We dive into darkness. And hope the sea is finally done trying to kill us.
THIRTEEN
AVIORA
Darkness. Pressure. The roar of water in my ears.
The current drags us through stone passages so narrow, my shoulders scrape walls on either side. I can’t see Zoric—can’t see anything—but his hand is locked around mine, and I focus on that grip with the single-minded intensity of someone who’s run out of options.
My lungs are screaming. Every instinct I have is demanding that I open my mouth, breathe, give in to the pressure building behind my ribs. I’ve been underwater too long. The edges of my vision are going gray, though there’s nothing to see except blackness.
Keep kicking.
The current strengthens. Pulls harder. We’re accelerating through the passage, tumbling past formations I can feel but not see, and I have a terrible moment of certainty that this is how I die—not fighting Oreth, not facing Finn’s ghost, but drowning in an unnamed tunnel while the man beside me drowns too.
Fitting.
Zoric’s hand tightens on mine. Not comfort—command.
So I don’t. I kick. I claw at water that resists every motion. I hold on to his hand with strength I didn’t know I had left.
And then?—
Light.
Gray and distant, filtering down from somewhere above. The passage opens. The current releases us into open water, and I’m kicking upward before I process what I’m seeing—kicking toward that light with everything I have, lungs bursting, vision narrowing to a pinprick of not-quite-dark.
We break the surface.
I gasp. Choke. Gulp air that tastes like salt and storm and the most beautiful thing I’ve ever breathed. Water streams from my hair, my clothes, my skin. The world is spinning around me—sky and sea and the dark mass of cliffs in the distance.
Dreadhaven. We’re in the Wrecktide’s outer reaches, maybe half a mile from shore. The keep’s blackstone towers rise against the predawn sky, and I have a hysterical urge to laugh at the sight of them.
We made it. We actually made it.
“Aviora.” Zoric surfaces beside me, water sluicing off gray-green skin. His braids have come loose, black hair plastered to his face, and he looks as wrecked as I feel. “You’re alive.”
“Noticed that.” My voice comes out raw. Scraped. “You?”
“Functional.” He treads water beside me, his massive frame moving with the easy efficiency of someone born to the sea. “Can you swim?”
I take stock. Arms: exhausted but working. Legs: screaming but operational. The gash on my palm from cutting Oreth’s chains has reopened, blood swirling pink in the water around my hand.
“I can swim.”
We strike out for shore. The water here is different from the cursed depths we left behind—cold, yes, but not the bone-deep wrongness of Oreth’s domain. The Wrecktide stretches around us, studded with the broken masts of sunken ships, but the ghostlights that usually drift among them are gone. The whispers are silent.
The curse died with Oreth. I can feel its absence in the water, a lifting of pressure I’d grown so accustomed to that I forgot it wasn’t normal.
My arms cut through the waves with the mechanical rhythm of pure exhaustion. Beside me, Zoric matches my pace, his bulk creating wakes that push me slightly off course every few strokes. We don’t talk. Don’t have the breath for it. Just swim—toward the cliffs, toward the cove beneath the Eastern Collapse, toward solid ground and whatever awaits us there.
The sky is still dark when we reach the shallows. I stagger through waist-deep water, my boots finding purchase on black sand, and then I’m out—actually out, actually standing on solid ground—and my legs give way beneath me.
I drop to my knees in the sand. It’s cold and gritty against my palms, and I don’t care. I’m alive. We’re alive. Oreth is ash and saltwater, the curse is broken, and I’m kneeling on a beach beneath Dreadhaven’s cliffs trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person.
Zoric crashes down beside me. For a long moment, we just kneel there, gasping, shivering, looking at each other with the wild-eyed disbelief of people who expected to die and somehow didn’t.
“We did it.” My voice sounds strange in my own ears. Too quiet. Too raw. “We actually fucking did it.”
