CHAPTER ONE
Thalia drifted in darkness without edges.No light pierced this void, no sound echoed within it, and her body—if she still possessed one—registered neither warmth nor cold.Only her thoughts remained, unmoored from flesh, floating in a boundless expanse that seemed both vast as the night sky and close as a shroud.Time had no meaning here.She could have been suspended for moments or millennia; without the rhythm of breath or heartbeat to measure its passage, she had no way to know.
Her last memory glimmered faintly—the Founders' Price chamber, the desperate rush to activate what lay beneath Frostforge as the academy crumbled around them.The Deep Ones' massive tendrils tearing through stone, Daniel's death, her friends' desperate faces.Then power—raw and ancient—had surged through channels she'd only just discovered, using her current-sensing ability as its conduit.After that, nothing but this endless dark.
She tried to move, to speak, to reach out, but found nothing to move with, no voice to use, no limbs to extend.She was reduced to awareness alone, a consciousness stripped of its vessel, suspended in a void so complete it seemed to consume even thought.
And yet, there was something in this darkness.Not light, not sound, but...presence.The void was not empty.It pressed around her like fathomless water, heavy with intention.Currents moved through it—invisible forces that tugged at the edges of her awareness, pulling her attention in directions she could not name.These currents carried a sensation that was neither hot nor cold, but potent and alive, like the breath of some ancient being stirring after epochs of slumber.
The currents strengthened, pushing and pulling at her consciousness until she felt herself drifting with them rather than against them.They drew her deeper into the dark, toward something she could sense but not see—a core of concentrated energy, pulsing like a heart in the center of nothingness.
As she approached this core, the darkness began to thin, not with light but with images—shadows forming within shadows, textures emerging from the void.The formless began to take shape, rising around her like islands surfacing from a midnight sea.
She saw cliffs.Massive, jagged walls of stone rising from churning waters, their faces slick with rain and salt spray.They loomed impossibly tall, stretching beyond any natural formation she had ever witnessed, as though the earth itself had been thrust upward in defiance of the sky.The cliffs were not made of the pale limestone of the fjords near Frostforge, nor the gray rock of the Rimspire Mountains.These were black as obsidian, with veins of what appeared to be the same silver-blue glacenite that she had discovered in the mines—but not raw and unstable as she had found it.Here, the glacenite ran through the stone in perfect, deliberate patterns, forming symbols and channels that pulsed with contained power.
Above the cliffs, storm clouds gathered, not as random weather but with clear purpose.They swirled and coalesced into formations too orderly for nature, bending and flowing like liquid rather than vapor.Lightning did not flash in jagged, unpredictable bolts but curved in graceful arcs, forming intricate patterns against the darkened sky.The thunder did not roll and fade but came in measured beats, like the steady percussion of some cosmic ritual.
These were not ordinary storms.Thalia knew this with instinctive certainty, the same way she could sense the currents in metals and plants.These tempests had been shaped—bent to a will that understood their essence at a level far deeper than any cryomancer at Frostforge had ever achieved with ice.
As she watched, figures appeared on the precipice of the cliffs.Distant at first, they were little more than silhouettes against the turbulent sky, but as her awareness drew closer, their details sharpened.Men and women stood in a circle, their garments whipping in the gale that surrounded them, yet they remained unmoved, as though anchored to the stone by something stronger than mere physical weight.Their arms extended, palms upturned to the sky, fingers splayed in gestures too precise to be random.
In response to their movements, the storms obeyed.When one figure swept an arm in a wide arc, a corresponding curve of lightning followed the exact path of their hand.When another raised both arms slowly, the clouds directly above them separated, creating a perfect circle of clear sky in the midst of chaos.A third figure traced what looked like runes in the air with fluid movements, and the storm itself seemed to absorb these symbols, the clouds briefly taking on their shapes before dispersing.
This was magic—but not as Thalia knew it.The cryomancy taught at Frostforge was arcane and exact, a disciplined channeling of power into rigid forms.The storm magic that Roran had revealed was wild and emotional, drawing strength from passion rather than precision.This was something else entirely—not the bending of nature to human will, but a harmonious exchange between mortal and elemental power, as though the wielders and the storms were engaged in a conversation rather than a struggle for dominance.
One figure stood apart from the others, positioned at the very edge of the cliff.Unlike the rest, who wore simple garments of undyed cloth, this person was adorned in what appeared to be armor made of the same glacenite that veined the cliff face.It covered their chest, arms, and legs in interlocking plates that gleamed with inner light, catching and reflecting each flash of lightning with unnatural brilliance.Their hands were bare, and as they raised them, the entire storm pattern shifted, every element—wind, rain, lightning—realigning to center on this single point of focus.
The sight filled Thalia with a disquieting mix of awe and unease.There was beauty in this display of power, a harmony that the fractious magic-users of her world had never achieved.Yet there was also something profoundly alien about it, a sense that she was witnessing a form of magic that predated everything she had been taught, perhaps even predated Frostforge itself.
Still, it did not feel completely foreign.Beneath her wonder and trepidation ran a current of recognition, faint but undeniable.The way the storm responded to the figures' commands, the patterns formed by the glacenite in the cliff face, the rhythm of the controlled thunder—all of it resonated with something buried deep within her, as notes of a half-forgotten melody played in a dream.
The sensation was similar to what she had felt when first discovering her ability to sense currents in plants and metals—that moment of connection when something external aligned perfectly with something internal, revealing a truth that had always existed but had never before been recognized.This was not new knowledge being implanted in her mind; it was dormant understanding being awakened.
As though responding to this recognition, the visions intensified.The cliffs and storms did not fade or blur as dreams might when scrutinized too closely.Instead, they grew sharper, more detailed, pressing themselves into her awareness with deliberate weight.She could now see the intricate patterns etched into the armor of the central figure, symbols that reminded her of the runes she had seen in the Founders' Price chamber beneath the Howling Forge.She could distinguish the faces of the other storm-callers, their expressions not of strain or concentration but of serene focus, as though they were performing a familiar ritual rather than wielding tremendous power.
The cliffs and storms receded, and in their place rose new images: vast underwater chasms where the black metal that dissolved ice-steel was being harvested by figures whose features were obscured by strange, bubble-like helmets; fortress-whales like Thrum'kith, but newer, their armored hulls gleaming in sunlight as they patrolled the waters between islands; and most disturbingly, glimpses of the Deep Tide—not as the tentacled shadow-creatures that had attacked Frostforge, nor as the endless expanse of blackness that had replaced the ocean around the archipelago.
The Deep Tide that Thalia saw, standing on a beach she recognized as being near the mouth of Frostforge’s fjord, was on the horizon, across an expanse of ink-black ocean.A single entity rose from the flat darkness, its approach inexorable.It was the size of a mountain, its form—if it was a single form—composed of darkness so absolute it seemed to absorb light rather than merely lacking it.Even through the haze of unreality, Thalia knew that when it achieved landfall, it would cut a clean path through the continent and leave nothing in its wake.
This was what awaited Frostforge.This was the threat that had been dealt with hundreds of years ago, the threat that had necessitated the Founders’ Price.These were the Deep Ones in all of their unrestrained power—not monsters rising in chaos or hunger.Not aberrations clawing their way into a world that rejected them.They wereforces—as old and ordered as tectonic plates, as inevitable as tides pulled by unseen moons.
The Deep Ones did not hate the surface world.
They merely existed to unmake it.
CHAPTER TWO
Kaine stood in the shadowed corner of the infirmary, arms crossed over his chest, fingers digging into the worn fabric of his sleeve.Before him, Luna directed the storm-callers with hushed, urgent commands, their hands weaving patterns in the air above Thalia's still form.Electrical currents sparked between their fingertips, leaving ghost-trails of blue-white light that illuminated the hollows of their concentrated faces.
Kaine watched as Roran, positioned closest to the bed, closed his eyes and pulled a thin ribbon of crackling energy from the air itself, guiding it toward Thalia's temple with agonizing precision.The air tightened, pressure building until Kaine's ears popped—then nothing.Like every attempt before it, the magic dissipated without effect, leaving only the scent of ozone and the weight of collective disappointment.
"The connection's there," Naj insisted, his voice rough from hours of instruction.The Isle Warden stood behind Roran, his tattooed hands hovering just above the younger man's shoulders."You're reaching for her, but not deeply enough.You must imagine the current flowing not just around her, but through her."
Roran's jaw clenched, the tendons in his neck standing out like cords."I'm trying."The words were barely audible, ground out through gritted teeth.Dark circles hung beneath his eyes, a testament to the three days he'd spent at Thalia's bedside, refusing both food and rest.
Luna exchanged a glance with Naj, something unspoken passing between them."Perhaps we should rest," she suggested, her usually scattered demeanor replaced by a focused calm that still surprised Kaine."The human mind can only sustain concentration for so long before it frays."
"We don't have time," Roran snapped, reaching again for the invisible currents that Kaine could not see."Every hour she stays like this..."
