Nerith Tidecaller's Arc

Chapter 6 of 6

The wrong breathing swelled up the passage again. Nerith held at the notch and watched the drone's light stab into the dark below. The footage had the carvings. It had the tally and the warnings. But it did not have the thing. Without the creature in frame, the proof was a wall of marks anyone could call old scratches. Nerith needed one image of what the carvers had feared, alive, below the line. "The drone can't go past the mark," Kael said. Their scar glowed sharp along the torn frills. "Neither can we." "The drone can." Nerith kept their eyes on the dark. "It's built for the pressure. We're not. We send it down alone." Sera lowered her lens. She had come into this trench before any of them, chasing the same shape in the current, losing her notes to it twice. She knew what waited better than she would say. "You send it down, it doesn't come back," she said. "That footage is everything you have." "If it comes back empty, I have nothing anyone will believe." Nerith's chest pulled tight. "One pass. It drops, it records, it climbs. We stay above the notch." Kael studied the groove running into the black. "Then it climbs fast." Nerith worked the drone's controls. They had learned its hacked rig in the station, every switch repurposed by hand. They set it to descend ten lengths past the notch and return. The drone's mapping lights swung down and locked on the groove. Then it dropped below the line. Its light shrank to a pale coin in the dark. The cold swell pushed up again, stronger, shoving Nerith's frills flat. Sera gripped the rock. Kael did not move. The coin of light stopped. Something crossed it. Nerith saw a flank slide through the beam. Translucent skin stretched over a long body. Blue organs glowed faint beneath it, a cold line of light moving under the flesh. Wide eyes caught the drone's lenses and held. The creature was vast. The beam could not hold all of it. It turned toward the light, slow and certain, exactly where the carvers had said it would be. "Now," Sera said, flat and quiet. Nerith hit the climb. The drone's legs kicked and it rose. The creature's head followed. Its mouth opened wide enough to take the whole machine. The swell hit Nerith like a wall, cold and heavy, and knocked the three of them back against the passage. The drone shot up through the notch. The creature stopped at the line. It did not cross. Its glowing body hung just below the mark, watching, then sank back into the dark. The carvers had read it right. It kept to its depth. Nerith caught the drone and checked its lenses. The footage was there. The flank, the glowing organs, the wide eye turned to the light. The creature, alive, below the warning line. The proof was whole. "You got it," Kael said. Nerith nodded. Their hands shook on the drone. "We go up." They climbed the passage together, past the bare rock, past the worn carvings, back into the grotto where two ages of marks covered every wall. Sera ran her lens over them one last time. "My people won't come down here," she said. "They'll believe it now. They won't have a choice." "Mine pulled my credentials on a false report," Kael said. Their scar glowed, but they did not touch it. "This footage names who lied." Nerith looked at the walls. Dozens of carved symbols. Hands that had lived here, left, and returned to write over their own old marks. Intelligent life, across ages, in the deepest trench of Neruval. The thing Nerith had chased since the first wrong breath in the dark. It was no longer a guess kept secret. It was recorded. It was real. They surfaced at the Selkari Cliff station as the deep light turned pale. Nerith carried the drone into the observation room and set it on the table before the broad windows. The others crowded in. Nerith played the footage from the start: the two layers of carvings, the matched tally, the warning line, and then the creature rising below it, glowing and alive. The room went silent. Someone said no word was needed. Nerith had set out to map every current and grotto of the deep and prove life had thrived below. The map was finished, the proof was in hand, and the breathing that had pulled Nerith into the trench finally had a shape the whole world could see.