Written June 7th - I forgot.
Published November 5th, 2020.
Alright then, time for the review responses. You guys have been helpful these last few months, so I figured it was time to give a shoutout. Check out my profile if you want to see more of my stories.
BookwormLe: Emotional things aren't my strong point, and never have been. I've tried with character-focused content but there's only been one or two times where I've succeeded when trying to write people; too dynamic, too foreign to me. Hopefully I'll be able to pull off a successful action/mystery story with this one while still paying attention to the personal elements.
Manic Dragon1224: I'd love it if you could make an FFN account, for PMs. Suffice it to say that at the time I already had written another chapter, and this one, and another one. There's going to be another update in two weeks, so stay tuned!
Pt35: You're a pretty morbid person if you want to see what happens to a dragon's eyeballs when they get crushed. I did research back when I came up with the idea for this story - it turns out that fish do have small quantities of gas in them, which they use as regulation to make them float or sink. Fish can still get the bends - if you catch a deepwater animal and pull it up to the surface quick it'll bleed everywhere and its eyes will pop out. There are species of jellyfish that can't exist in the high-light, low-pressure environment of shallow water at all. I've decided to make Seawings a shallow to medium-deep water species, the sort who don't venture past the depth of the continental shelf. Could they survive in deep water? Yes, but they wouldn't like it.
I didn't think about the 'bigger and scarier' things part much when I was writing the story; I was thinking of a different kind of horror. You may have given me an idea for a chapter, friend.
AppleTheAllwing: Apple, when you make a review, at least try. Please.
That chain seemed to last forever. We sunk down, and down, and down, and when it seemed the bottom must soon come into sight all there was was murk. The fathoms oozed by like time did when I was doing something I didn't want to be doing, and would rather have been done with. It got dark down there, so dark the grayish-blue light coming from above did as much good for the visibility as a candle does at night in the Skywing forest. We were the only illumination, till at long last a teal glimmer appeared on the bottom, slowly moving, or so I thought, until I realized the chain was bent because the buoy was being pulled sideways by the wind somewhat, and we were coming down at an angle and so had some sideways momentum. Whoever was down there was standing quite still.
A little more, a little more, and soon our claws were hovering just above the silt. There was a thick iron u-bolt connecting the chain to the stone foundation which anchored the buoy, but all this was nearly covered with detritus.
"Hello," said Fin. I took a moment now to imprint the pattern of his luminescence on my memory, lest I fail to recognize him in the dark. "The Seawing here is asleep!"
It was – or rather, he was. The dragonesses on the Ridge were either somewhere else or had long since bailed on this desolate place. Where did they even get their food?
Fin saw the questions on my brow but could not yet answer them.
I glowed, and increased my glow till the light from the Seawing beside me became dull in comparison, and that woke him up, for he stirred and opened his eyes, and I dimmed so I wouldn't cause him pain.
His name was Ichor; we gathered, and he was very much in the habit of saying things twice, through roundabout says, so mentally I tuned out the repeats and used the lulls in conversation to get my bearings.
"Hello," he said, "beneath the shifting seas."
"We wish you calm currents ourselves, for we have been through a week's journey," I said. "My name is Riptide, and his is Prince Fin. We are dreadfully hungry."
"That can easily be fixed, mayhap," said Ichor.
While he rambled on I looked around and took in the surroundings, anything of noteworthy importance, and found little. In the dark our light was absorbed by the silt, for at the bottom drifting clouds of detritus rolled from left to right like morning fog on a mountain; like the mountain the ground too sloped rightwards and downwards – east, probably, My compass confirmed this.
"Wherefore comes the current?" I asked: perhaps there was some learning to be had in the geography of the deep.
"It is water flowing from high to low, into the abyss," said Ichor. "Stand near the cleft where the silt steepens and you will feel the rush as the water rushes past towards nothing."
Ichor went on expounding indirectly the points he'd just made, which I paid half a mind to, subcontracting a portion of my consciousness to report whether anything of note was being said while my snout went through the motions of understanding. My mind wandered a mental landscape while my eyes roved a sea one. As Fin had said so many days ago, the only color was blue; the water was blue, our scales were blue. The silt might've been brown or rust-colored, but the only light here was blue, and navy mists of silt competed with teal.
All the while we were talking we were drifting eastwards, swimming lethargically while the current did most of the work, and following Ichor's lead, wherever he wilt. The cold and pressure slowed me down, sapped at our strength. It was rather like mountain air in that sense. Hopefully it wouldn't turn out to be too similar; I didn't want to be ill. I never enjoyed peak sickness.
I spun the cognitive dial and tuned to the conversation at hand.
"And where do the inhabitants live?" Fin was asking.
"In frames of stone, walled against the current with rock as a windbreaker," said Ichor. Then some more repeating. "We all live near the anchor – to be lost on the bottom means ascending and finding the buoy, and going up too quickly means some unpleasantness."
"Like what?"
"When fish get pulled up from the bottom they die. Seawings get nothing so major. Most of you are never deep enough to notice at all. But going up a hundred-fifty fathoms in a minute makes you sick."
"Giddy?"
Ichor had to think.
"No, sore. It's as if there's something in your blood that's about to pop. And you'd better deflate your air bladder going up, too, or you'll explode with a bang. If you're not used to it you'll retch, at the very least."
"Sounds pleasant," said Fin.
I dimmed yet again, for the light emanating from my belly cost energy; a small amount, but a significant quantity nonetheless. No wonder the dragons down here gave so little luminescence; they were conserving power. And that reminded me of the food Ichor had promised, and my empty stomach, which was gnawing at my insides now that we were away from the surface excitement.
"And how do you tell where to go?" asked Fin, when Ichor's rambling had become sparse enough he felt it was polite to interrupt it.
"The lay of the floor, and the feel of the currents. They change, especially in the lee of one of our shelters. Anything too far out is impossible to memorize. If there were lights like the Icewings have, and more stone, and more food, then there could be more dragons down here. But no one wants to come, and Glacier would never lend us lamps, if indeed ever she learnt of us."
A moment's pause, the eerie darkness swirling closer as Fin and I took a moment to consider.
"Glacier?" asked Fin.
"Yes, Queen Glacier," said Ichor, impatient. "Did a daughter take the throne?"
"Glacier died to illness," I said, not wanting to delve into the details. "Snowfall has been queen for a year now."
"No one thought to mention that to us," said Ichor. "We are too unimportant to consider."
"You are important enough for us to be here," said Fin. "A son of the crown and his companion."
A selfish thought came to me; if they did not know of Glacier's death, perhaps they were too isolated to remember that I was Webs's son. Certainly Ichor paid little attention to me when I mentioned my name, but he did not seem to pay much attention to Fin, either.
The shadow of a rise in the ground came into view through the silt, incipient and indistinct. Slowly it resolved as we approached, until it became a tumble-down pile of stone with a tadpole tail of silt in its lee, dirt wafting by like fog, and some swirling about black cracks in the structure before they were suddenly pulled in, and emerged from the other side in puffs, or never came out again. The stone was blue, and speckled black and grey-blue in part.
"Here we are," said Ichor. To him it looked like home, perhaps, but to me it was devoid of character; indeed, the most interesting thing about it was the way the currents swayed in its lee. How did anyone live down here?
"Shall we discuss your problem inside?" asked Fin.
"Be my guest."
Ichor slipped inside a crack on the south side, seeming suddenly to vanish before my eyes penetrated the concealing gloom and made out his lights inside, disappearing down a tunnel of short length. Fin and I looked at each other, and I decided to go first. There was an icy tassel of fear wrapping around my guts, and I hated that there was fear, and quashed it; I should not be afraid of this dark and foreboding cave.
But thinking about that made me more tentative.
I forced my body on.
It was lighter inside than outside; the rocks caught some of the light and reflected it inwards, so amplifying the dim glow we cast. There were a few others here, resting in the corner, and some fish stashed in places, all dead, with bulging, near-blind eyes like the eyes of cave animals. That reminded me of the tunnels and rimrock at Jade, and calmed me, for in the dark there was nothing save that which feared me.
Or so I hoped.
At any rate, Fin ducked in beneath the stony overhang, and we ate, and rested. The Seawings in the corner were huddled up, as if afraid, darting inquisitive glances at me when they thought I wasn't looking. Presently another came through the entrance and joined the throng, flashing dully in a dialect which was hard to understand and harder to make out when the speaker wasn't dead on to me but facing away. When no one spoke to us Ichor decided it needed to be him.
"At first we thought it was nothing. There have always been tales of fish in the water; ugly carnivores which lie in wait for you to come by and jump out at you. But they were more afraid of us than we were of them, and when we discovered this ignorance bred contempt, and we pay no more heed to those creatures than you do to a clam."
Fin tilted his head. "You say 'at first'. What next?"
"People started seeing things. Lights, or shadows slithering about on the bottom. Strange scents."
Those could be the product of an imaginative mind, however. A mudslide, or the dispersed image of a cloud coming over the water far above. An hour down here and already I was conjuring specters and evil eels coming at me with every puff of silt that came through the walls. Fin thought the same, no doubt.
"Has anybody disappeared?"
"No."
Then a week's journey had resulted in a collossal waste of time. At the very least we might salvage some surveying out of what was turning out to be a boondoggle.
"You wanted us here for reassurance?" asked Fin.
"Yes."
"Look at me; I'm the fighting one," I said. "Why, there's nothing down here at all."
"That is what we desperately wanted to hear from someone on the outside."
Frustration bubbled in my blood. I tugged at Fin.
"Excuse us for a moment."
Ichor watched us go as we filed out the tunnel to the outer world. I stepped aside from the entrance to the corridor, ensuring he could make little sense of our speech.
"We're down here on a wild goose chase!" I said. "There's obviously nothing down here and we're at the mercy of a few dozen fisher-dragons who don't even know what they're talking about."
"At least it was a fun trip," remarked Fin. No sarcasm there.
"If you mean that by fun in the painful sense, then yes. Let's survey the contours of this place and head home."
"You're feeling up to it, then?" asked Fin.
"No."
"Then let's get inside and have some rest."
My limbs could've been made of stone right now, for all the good they did me, but the annoyance was heating them to an even temper. Still, one could not simply ignore exhaustion. I could employ compass and plumb line for hours if need be, but in the morning I would pay dearly for the effort, stacked atop the travel work which had already taken me to the limits of my endurance. Fin looked tired too, but he hid his vulnerable state as well as he had on the plains. He leaned back and forth, resting one side at a time, and his movements were sluggish, but in other ways he was the picture of health.
On the other talon, I looked like a swimming, talking brick.
We shuffled inside and I fell asleep, to my body's gratitude and my brain's futile protests.
There was no particular time called morning down here, but it must've been sunrise above when my eyes snapped open; I was at home, in water – but it was dark and gloomy and there was choking silt swirling around my gills, and all of a sudden it dawned on me that I was not in my comfy tunnel in the shallow waters near the islands of the bay, but on an inhospitable bottom some thousand feet beneath the surface, lonely, cold, and foreboding.
Fin was still asleep, draped over a rock like a lizard bathing the sunlight: my sense of time had won out, if I had not slept a day and a night and gone to sleep day before yesterday. It was easy to lose track of the days down here; incredibly so. I nudged Fin from his slumber, and he floated gently from the stone and suddenly woke up with the ground looming in his face and about to hit him. It's understandable that he squawked (though it came out as more of a gurgle).
I let loose a luminant chord of laughter.
"Very funny," said Fin, when he was fully awake. "I imagine it looked hilarious, but it was a rather rude way to wake me."
"Did his majesty want cod with breakfast?"
Then Fin laughed, too.
"I suppose we'd better be up," he said, and looked around. Ichor was out, and so were most of the Seawings, save one, who looked asleep. "I think they're seeing things. The whole story hasn't got any details, only vagaries and fears of what goes bump in the night.'
"You're quite right," I said. "It's a good thing I brought the fathom cable – it acts nicely as a measuring tape."
And Fin produced an empty chart and quill. "Let's get a move on."
We measured east from the house, ensuring we were on the straight with Fin's level and marking a contour for every five fathoms the bottom went down. We left a plumb line in the silt, too, so we could find our way back, for there were no landmarks here, and one part of the ocean looked much like the next.
"The chart says the slope is getting steeper here," remarked Fin, after ten or twelve soundings. To my eyes the seafloor looked like a flat slab of silt tilted slightly sideways, but we had been going on for nearly a mile now, and what I could not see in the murk and fifty yard visibility our measurements could certainly make out.
"How deep are we?" I asked, holding the cable.
"Two hundred and twenty some."
"The light's been fading."
"Might be a cloud."
"Fifty fathoms makes a decent amount of difference," I said. "The world is getting dimmer and dimmer."
"Let's keep on. Ichor said the falloff was this-a-way."
The presence of Fin lent some cheer to an otherwise dreary situation, though the current had accelerated as the ground tilted ever downwards and perhaps inwards, as if we were standing on the slope of a gigantic funnel and the sea was flowing through it towards a waterfall. Rolling clouds of silt blurred Fin's features and did even more to obscure the faint light from above. There was a decent tilt to the silt now, and though I did not yet feel as if I were going to tumble backwards I noticed a gradual steepening.
"This is becoming perilous," I said.
"What, thinking of going back?"
"Merely remarking on the danger."
"It feels like we're clinging to the bottom of a river, and it only goes faster the farther we go on," said Fin. "Five fathoms?"
"No, four and a half. Keep going."
"Five?"
"Yes."
He marked the contour on his chart. He swam forwards and I paced backwards ahead of him, paying out fathom line while watching the level and raising it compared to my chest as we headed down the slope. A little while later the same thing began all over again. We could hardly go thirty feet without remarking the gain of a fathom's depth; the grade was very steep, and at times there would be sudden drops in the lee of a stone outcropping which would take me by surprise, so that I got in the habit of bracing myself on all fours instead of swimming against the current. Eventually the slope became twenty-five degrees, and then thirty, and then almost one forward for one down, with no footholds, and water rushing past my ears with a steady rumble that told me of unfathomable quantities speeding past us and dropping into the abyss, perhaps to well up from the bottom in a few hundred miles.
A part of me remarked that it was an odd thermocline to make water flow downwards. Perhaps there was an oceanic volcano somewhere in the deep, which heat caused a column of warmth to swell upwards, and this was the replacement for the lost fluid. But finding that out might mean following this current for hundreds of miles.
"Could you take a temperature sounding?" I asked.
"Whaaaaaaat?" came the reply, garbled by the blurring of the silt racing by.
"Temperature sounding!"
A moment.
"Forty-two!"
We went on a little ways, ever ready to turn back if the other said we could, but too prideful to suggest it alone.
"What about now?"
"Almost forty-two."
There was little change in water temperature, as I'd suspected; the waters lost little heat tumbling down.
"Do you want to go on?" Fin asked.
"Do you want to go back?" I said.
"No."
"Then keep going."
At last we reached a sheer cliff of rock, sloped at the edges like a funnel, the current so strong I slipped backwards in the mud, though I crouched low and dug in with all my might. I looked over my shoulder and everything stopped; the rush, the silt, Fin and all. There was something glowing down there, and not us; two orbs clinging to the crags like eyes. A swirl obscured them for a moment and they disappeared.
"I think we've gone far enough," I said. "Time to go home."
We secured everything to ourselves and began the long trek back, due west according to my trusty compass, up and up and up, till we went more sideways and less up, and the water became shallower, though the light was no dimmer; the sun must've been setting ahead of us, and it was as well that we started back when we did, or we would've had to find the lodge in complete darkness.
"By the way," I said, halfway through the trip. "Did you see anything while we were surveying?"
Fin cast a worried glance at me. "Mud, pebbles and water, nothing else."
"Ah," I said, wondering whether or not to lie to him. I settled for a half-truth. "I'm not sure I saw anything else either."
Ichor was at the lodge, but for him I did not care; I spent my time in the stone corner, turning restlessly. When at last exhaustion overcame me and I fell to sleep, my dreams were haunted by the twin glows which spun ever about me, weaving a trail of horror at who knew what. When it felt like I was falling to my death I woke up and found myself solidly on the cold, dark rock, almost invisible even to my eyes, for the only light came from above: Fin was asleep, and his scales were cold blue. I did not want to go outside – but to be afraid of what lay beyond was to be as bad as the locals.
No, I wasn't afraid, or wouldn't be.
I was also probably doing something stupid, I thought, twining the plumb line onto its roll while puffs of orange dye sloughed away and settled to the floor; orange, yes, but it looked blue. There was my compass and thermometer, and a tourniquet, and a scroll, which I rapidly employed in writing upon and leaving wedged in a rock where Fin would see it.
Got bored of lying around, decided to get the lie of the ridge today. Hopefully will be back in a couple hours with temperature readings, cheers, Riptide.
Would it not be better to wait, and wake him up? No; fears faced with friends came back no sooner than the friend had left: conquered alone they hissed and remained silent in their holes. I ducked my head beneath the overhang in the dark water, angled my body between two uncomfortably jutting stones midway through the thin passage, and slipped the confines of the lodge altogether. Now the main difficulty was picking up our track.
It was particularly hard; my talons had scuffed the bottom here and there, leaving a trail of marks not yet completely erased by the current. Temporarily they deepened where I had stepped while surveying, then disappeared altogether – the speeding waters had swallowed them up. With the lights on my shoulders I cast brilliant beams around me; from a distance they must've seemed like the flare of a star, or the burning fire of a diadem, with lances of blue light speeding away at right angles.
That was what the vainglorious part of my mind said I would look like, anyway. The reality was less profound. At any rate, if there were malcontents down here they ought to catch one look at me and skedaddle, if the murk didn't obscure me entirely.
And well it might. I would step in the silt to gain traction against being swept away entirely by the current, look behind me and see my previous tracks being filled as quickly as I made them. The whole bottom was enveloped in some kind of fog, with no light from above and no landmarks, left or right.
I pressed on. The slope grew ever steeper, and still I continued. When I thought I had reached the turning point of yesterday's expedition I stopped and peered into the swirling gloom to my left. Where before there'd been another being staring back at me, now there was nothing. I treaded forwards, leaving behind the straight track east which heretofore I had made, the way home. There was a rocky outcropping twenty-five fathoms from where I'd been at the time – far enough for someone to have reared up on their hind legs and only been a silhouette in the grungy ocean for my eyes, for the water was so murky someone could've snuck up on me without my ever knowing it.
Suddenly something touched my tail. I spun about and there it was; the dark and twisted shape of another dragon crouching low to the ground. I kicked and there was a crack; it shied away, and yet I had thrown myself into the current. Before I could get hold of the ground again the water had me, was carrying me down, down into the depths, a hundred fathoms, two hundred – more. There was no light except what came from me, abyssal void above and beside and below; I was lost from the ridge, and when at last it found me again it greeted my head with a rock.
That could've been the end for me; my final resting place hidden somewhere on the bottom of the ocean, scavenged to the bones by the crabs. But it was at long last that I woke up, with my head spinning, with darkness all around me, but at least something beneath me to speak of, and with a lobster already nipping at my wing membrane. I kicked away the crustacean quickly, for it reminded me of the dragon at my tail.
Who had it been? One of the fishers, trying to get rid of me? But why-ever would they try to do that to me? It was not as if they knew I was the son of Webs, and were trying to get revenge on my father by killing me. They were perfectly innocent of my heritage. And the proportions hadn't been right.
I got to my talons. At the bottom the current was still strong, but manageable. What goes down must go up in the ocean, so there had to be a place where the water rose. But the place of upwelling might not be for a hundred miles.
Up was hard to discern. I could be clinging to the ceiling of a cave for all I knew, supported by the sea and lifted by a slight internal buoyancy. On went the lights. I was standing in a wasteland, in the center of a valley in an alluvial fan, with the mud rising on either side and presumably where the cliff was.
But the direction it was in – and thus where I happened to be – were impossible to know. Did I have my compass?
Gone.
And what about the plumb line?
Also gone.
The only things I had left were my quill and some scrolls and a thermometer – a whole lot of use in gaining my bearings.
It was imperative to get to the surface. There the sun would grant me some idea of where I was – assuming I was east of the ridge, it would be easy to head west, and gain Pyrrhia from there, then go either to the ridge again or wait at the palace for news. The warnings of Ichor did not elude me, however. To go up too fast was to invite doom. I would have to take it slowly.
I swam upwards, pausing every so often and trying to hold my depth, then swimming again, till at last there came into view a hint of light.
Odd, that I'd gained view of the surface so quickly.
I soon knew why. Rock reflected a glimmer of my glow – and it was rock which implacably lay before me, blocking the way out. That was why the ground had sloped up on my sides.
I was in a cave.
Despair gripped me and I sank both in spirit and body. There was no way out! - or perhaps there was, but it was impossible to leave because of the current. I might die of starvation before I reached the exit.
A sixth sense warned me of danger before it came - I turned, and there in front of me swam the dragon from before, with gangly limbs and a mouth full of teeth.