6
EURYDICE
The necropolis "breathes" around me like some vast, sleeping beast, its gates and archways yawning wide with each surge of the tide. I feel the rhythm of it in my bones—a slow, hypnotic pulse that seems to sync with my slowing heartbeat. The kelp bindings around my wrists have grown tighter, and with each breath of the strange, honey-salt water, I feel more of myself slipping away into the cold embrace of this drowned realm.
Small shapes emerge from the coral gardens that have overgrown what were once grand courtyards. At first I think they're fish, but as they drift closer, I see they are children—or what children become when they drown in places where death refuses to release its grip. Their eyes are black pearls, their skin translucent as jellyfish, and when they smile at me, their teeth gleam like tiny pearls in the phosphorescent gloom.
"Pretty lady," one whispers, a girl who might have been six when the sea claimed her. Her hair drifts around her face like seaweed, adorned with tiny shells that chime when she moves. "Pretty lady with warm hands. We haven't seen warm hands in so long."
She reaches toward me with fingers that end in delicate points, not quite claws but no longer entirely human. When she touches my bound wrist, her skin feels like water given form—cool and fluid, but somehow solid enough to grasp. The other children cluster around her, perhaps a dozen of them, all reaching out to touch the warmth that still flows through my mortal flesh.
"Please," I whisper, trying not to frighten them. They're still children, despite what they've become. "Can you help me? I don't belong here. I need to get home to someone who loves me."
The first child tilts her head, considering my words with an expression far too old for her apparent age. "Home?" she asks, the word strange on her lips. "We remember home. Warm beds and mother's songs and bread that smelled like sunshine." Her smile grows wider, showing more of those pearl-white teeth. "But this is home now. The deep halls are home. The singing stones are family."
One of the others, a boy with barnacles growing along his jawline like a patchy beard, reaches into the ruins of his clothing and produces something that makes my chest clench with pity. Pearl teeth—dozens of them, strung on a kelp-fiber cord like a necklace. They're his own, I realize. The teeth he lost as a child, saved and preserved in this place where nothing ever truly dies.
"For the pretty lady," he says, holding the necklace out toward me. "For luck in the deep halls. The tooth-keeper says they remember the taste of milk and honey cakes."
I want to refuse, but the look in his black pearl eyes is so hopeful, so desperate for connection with something warm and living, that I cannot bring myself to turn him away. "Thank you," I whisper, bowing my head so he can place the necklace around my throat. The pearl teeth are cold against my skin, but they carry with them the echo of innocence—the ghost of childhood wonder that not even death can completely extinguish.
As the strange gift settles around my neck, a shadow falls across our gathering. The children shrink back, their forms becoming more translucent, as a figure approaches through water with the fluid grace of a predator. This one was clearly a priest in life—his robes, though tattered and stained with centuries of brine, still carry the elaborate embroidery that marks the dark elf clergy. His face is gaunt and terrible, the flesh stretched tight over sharp cheekbones, and his eyes are not empty sockets like the other shades but burning points of cold blue light.
"Little surface-child," he says, his voice carrying the authority of one who commanded congregations in life and still holds dominion over the dead. "Little warm-blood who thinks to pass through our realm unchanged." He raises one skeletal hand, and I see symbols carved into his palm—runes that glow with the same cold fire as his eyes. "You will join our congregation. You will sing in our choir of laments."
He begins to trace those glowing symbols in the water above my chest, each gesture leaving trails of blue fire that hover in the liquid like trapped lightning. I feel something responding within me—a cold that starts in my heart and spreads outward through my veins like ice forming on a winter pond. My breath comes in short gasps, and the taste of honey-salt water grows bitter on my tongue.
But then, faint as a whisper but clear as a bell, I hear it—Theron's voice drifting through the water, carrying one of the festival tunes we danced to just hours ago. The melody wavers and distorts as it travels through the liquid medium, but I know it instantly. It's the song we were singing when the spirits first rose from the waves, the last music we shared in the beautiful world of the living.
I begin to hum along, my voice barely audible above the priest's chanting, but the effect is immediate. The blue firesymbols falter, their glow flickering like candles in a strong wind. The priest's eyes widen with something that just might be surprise or fear, and his skeletal hands pause in their ritual gestures.
"What is this?" he hisses, leaning closer. "What warmth do you carry that burns away the cold truth? What fire do you harbor that melts the ice of certainty?"
"Love," I whisper, continuing to hum the festival melody even as my bound limbs grow numb with cold. "Love and hope and the promise of spring after winter. Things you've forgotten in your halls of endless sorrow."
The children around us begin to echo my humming, their voices joining mine in a harmony that grows stronger with each note. They remember this music, I realize—not the specific song, perhaps, but the feeling it carries. The joy of celebration, the warmth of shared melody, the simple pleasure of voices raised together in happiness rather than lament.
The priest recoils as if struck, his burning eyes wide with something that could be recognition or terror. "Impossible," he breathes. "The warmth... it burns. It remembers." He looks at the children clustering around me, their forms growing more solid, more real as they sing. "They remember the taste of milk and honey. They remember mother's lullabies."
One of the little girls reaches out and touches the priest's robes with her translucent fingers. "Pretty music," she says softly. "Like before the cold. Like when the sun made shadows on the nursery floor."
For a moment, something flickers in those burning blue eyes—a ghost of the person he was before death and centuries of sorrow stripped away his humanity. His skeletal hand trembles as he reaches toward the child, then stops, clenching into a fist.
"No," he says, his voice cracking like ice under pressure. "No, the old songs are forbidden. The warm words are poison. Only the lament remains. Only the endless choir of what was lost."
He turns away from us, his robes billowing in the current as he glides back into the deeper shadows of the necropolis. But I can hear him humming as he goes—just a few bars of the festival tune, so quiet I might have imagined it, before his voice dissolves back into the eternal chorus of the drowned.
The children remain clustered around me, their pearl-black eyes bright with something I hadn't seen before—hope. They continue humming the melody, their voices growing stronger and more confident, and I feel warmth returning to my limbs despite the kelp bindings. Somewhere in the distance, Theron's voice grows clearer, and I know he's getting closer.
"Keep singing," I tell the children, my own voice growing stronger. "Keep remembering the warmth. Keep holding onto the light."
And in the drowned halls where sorrow reigns eternal, the sound of children's laughter begins to echo once again.
7
THERON
The descent into the necropolis feels like diving through liquid night itself, my weighted belt carrying me down past layers of history written in stone and bone. The rope from the prayer-stone trails behind me like a lifeline to the world above, its blessed fibers glowing faintly in the phosphorescent gloom. My lantern cuts a narrow path through the darkness, revealing glimpses of architecture that defies mortal comprehension—corridors that twist like the inside of a conch shell, walls draped with what looks like silk but moves with the fluid grace of living kelp.
