Vargoth Ember's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

The green tendrils spilled from the chest and did not stop. Vargoth watched them fatten in the shallows. They crawled toward the deep, toward the wrecks and his diving route. In one night they would choke the gap he had fought so hard to open. He needed to know what they were before they sealed the hoard away for good. He would not dive blind again. Up the shore stood a weathered shack, its walls hung with nets, jars, and a brass spyglass. A coastal watcher had lived here once, cataloging every strange thing the tide brought in. Vargoth broke the door with one shove. Inside, shelves held dried plants pinned to boards and notebooks swollen with salt. He read by the light of his own breath. One sketch matched the tendrils exactly. Beneath it, a scrawled line: burns from within, not without. Beside the notebook sat a round glass flask, its green fluid marked with old runes and dark stains. He could not carry his fire underwater. But he could carry this. Vargoth clutched the flask in his claws and turned back to the water. He would not risk his own hide first. He called to the deep, low and long. Something answered. A serpent rose from the dark water, sleek and blue, its body longer than three dragons. Luminous eyes fixed on him without fear. He had glimpsed the creature before, hunting the wrecks where he could not grip. It feared the tendrils less than he did. "Take this down," Vargoth said. He held out the flask. "Break it where the roots gather." The serpent took the glass in its jaws. It slid beneath the surface and vanished among the green. Vargoth waited, half his tail in the churn. He saw the glow of the serpent's eyes far below. Then a pale cloud bloomed in the water where the flask shattered. The tendrils near the cloud shriveled. They blackened and sank, curling into dead threads. Vargoth roared and dove after the serpent, driving his iron claws into a hull to hold against the slack. The blight spread outward. Every root it touched went limp. The route to the wrecks opened again, clear and dark and empty. But the cloud kept spreading. It did not stop at the tendrils. Vargoth watched a school of fish drift belly-up through it. The poison sank past the dead roots, down toward the hoard itself, into the deep silt where the gold lay buried. Whatever the flask carried, it did not know the difference between weed and treasure. The serpent surfaced beside him, shaking its head, its glow dimmed. The tendrils were dead. The path was his. And a slow green stain was settling over the very prize he had come to claim.