“The god of Water,” I explain.
“Oh, fish face,” Nyssa mutters. “Let’s get her then. We need to end this cowardly fucker, once and for all. Back to the Pantheon realm, then.” She holds her hand out for transportation, but I shake my head.
“You do it.”
Her eyes widen in surprise, but then she gives a grim nod. She doesn’t ask how. She closes her fingers into a fist, breathes once, and the air folds like cloth around her knuckles. Light threads, shadow locks, death hums.
“Show-off,” Dastian says, grinning.
“Move,” I tell him, and take Nyssa’s free hand. Voren touches her lower back. We step through.
The Pantheon isn’t whole. It’s quieter than it should be, drained, but the fog has gone, at least.
“Pool?” I call out, knowing the snivelling goddess will be hovering somewhere near the exit.
She slinks into view, sniffing and wiping her nose on her sleeve. “You called?”
“Yes, we need you to get to a place we cannot.” I give it to her without preamble. We are on a clock. The longer the Devourer has to regroup, the worse it will be.
She eyes my expression like a child about to be told off. “Where?”
“Off the west coast,” Nyssa says. “Drowned stone. A passage cut under a reef. Old law doesn’t reach it.”
Pool’s mouth pulls down. “Deep.”
“That’s why we called you,” Nyssa says, voice even. “Can you get us there fast?”
Pool dithers. I let my shadows crawl up the wall and narrow the corridor to a thin strip at her feet. She flinches.
“Now,” I say.
She closes her eyes and draws a circle with one finger. Water sluices across the floor and rises in a clean ring. It holds without spilling. “Through and hold your breath. I won’t fish your corpses out if you panic.”
“Charming,” Dastian mutters and steps to Nyssa’s other side.
Voren falls in behind her. I take point with her. We go.
Cold clamps down. Pressure grips every inch of me. Pool’s tunnel holds, a cylinder through black water. Fish flicker outside the wall, silver blurs. We descend. The light above snaps to a coin, then a pinprick. Darkness takes over. Pool’s tunnel glows faintly from within, enough to show the seabed rising to meet us.
An opening gapes in the rock. Cut stone rings it, half-buried in weeds, carved lines eaten by time. The tunnel bends and then spits us out into a chamber of stacked slabs. The roof sits low. The passage beyond narrows and curves to the right. The water presses like a weight we can’t shake.
Pool’s voice comes thin through the wall. “I can’t go further.”
“Hold this gate,” I instruct. “If we come back, we need it open.”
She nods, pale, and anchors the ring to the rock with a flick of her wrist.
Nyssa studies the cut marks with her fingers, the way she did at the mound. I watch the faint lines in the stone. Old work. Old law. It never touched this place properly. That is why he ran here.
“We need a boundary,” she says, voice calm through the water hum. “I can’t enforce anything without a rule to anchor to.”
“I’ll cut you a track,” I answer. I draw shadow thin and hard and score a clean ring across the nearest slab. The stone takes it. It isn’t pretty. It doesn’t need to be. It just needs to hold.
Voren closes his eyes. He is somewhere else already. “They are here. The drowned.”
“Can you pull?” I ask.
“When you give me a door,” he replies.
