I can’t break down here.
Standing in the dark, I try my best to adjust my vision to the surroundings. It’s no use. My eyes aren’t any better than before. “How am I supposed to see anything?”
At those words, light fills the small island rock we inhabit. Turning, I find the azure kraken is alight.
“You are glowing,” I exclaim.
“Now I’ve seen everything,” Moyrie’s voice comes from behind me, finally awake.
“I have the ability to light our way in the darkness,”the kraken adds nonchalantly.
“Don’t get any closer,” Moyrie’s slippery, snake-like voice says behind me, gripping my waist. “I think he has taken us as pets or food. We have to find a way out.”
I laugh because she hasn’t been privy to the conversation I’ve been having with Ken the kraken. After his unnerving gushing about me being his Goddess, I asked if he had a name. He was adamant that I should call him whatever I wanted to call him, that any name he used would be an insult to a name bestowed by a Goddess.
My sigh was audible, and my connection to Fury was not fully stitched back together to ask what the deal with the kraken was, so I named him Ken. Something about naming him Ken the kraken helped me diffuse the alarming sense of danger in my brain around this situation.
He is Ken the kraken.Ken the kraken wouldn’t hurt a wisp. I can trust Ken the kraken, even though he is possibly larger than Saff, with eight blue-sucking tentacles and two large, all-seeing eyes with black irises.
All lit up like the suns in an underground cave surrounded by water above and below, this creature seems even less threatening.
He is also our only way out.
“His name is Ken, and he is going to help us. He’s one of Fury’s beasts,” I say, plucking Moyrie’s hand from my waist and spinning around to face her wide eyes.
“How do you know he’s not just tricking you so he can eat us later?” She pauses for a moment, slitted pupils eyeing off the glowing creatureon our stony island surrounded by more hard rock walls. “How are you communicating with him?”
I raise my shoulders up and down. “He just says things in my head, like when Rivern or Fury or Saff talk to me.”
A hairless eyebrows raises and a“what in the Gods’ names”are you talking about expression crosses Moyrie’s face. I exhale a long breath.
“It’s Seraph stuff,” I add, so she can maybe understand what I’m saying without the need to explain further. I assume Saff never talked in her head. She was aware of the bonded chatter; Fury’s beasts talking to me is a new revelation.Gods, I can’t even keep track of everything in my head sometimes.
“Ken, do you think you can show us a way out of this place without needing to go through the water?” My fingers are crossed, hoping there’s some secret door we can’t see.
“No, the only way in or out is through the water.”
Pointing at the pools surrounding us, I ask,“Which way is it back to where you found us?”
Moyrie starts walking around the rocky island. There’s a perfectly smooth, stony circle in the middle, puddling with a small amount of water, making me realise this must be a nest of sorts for the kraken. There’s also a lot of scattered shards of small bones. Fish bones, hopefully. Since none of them are human-shaped, I try not to let it rankle me too much.
“It is below and up.”I scratch my head at that.How can something be below and up?
“Can you take us there?”
“No.”
Okay, not the answer I was expecting since he told me movements before that he would help us out of here and back to Fury. Trailing a toe over the even rock below, my body trembles internally, my lips no doubt blue in shade. The cold has never agreed with me. Give me the suns and heat any day.
A true sunshine child. It makes sense that I was bonded to a fae prince who reminds me of such weather.
“I can take you to the mers.”
My head whips up. “You can?”
“Yes, they are up and down.”I shake my head at Ken’s strange sense of direction.How are we meant to go up?
“Dove?” Moyrie walks around a large boulder on the side of the island, where she disappeared movements ago, dragging something that looks heavy in her grasp.
