the silt around its edges sloped down into shadow before I could make out the bottom of it. The stone walls surrounding it were worn impossibly smooth — not naturally, not by current alone, but by decades of something enormous settling into the same shape over and over until the rock itself had given up. Moss grew thick along every surface he must have touched regularly, the same dark green that covered his own hide, like the den had slowly started growing him back.
There was no second shape curled anywhere nearby. No smaller bones, no second worn hollow beside the first. Just one impression in the stone, made by one creature, alone, for what looked like a very long time.
That detail bothered me more than I expected it to.
Scattered around the edges of the hollow were the things you'd expect from a creature that ate enormous quantities of whatever the lake offered — bones, shells, the husks of things I didn't have names for, all settled into the silt in loose, undisturbed drifts. Old. Routine. The detritus of a quiet, solitary life.
Except it wasn't undisturbed anymore.
The silt nearest the back of the den had been churned up recently, clouded and unsettled in a way that suggested thrashing rather than resting. Whatever peace this place had once had, it had been getting interrupted.
And there, half-buried in the disturbed silt at the back of the hollow, exactly where something sick and miserable would have been lying closest to it for days, was the source.
A single chunk of elginarium, easily the size of my torso, pulsing with that same, uneven golden light I'd seen in the crate wreckage above — except down here, this close, it wasn't subtle. It lit the whole back of the den in faint, sick color, throwing Mossback's own worn outline into sharp relief against the stone.
He'd been sleeping next to it. Probably every night since the cart went into the lake.
I felt something that was almost certainly not supposed to be sympathy for a thirty-foot river lizard who had recently tried to kill all four of us.
I felt it anyway.
I sized up the situation. I could tell, even from where I was, that the ore was going to be manageable, but really heavy. Even with the vastness of the lake helping me float, I wouldn't be able to swim with it in my hands.
I considered removing SCRUB from my back and trying to tie the rock there in his place. I ruled it out immediately.
Then it hit me. My robot companion still had a singular flotation device from Kael's failed river test. It wouldn't make the rock float, but if I lashed SCRUB to the rock and managed to get him to deploy the device, I could more easily drag the ore across the lakebed until I hit the shallows.
I reached behind me and undid the knots tying him to my back. He sank to the dirt and gave a muffled boop.
Now came the hard part; I couldn't speak underwater, even with the breather.
I used my hands to gesticulate at the curious bot, imitating the motion of tying him to the rock, and then did my best to communicate the idea of something inflating.
There was a long pause. "Beeeeeeeeep."
That sounded affirmative to me. I set about the work, and before long, I had a robot tied to some magical ore – not something I had expected to do today.
As I was tying the final knot, SCRUB began to whir and beep frantically. I looked over my shoulder and immediately wished I had not.
Apparently, I had only deferred the mutant fish problem rather than solving it. There had been one before; now there were at least a dozen of the horrifying creatures, all swimming in a fast, off-kilter zig-zag pattern. A loose pack, all equally mutated in different ways. But they all had way too many teeth. Way too many eyes.
I sighed internally, my mind quickly – but not frantically – going over options.
I would have to try to defend myself. I had no reasonable path of egress.
The monstrous fish drew closer.
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SCRUB gave a shriek that was muffled by the water, and they were upon us.
It was a whirl of fins, gnashing teeth, thrashing tails, and milky white, unblinking eyes. I laid about with my stick, jabbing and thrusting, but there were too many.
I tried to move backwards and felt my back press up against the rock.
I felt a sharp, agonizing pain in my arm, and saw blood flowing into the water. One of the mutant fish had managed to sink its fangs into me. I bashed at it with one end of my stick, but it wouldn't let go.
I felt another fish snag my arm, and somewhere underneath the pain, a colder thought arrived: I might not get out of this.
I gritted my teeth around the breather, pushing through the pain and trying to keep focus.
I needed to get to shore. I needed to get out of here and not be eaten by fish. I needed to get the ore and SCRUB out of the lake with me.
I needed –
I suddenly found myself somewhere else – specifically on my back in a tall patch of reeds on the side of the lake. The ore and its passenger were sunk into the mud beside me. All I could see around me was plants and the sky above.
I spat out the breather, my instincts giving way to the rare panic I'd only felt a couple of times before.
What had happened?
I thought about it for half a second.
I knew what happened.
Nightstep.
I knew it in my gut: it was just like what happened back in the Tangle. A moment of desperation, and I was no longer there. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out the specific trigger, but I was already seeing a pattern.
My thoughts were rudely interrupted as the intense pain in my arm and leg came back to my attention. I was still bleeding all over, the water staining deep red.
I stumbled to my feet, grimacing and gritting my teeth. I took the rope that was tied around the ore and painfully dragged it behind me out of the reeds. I noticed that SCRUB was making excited noises I had never heard before. I didn't register what he was trying to tell me.
As I emerged from the shallows and onto the lakeshore, I heard Tessa scream distantly. "LORNE!"
I continued limping, every step agony.
It felt like an eternity before Tessa reached me. My vision was swimming.
Tessa looked thoroughly panicked. I could see Kael and Alara far behind her. "Lorne, what happened?"
I felt my knees buckle under me, lamenting the fact that being heavily injured was such a frequent thing for me. "Fucking Shitfish."
Tessa's face did something complicated — relief and horror trying to occupy the same expression at once — before she got an arm under me and started half-carrying, half-dragging me toward flatter ground. I didn't resist. I wasn't sure I could have.
By the time Kael and Alara reached us I was sitting, more or less upright, against a fallen log, watching my own blood do unpleasant things to the grass.
Alara dropped to her knees in front of me without a word. Her hands found the wound on my arm first, efficient and clinical, the way they always were when something had actually gone wrong. The wall-and-door version of her, completely absent. Just the part of her that knew how to keep people alive. "What happened to you?"
It wasn't really a question, so I didn't really answer it. "Fish."
"I gathered that.""Then why did you ask?""Shut up."
She peeled back the torn fabric at my shoulder, assessed something with a look I couldn't read, and started the low, familiar hum of a healing incantation under her breath. Warmth spread through the wound almost immediately, knitting something back together that had very recently not wanted to be together.
I watched her work for a moment. "I thought you said you weren't going to heal me if I did something stupid again."
She didn't look up. "I guess it wasn't stupid enough."
A beat. "Idiot."
Despite everything — the blood, the pain, the ore currently sitting in the mud a few feet away with a robot still lashed to it — I felt something in my chest that was suspiciously close to a laugh. "Noted."
"You're lucky I like this job."
"Do you, though?"
"Shut up and hold still."
I shut up. I held still.
Behind her, Kael was already crouched over an unlashed SCRUB, checking him for damage with the same urgency Tessa was fussing over me with. I could see him doing some intense mental math.
Relief spread through my body as my eyes locked on Alara, and I exhaled deeply.
At least it was done.
Mossback's transformation, when it finally happened, was not subtle.
Tessa and Alara worked for the better part of an hour — Tessa untangling whatever residual glowing residue clung to him with her Mana Sight, narrating half of it under her breath in a stream of technical enthusiasm that nobody but her fully followed, while Alara handled the physical side, her hands steady and glowing faintly against his enormous flank. I sat propped against a tree, freshly bandaged, and watched.
The moss-dark patches along his hide lightened first — not disappearing, just settling into something that looked less like sickness and more like simply being a large mossy lizard who lived in a lake. His eyes, which had been dull since we'd first seen him, sharpened back into something amber and clear and considerably less interested in eating any of us.
He let out a sound that was, unmistakably, a sigh.
Wren threw both arms around as much of his snout as she could reach. "There he is! There's my big guy!"
Mossback made a low, rumbling noise and very gently knocked her over with his nose. She laughed so hard she had to be helped back to her feet.
Tessa snapped her notebook shut with the satisfaction of someone who had just finished a very good puzzle. "He's going to be fine. The mana's stable. No more — "
She gestured vaguely at the lakeshore, where the last twitching remains of a grass monster were quietly dissolving. "–all that."
Wren looked like she might cry, which she covered by yelling at Mossback to go take a bath, which he did, submerging with a splash large enough to soak all of us a second time. "Okay."
She wiped her eyes and resumed her full bossy authority in approximately one second flat. "You're all coming to the village. You're hurt, you're tired, and you smell like fish guts. No arguing."
Nobody argued.
The village was small and warm — a stark and very welcome contrast to the bottom of a lake.
Word of what had happened apparently outran us, because by the time we arrived, there was already a fire going and more food than four exhausted janitors had any right to eat. Someone pressed a bowl of something rich and herby into my hands before I'd even found a place to sit. Someone else fussed over the bandage on my arm with the brisk, no-nonsense energy of a person who had patched up worse.
At some point during the afternoon, one of the village artisans helped us break some chunks off of the hunk of elginarium. Kael squirrelled them away for later. Wren said they would find a way to dispose of the rest quickly.
Kael, somehow, ended up the guest of honor. A small crowd of children had gathered around him within minutes, utterly fascinated by SCRUB, who endured the attention with the long-suffering patience of someone who had decided, for once, not to hold a grudge about it. Kael explained the flotation devices to anyone who would listen, and several people who clearly had no idea what he was talking about listened anyway, just to be polite.
Alara sat slightly apart, as she usually did, but accepted a bowl of something when it was offered without protest, and when a small child asked her, with complete sincerity, if she was a real elf princess, she said "no" in a tone that wasn't unkind, and then — after a pause — let the child braid a few strands of her hair anyway.
We rested there until the light started to go gold and long, the kind of warm exhaustion settling over all of us that follows a day that asked too much and somehow still ended well. Wren saw us off at the edge of the village, Mossback trailing behind her at a respectful distance, looking considerably more like a contented lake monster and considerably less like something that wanted to eat us.
Wren shook my hand very formally, her "thank you" carrying the gravity of someone much older than she appeared.
The walk back to Moorhaven was quiet. Nobody had much left to say, and nobody needed to. The city walls came into view as the last of the light faded, lanterns already lit along the main roads, and by the time we reached the Guild Hall, it was full dark.
We were tired, sore, and — against every reasonable expectation for how the day had started — content.
That lasted exactly as long as it took to walk through the front doors.
A receptionist intercepted us in the entryway — one of the evening staff, pleasant and brisk, already sorting through a small stack of correspondence that had apparently accumulated in our absence. Guild notices for Kael. Something from the library, addressed to me, that I assumed was Alben being thorough. A standard supply requisition update for Tessa, who groaned at the sight of it.
Then, almost as an afterthought, the receptionist held out a plain envelope. "This came for you. No return address. The messenger didn't say who sent it."
Alara took it.
There was nothing on the front except her name, written in a careful, looping hand that belonged to no official I'd ever seen — no guild seal, no wax, no formal mark of any kind. Just two words.
"Alara Veyne."
She looked at it for a moment longer than the moment required.
Then she opened it.
I was close enough to see her go still — not the composed stillness she usually wore like armor, but something underneath that, something that arrived all at once and emptied her face of whatever had been there a second before. Her knuckles went white around the paper. I heard her breath catch, sharp and involuntary. "Alara?"
She didn't answer.
She turned — fast, her braid swinging with the motion — and I caught only the back of her, shoulders rigid, before she was already moving toward the corridor into the hall proper. I never saw her face. "Alara, wait—"
The door at the end of the hall closed behind her before I'd finished the sentence.
Tessa and Kael exchanged a glance I couldn't read.
I looked down at the letter in my own hand from Alben, abruptly meaningless, and felt the entire warmth of the day drain out of the room like someone had pulled a plug.
Something was very wrong.
I just didn't know what yet.