Above me, the lights of Milthar fade to pinpricks, then disappear entirely as I'm pulled through what can only be a drowned archway. The stone feels real beneath my fingertips as I grasp desperately at carved surfaces—intricate reliefs of dark elf faces with hollow eyes and gaping mouths, their expressions frozen in eternal screams.
"This cannot be real," I gasp, and to my shock, words emerge instead of water. The liquid around me has changed somehow, becoming thinner, breathable—salty-sweet like tears mixed withhoney. I can speak, I can breathe, though each inhalation tastes of the deep places where sunlight has never touched.
The architecture surrounding me is alien yet beautiful, all flowing curves and spiraling towers that twist upward like frozen waterspouts. I remember the stories Theron's grandfather used to tell during winter evenings by the fire—tales of dark elf cities that fell to hubris and war, swallowed by the hungry sea.
"The necropolis," I whisper, the word heavy with dread. "But it's supposed to be legend. Supposed to be lost beyond the deep waters."
Phosphorescent eels writhe in the water around me, their bodies glowing with sickly green light that illuminates the impossible city spread out below. It's vast beyond comprehension—a necropolis of toppled spires and broken domes, streets paved with tiles that shimmer with runic inscriptions in the dark elf tongue. Gardens of kelp and sea-anemones have overgrown what were once grand plazas, while schools of translucent fish dart between the ribs of collapsed towers.
Everything is covered in a fine layer of silt and barnacles, yet somehow the city maintains an eerie beauty. Death has only made it more perfect in its desolation, more terrible in its grandeur. The dark elves built their city to last millennia, and even drowned and broken, it retains a majesty that makes my heart ache with awe and terror.
Shades drift between the ruins like veils caught in an underwater breeze, their forms shifting and translucent. Some still wear the tattered remnants of fine clothing—silk robes that flutter in the current, jewelry that gleams dully in the phosphorescent light. Others are naked save for their pale skin and the hollow darkness where their eyes should be.
One drifts closer, its face still beautiful despite the waterlogged flesh and empty sockets. It was female once, withthe high cheekbones and pointed ears of the dark elf nobility. I think of my friend Pamela, who works in the human quarter—she has those same elegant features, though hers are warm with life where this creature's are cold as winter stone.
"Please," I whisper as the shade reaches toward me with fingers that trail wisps of shadow. "I don't belong here. I'm not dead."
The shade pauses at my words, tilting her head as if remembering what it means to speak. When she touches my cheek, her skin feels like ice formed from tears. She leans close, pressing her face to mine, and I feel her tasting my breath—sampling the warmth and life that still flows through my mortal form.
Her touch sends cold shooting through my veins like poison, and her mouth opens to reveal teeth like broken pearls. She speaks, and her voice is like wind through empty chambers: "So warm... so alive... we remember warmth. We remember the taste of living breath."
"Then help me," I plead, meeting those hollow sockets where eyes should be. "Help me return to the warm world above."
But she only laughs, a sound like waves breaking over broken glass. "None leave the deep halls, child of the surface. None return from under-winter to the realm of sun and flame."
Terror threatens to overwhelm me, but then I hear something that makes my soul dance with desperate hope. Faint and trembling through the water, barely audible above the whispers of the dead, comes a sound I would know anywhere—Theron's voice, deep and resonant, singing one of his old sea-shanties.
"Theron!" I cry out, my voice echoing strangely in the liquid medium. "I'm here! I'm here!"
The shade touching my face recoils as if burned, her empty sockets widening in what might be surprise or fear. She releasesme and drifts backward, her form becoming more translucent until she's barely visible against the green glow of the eels.
"He comes," she whispers, and there's something like wonder in her voice. "A living voice in the halls of the drowned. How long since we heard such music?"
Around us, other shades pause in their eternal wandering, their heads turning toward the source of that living voice like flowers seeking sunlight. Some begin to drift closer, drawn by the warmth and life in Theron's song, while others flee into the darker recesses of the ruins.
The water-chain pulls me onward, past a colonnade of pillars carved with images of dark elf warriors and their conquered foes. The sculptures show humans in chains, orcs fleeing in terror, purna women bound and broken—a catalog of conquest and cruelty preserved in stone.
"Your people did this," I say to the shade that follows me, anger cutting through my fear. "You enslaved and tortured. Is this your reward? An eternity in the cold dark?"
"We ruled," she replies, her voice growing fainter as we move. "We commanded wind and wave, fire and earth. But the sea... the sea remembers all debts. The sea claims all crowns in the end."
The chain drags me to a halt beside one of the pillars, and suddenly I feel something cold and slimy wrapping around my wrists and ankles. Kelp—but not the ordinary seaweed that grows in Milthar's shallows. This is something else, dark and oily, that seems to writhe with a life of its own.
"No," I gasp, struggling against the fronds as they coil around my limbs like serpents. "No, please, let me go!"
But the kelp pays no heed to my pleas, binding me to the pillar with knots that tighten whenever I struggle. As it secures me, I feel my heartbeat begin to slow. The cold creeps throughmy veins like winter fog, numbing my fingers and toes, making my thoughts sluggish and strange.
"This is how it begins," the shade whispers, drifting close again. "First the cold, then the stillness, then the forgetting. Soon you will join our chorus, child. Soon you will sing with the drowned."
"I won't," I say through chattering teeth, though I can feel the life draining from my limbs. "I won't forget. I won't become like you."
"They all say that," she replies sadly. "But the deep remembers all, and forgives nothing. Rest now, little surface-child. Let the cold take you. Let the water fill your lungs with dreams of what was."
But Theron's voice reaches me again, stronger now, and I cling to that sound like a lifeline thrown into dark water. He's coming for me. He's fighting his way through this nightmare to find me, and I will not let myself fade before he arrives.
"Do you hear that?" I whisper to the shade, forcing strength into my voice. "That's my golden bull, singing me home. He'll come for me, and your chains won't hold me when he does."
The shade tilts her head, listening to that distant song. For a moment, something flickers in those empty sockets—a ghost of the warmth she once knew.
