Page 18 of The Dark, Dead, Deep

I held his eyes for only a minute before someone tapped me on my shoulder. I had reached the front of the line.

I kicked off the lakebed, just as I had seen the dozens that came before me do, and I swam into the Abyss.

I didn’t know how long I had been swimming when I felt my legs slow and my fingers freeze and go numb. I was at the very back of the crowd, struggling to keep up, as the undine in front of me grew smaller and smaller in the distance until they were swallowed by the gloom.

Kick by kick, I felt myself falling behind, confused at my failing body as I began to sink, unable to right myself.

The faelights shifted and my vision clouded as the glow stretched into sunbeams. In the silence of the Abyss, my heartbeat was too loud and I winced with every tick and every woosh of water shifting through my gills.

My blood pumped so slushly and my tongue was numb. Had I been poisoned? Had someone managed to weave a sleep spell into my clothing?

Dropping from the path and falling slowly to the lake floor. I opened my mouth to shout for help, but no sound came out. My lips were locked together, my screams trapped in a frozen body.

I tumbled through the water, unable to move, the yawning maw of the chasm below the migration path welcomed me, and darkness swallowed me whole, stealing my sight for a moment as my eyes struggled to adjust.

I didn’t feel it when I hit the lake bed.

Sharp rocks dug into my skin, and a lone fish with teeth longer than my fingers darted by without giving me a second glance.

Was I going to die?

I tried to figure out what had happened, reaching for the lake to ask for help only to find our connection blocked somehow. Had I been drugged?

I had been given the same blood wine as everyone else, but it was the only thing I could think of.

My breath grew reedy and thin as I laid on my side in the silt, unable to move a single muscle. I felt the edges of my vision darken as sleep threatened to pull me under.

Every time my eyes closed, the darkness shifted. One moment I was in the chasm, the next I was being carried.

My gills choked and sucked on air as I burst from the surface of the lake. I took a moment and then another, my eyes were stuck closed and no matter what I couldn’t open them.

I gagged as sea water erupted from my lips, and I disappeared back under the surface for just a moment before I was grabbed under the shoulders and wrenched from the water so harshly that my head smacked into my collarbone.

I was a limp weight as I was dragged from the water. The waves lapping at my ankles as my bare stomach met sand. The grit and stones dug into my skin and left scratches as I was pulled along and dumped onto the sand.

I managed to open my eye, no more than a whisker, but all I could see were splotches. My head spun and I couldn’t move my body, no matter how hard I tried.

“We need evidence that the job is done,” a male said, taking over my prone body.

“Won’t it be obvious when she doesn’t come back from the migration?” another male replied.

“King’s orders,” someone grunted. “Take one of her freckles. The half moon one.”

I tried to unlock my jaw, to scream and beg. I tried to communicate with my hands, my legs, with any part of my body, but I couldn’t.

“We gotta do it quick before she turns to human form,” another male replied.

My gills wheezed before the magic rushed over my body, and a hand gripped my cheeks and wrenched my head out of the sand. I felt a single claw trail a path from the edge of my eye to my cheek, over the shining pearl inlaid in my skin. It was a crescent, and mirrored the exact placement of one of my mother’s most prominent features.

I couldn’t beg. I couldn’t plead. All I could do wasfeelas a single hooked claw dug into the skin of my face and tugged the pearl free. The awkward shape snagged and made it difficult for my assailant, but they didn’t stop. Blood streamed down my cheek, and the wound burned with the sand on my skin, and the salt that had dried on my face from the lake.

When the job was done, my head slammed back onto the sand, sending a shower of granules in all directions. Someone brushed their hands together and stepped away. “Got it,” they declared.

Footsteps crunched as they made their way back to the water.

“Undine can survive on dry land. What happens when she gets back to Cruinn?” one of the males asked.

Another snorted. “She’s been poisoned. The wretch isn’t going make it until sunrise, let alone back to the castle.”

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