Shivers skitter over my skin, the dance of arthropods. I brush at my arms reflexively and feel the the Fathom-like breath against the back of my neck. The realization that she has witnessed me even as I witnessed her, that one of us will be forever changed, the other forever unchangeable, my knowledge of her as newborn as fresh snow, while her knowledge of me is older than the world itself. How small we’ve been thinking, our little cult, deceived by that finite room, that tiny door. All while her thoughts have birthed galaxies and set fire to whole histories.
Which means Arla, Brennan, Cadence, me… we are no accident. The call Arla described, the gifts we each experienced, the death that claimed me for seventeen long minutes—these seemingly random encounters are not random at all. We just can’t see the design. All along Arla thought she’d been calling the shots, but she’s merely been relaying them. We are the pieces, but the Fathom is the board, the player, and the game. Every person she has drawn to that chamber has been intentional. And she could only have one purpose—to set herself free. She used the promise of our power to convince Arla to do her work for her, let her puppet believe it was a master. But she’s been biding her time down in that well because as an immortal, time is all she has.
Some things simply don’t fit in cages.
I put the book aside, rub my eyes, and look at Levi, who’s quiet behind the wheel, steadfast. I’m weary in a way I’ve never been.I’ve lived harder these past couple of weeks than in all my thirty-odd years. They’ve been a blur of magic and monsters and fire and blood. At least, looking at this man still beside me after everything, I can say one good thing has come of it.
She’s standing in the water when I see her, her back to me, red hair plaited down it, spooling like a ribbon at her feet.Dara.The ocean rolls in front of her, a lavender expanse of placid waves that come to nip at her ankles.
There is something off, though, something not quite right. Maybe it’s the impossible length of her hair or the unusual breadth of her shoulders, the swooping cape of iridescent feathers coursing down her back. Or maybe it’s that when I call her name, she doesn’t turn.
My feet plunge into the sand as I move toward her, and it is only when I reach her side that I see it isn’t her at all. Even if the nose and chin are right, the pattern of freckles, the smooth space between the eyes.
Her irises are spinning quasars, the whites swirls of smoke. It’s her face, but it’s been drawn over a question like a silk veil.
“You’re not Dara,” I say.
“No,” she agrees. “I’m not. Would you prefer this?” Her body thins to cellophane and ripples like liquid, running down into the ocean and back up in a column of water before resolidifying as Arla, raven-black hair and green eyes.
My flinch sends her spinning apart again. Droplets scatter over my face as she melts beside me and reconfigures into Anneli’s bright hair and colorless eyes. Before I can respond, she is shifting once more, coming together as Áhcešeatni, terror of the glacier, wings of an owl and the antlers of a reindeer. I shudder to see what the artist saw, this beast maiden of the North. And then she is gone, and Thalassa has replaced her, a body of silver scales and crab claws snapping overhead, eyes like thunderclouds. Before that image can fully settle, she morphs again into the large, lithe form of a dragon, her slender head spewingfire and her barbed tail whipping behind us. Heat pours off her scales that clink against each other like steel. Then, all at once, the dragon is gone, and she is a woman once more, with the proud, golden bearing of my grandmother, complete with Aurelia’s slanting eyes and hard jaw, just like she looked in the portrait.
I throw my hands over my face and cry out, unable to bear it. And when I pull them away, she is Dara again, if a bit more.
“Who are you?” I ask, though I know. I feel the answer wiggling inside me like a parasite.
She turns to me. “I am all of them. And I am you too.”
When she looks at me this time, I see my own long face and stick-straight hair, but only for a second, a ripple across the surface.
“If you prefer, I can be fins and tentacles, hair and fish, the sleek shock of an eel.”
“You’re the creature in the well,” I respond, the memory emerging.
“I am the well,” she says to me, anger in her tone. “And the water. I am the thing that lives within.”
I quiver at her ire. “You’re the Fathom.”
“I am a multitude,” she answers. “An expression of something too vast for you to comprehend.”
The ocean spreading to infinity before us suddenly takes on new meaning. “How is this possible? Where are we?”
“You’re dreaming, Jude. And dreams are a specialty of mine. You’ll forgive me for invading yours, but we are past due for a talk.” She glances sidelong at me.
“Now?”
“You have the key,” she explains. “The spell, the chamber—it’s yours now. Of course, I’d wanted this to happen much sooner. But you lacked a certain…sensitivity, making the connection harder to establish, and were too young to be of use to me, so I waited. But before you could come of age…”
“The fire,” I supply.Dying.
“Yes,” she confirms. “And after you were impossible to reach. Though I have tried of late, with what meager messengers I could muster, after the other one began to fail me.”
“The cat in the street that night. That was you.” The rat. The spider. The moth and dove. So many small ways she’s been reaching out, showing herself to me from the beginning.
Something like a smile crosses her face. “The chamber may hold my form, but it cannot hold my power. Not all of it. There are cracks in Rudzitin’s design, and I have had many years to discover them.”
I blow out a long, disbelieving breath.
“I envy humans,” she admits to me, staring out across the hazy water. “The way you throw yourselves at life, each of you a puff of air, a breath you would happily give for what you love. It must be easier to spend everything when all you have amounts to so little.”
