The zombie mermaid swam ahead of us, diving deeper and deeper into the bottomless abyss of this magical ocean.
The Abyss...
They were taking me to the Abyss. What for?
“To right his wrongs,”Dorelea had said. But what did that mean?
Were they going to feed me to whatever nightmares dwelled in the darkness below?
I kicked my legs and moved my one free arm in a desperate attempt to swim away, but Dorelea seized my arm again, trapping me.
Her long, black hair floated around us like a shroud. Black shadows slithered in the dark water, circling closer and closer. Some remained shapeless. Others morphed into humanoid silhouettes with long, serpentine tails trailing behind them instead of legs.
More undead mermaids?
I gripped the cloaks of the sirens on each side of me, no longer trying to swim away. The sirens were the only living beings between me and the monsters lurking in the inky water.
But did the sirens bring me here to feed me to these underwater ghouls?
Horror spread through me anew. I closed my eyes, trying to rein the panic in.
I couldn’t die. Not like this. Not here...
Something brushed my leg, and I jerked, expelling a jet of water from my mouth in a silent scream.
Something long and dark undulated in front of my face.
A ribbon of seaweed?
A water snake?
The shape convulsed, sending a ripple of blue light along its length. Shiny, black orbs rolled under its dark, semi-translucent skin.
Then...a hundred eyelids opened at once.
I recoiled from them and thrashed, fighting the sirens’ grip on my arms. Holding me firmly in place, they bowed their heads to the bizarre creature hovering in the water in front of me.
It was shaped like a thick, bumpy tentacle, peppered with hundreds of open eyes, all of them staring at me.
I froze in terror under those dead, black stares. Random surges of blue glow exploded all along the eyed tentacle, illuminating its tip that curled into a question mark above our heads. The other end of it disappeared into the dark depth below our feet, making the tentacle appear endless.
The sirens straightened, and we continued to descend. I couldn’t look away from the tentacle that kept watching me. Its eyeballs blinked randomly, slowly rolling up and down its length. Sometimes, they would all group together. Other times, they would spread and even briefly disappear from view.
Then, the tentacle curved sharply. The very tip of it pointed straight at my face. The tip bloated. Its skin split open, and another eye blinked at me from inside.
I felt nauseous. My chest and stomach seemed to expand, as if my body was going to explode. The next moment, the opposite sensation hit me. The ocean pressed on me from all sides, threatening to implode me.
Horror racked me. I thrashed, kicking my feet and trying to shake the sirens’ hands off me, to break free from them and this nightmare.
The darkness around us thickened. It spread in wide, black streams like a squid inking the water. A hum buzzed in my brain. My entire body vibrated with it. I could see thesound reverberating through water, its ripples spreading in the darkness.
The hum was coming from the sirens, I realized. The concentric ripples spread out from them, meeting in the middle of the semi-circle that they had formed.
The black tentacle dissolved into darkness that crackled blue, charged with some unnamed magic. Now hundreds of tentacles spread through darkness, as if it became them. The eyeballs rolled along each tentacle while each appendage undulated and split into more, their ends squirming like long, spindly fingers.
“The Ancient One.” The hum turned into words that sounded directly in my head. “Jahanam, the Lord of the Abyss.”
The sirens clasped their hands together, then raised them over their heads in worship. I realized I was now free from their grip. I kicked my feet, quickly raking my hands through the water to swim up, up, up... Back to the world of the living.
