“Integration is poison,” the lead guard recites like doctrine. “The Sky Witch has corrupted you?—”
“Look at me.” I spread my arms, letting them see the golden lightning veins covering my scales. “Does this look like corruption? Or does it look like evolution?”
Zara moves beside me, and electricity arcs from her hand to mine. The charge flows through my body, amplifying my hydrokinesis. Water rises from the corridor floor, glowing with contained lightning, forming a sphere that shouldn’t exist but does.
Liquid lightning. Storm and sea made manifest.
“This is what integration creates,” I tell them. “Not weakness. Power. Not pollution. Survival.” I let the sphere dissipate. “Caspian wants to drown the world because he thinks isolation will save us. But isolation is what’s killing us. I’m living proof that the opposite is true.”
The guards exchange uncertain glances. Not convinced, but shaken. Doubt creeping into their certainty.
“Stand aside,” I order. “We’re going to stop Caspian. You can help us save lives, or you can waste time we don’t have trying to stop the inevitable.”
For a moment, I think they’ll fight anyway. Then the lead guard steps back, lowering his weapon. The others follow his lead, though reluctantly.
“Go,” he says quietly. “But know this: if you fail, if the Sky Witch’s poison kills you—we’ll tell the story of how integration destroyed our best Sentinel.”
“Fair enough.” I nod. “And if we succeed?”
“Then maybe—” He stops. “Then maybe we were wrong.”
It’s not much. But it’s enough. We push past them and keep running.
The Citadel is in chaos.
We emerge into the upper districts to find Deep Runners everywhere—arguing in the plazas, children crying, elders shouting conflicting orders. The coup has fractured the community along lines that were always there but never acknowledged. Those who support Caspian’s radicalism. Those who fear it. Those too paralyzed by uncertainty to choose.
“Where’s the High Elder?” Zara asks.
I reach out with my hydrokinesis, sensing the water tables beneath the city, the currents that flow through hidden channels. The High Elder’s chamber is—there. Near the council building. Under guard, but not heavily. Caspian doesn’t see her as a threat anymore.
“This way.”
We cut through the plaza, and Deep Runners stop to stare. At me, marked with lightning. At Zara, her storm-gray wings spread slightly for balance. At the way we move together—synchronized, powerful, impossible.
“That’s Sentinel Blackwater,” someone whispers.
“He’s bonded with a Sky-dweller,” another voice answers, disgust clear.
“He’s become something else,” a third voice says. An elder, ancient enough to remember before the complete isolation. “Look at them. Really look.”
I feel Zara’s impulse through the bond—she wants to stop, to address them, to make her diplomatic case. But I pull her forward. “No time. We convince them by stopping Caspian, not with speeches.”
“Later, then.” She squeezes my hand. “When we have time.”
If we have time.
We reach the council building to find six guards at the entrance. These aren’t uncertain recruits. These are hardened Sentinels, Caspian’s inner circle. They recognize me immediately and level their weapons.
“Traitor Blackwater,” one snarls. “You betrayed your oath. Your people. Everything that?—”
I don’t let him finish. Water erupts from the corridor channels, wrapping around three guards before they can react. Not to drown—never to drown my own people—but to restrain, to neutralize, to remove from the equation.
Zara’s lightning dances across the remaining three, carefully controlled charges that lock their muscles without killing. They collapse, twitching, conscious but immobilized.
The whole fight takes less than ten seconds.
We step over the fallen guards and enter the building. Through the bond, I feel Zara’s grim satisfaction mixed with guilt. She didn’t want to hurt them. Neither did I. But Caspian forced this choice—made enemies of those who should have been allies.
