Nerith Tidecaller's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

The groove ran from the grotto floor into the black passage ahead. Nerith hovered at its edge. The Beacon drone held its light on the warning marks. Those marks named the thing below. Nerith could not read them. Swimming down that passage blind meant trusting a guess, and a wrong guess meant meeting whatever the carvers had feared. Kael drifted up beside Nerith. Their scar glowed pale along the torn frills. "You want to go down there." It was not a question. "I want to know what the symbols say first," Nerith said. "If they name it, I can plan for it. If they just say run, I run." Sera lowered her lens. She had come down here alone before any of them, chasing the same large thing in the current. She knew the deep better than she admitted to her own people. "The lens shows what's cut," she said. "It doesn't translate. Nobody translates this." Nerith studied the two layers of marks again. Old carvings under new ones. A thought caught. "The tally," Nerith said. "The even counts by the floor. You said measurement. Depth or time." Sera raised the lens again. The row of marks lit up. Nerith counted them, then counted the spacing between the warning symbols and the groove. "They're the same count," Nerith said. "The tally matches the warnings. They weren't measuring years. They were measuring distance. How far down the thing stays." Kael leaned in. "So the number tells you how deep it lives." "If I'm right." Nerith's chest tightened. This was still a guess. But it was a guess built on a pattern, not on nothing. "The tally stops at a set depth. Below that mark, the passage belongs to it. Above it, we're clear." Sera held the lens steady on the groove. "Then we don't swim past the mark." Nerith signaled the Beacon. Its lenses turned and locked on the tally, the warnings, and the groove together. The footage caught the reading in one frame. Whoever came after would see the math the carvers left behind. Nerith moved into the mouth of the passage. The water grew colder. The groove deepened under them. Nerith watched the walls for the tally mark that meant stop. They passed worn carvings, then bare rock, then nothing. The mark appeared. A single deep notch cut across the stone, level with the groove. Below it, the passage dropped into pure dark. Nerith stopped. Kael stopped. Sera stopped. Then the dark below the notch moved. Not current. A slow swell pushed up the passage, cold and heavy, and the water shoved against Nerith's frills. Something exhaled down there, low and rhythmic, the same wrong breathing Nerith had chased into the trench in the first place. The guess was right. The thing was real, and it was awake, and it was exactly where the carvers had marked it.