Page 44 of Frostforge, Passage Six
The wheel completed its rotation with a final clang.Cassia pulled, and the heavy door swung toward them, revealing not the ocean as Thalia had feared, but a small chamber with another identical door on its opposite side.An airlock.
"Captain, no," Thalia breathed, understanding blossoming with terrible clarity."You can't—"
"I can," Cassia interrupted, stepping into the chamber."I must."
She turned to face them, framed by the airlock's metal walls.In that moment, she seemed both smaller and larger than life—a woman of ordinary stature carrying the weight of extraordinary purpose.
"This is how it works," she explained, her voice steady despite the fortress shaking around them."When I seal this inner door, the outer one will open.I will join her in the waters, and will have moments to act.Enough time to allow for our whale's escape."
Roran shook his head, static electricity crackling more visibly in his wild curls."You'll be crushed instantly," he protested."Or worse—taken by that thing out there."
A smile touched Cassia's lips, genuine despite the grim circumstances."Perhaps," she conceded."But not before I remind the Deep Ones why they must fear storm-callers."
She looked directly at Thalia then, her gray eyes intense with purpose."You made promise to bring our whale to safety," she said."Now I ask again—will you keep this vow?Will you shelter my people when I cannot?"
The question hung between them, weighted with lives and futures Thalia had never expected to be responsible for.She thought of the civilians huddled in the chambers behind them, of children who would never see their captain again, of a people who had been fleeing an unimaginable threat for generations.
"I will," she said, the words emerging stronger than she expected."I swear it."
Cassia nodded once, satisfaction briefly softening her stern features.Then she reached for the inner door, beginning to pull it closed between them.
"Wait—" Thalia began, though she knew nothing she could say would change the captain's mind.
"There is no waiting in duty," Cassia replied simply."Only doing what must be done, when it must be done."
The door sealed with a heavy clank, locking mechanisms engaging automatically.Through a small reinforced window in its center, Thalia could see Cassia turning toward the outer door, her hands already raised as she prepared to channel the storm magic that flowed in her veins.
"We need to go," Roran said urgently, tugging at Thalia's arm."We need to see—to know if it works."
He was right.They raced back along the corridor, the fortress-whale's movements growing more frantic around them as it continued to struggle against the constricting tentacle.They reached the observation room just as a metallic groan echoed through the structure—the sound of the airlock's outer door opening to the crushing pressure of the deep.
Through the porthole, Thalia saw the inky tentacle suddenly recoil, releasing its grip on the fortress.The movement was violent, reactive—the response of something unexpectedly challenged.In the space where the darkness had been, a small figure now floated, arms extended in a posture of defiance that appeared absurdly tiny against the scale of what it faced.
Cassia.
Lightning erupted from the captain's outstretched hands, not the clean silver of natural storms but a concentrated, blindingly white energy that cut through the murky water like a blade.The electricity forked and multiplied, creating a lattice of power that pushed back the encroaching darkness.Each bolt illuminated the true scope of what they faced—a mass of shadow that seemed to extend forever downward, as if the entire ocean floor had been subsumed in living night.
The fortress-whale seized its opportunity.With a powerful thrust of its enormous tail, the leviathan surged upward and forward, fleeing while Cassia kept the enemy occupied.The sudden acceleration pressed Thalia against the porthole glass, her face inches from the barrier that separated her from the abyss outside.
Her last glimpse of Captain Cassia showed the woman suspended in water that boiled with the force of her magic, her white braids floating around her head like a crown of silver snakes.The Deep One's tentacle whipped forward with astonishing speed for something so massive—a deliberate strike aimed directly at the source of its agitation.
Then darkness swallowed the small figure, and Cassia was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Thalia sat alone in the corridor, her spine pressed against the cold stone wall, legs drawn to her chest like a child seeking comfort from the vastness of the world.The fortress-whale's groans echoed through the structure—not the pained sounds of a wounded creature, but the steady, ancient voice of something that had traversed these waters since before humans built their first boats.
In the dim light cast by gas lamps, she watched shadows dance across the curved ceiling, their movements synchronized with the leviathan's gentle undulations through shallower waters.Her mind replayed the image that refused to fade: Cassia suspended in the abyss, white braids floating like silver serpents around her head, hands outstretched as lightning erupted from her fingertips against an enemy older than time itself.
That final moment—caught in the unnatural light of storm magic against absolute darkness—had burned itself into Thalia's vision.She closed her eyes, but the scene only grew more vivid: Cassia's small figure dwarfed by the immensity of the Deep One, her defiance magnificent and terrible in its futility.Then the tentacle, swift as thought despite its impossible size, wrapping around that spark of resistance and extinguishing it completely.
No screams.No struggle.Just sudden absence where life had been moments before.
A hollowness expanded in Thalia's chest, a void not unlike the one that had consumed Cassia.This grief felt different from what she had known before—it carried the bitter edge of survivor's guilt, the knowledge that she, an outsider, lived because a Warden captain had chosen to die.
The irony of it pulled at her like a fishhook caught in tender flesh: she had spent years training at Frostforge to fight these people, had been taught to regard them as enemies to be eliminated, threats to be neutralized.Yet when the moment of true crisis arrived, it was a Warden who had sacrificed everything to save them all.
Her fingers traced the roughened stone beside her, feeling the subtle vibrations of the leviathan's heartbeat through the material.The fortress-whale continued its journey, carrying its burden of refugees and three continental soldiers with the same patient strength.It asked nothing, demanded nothing, simply persevered as it had for generations.Cassia’s lieutenant, a narrow man with close-cropped hair and perpetually wary eyes, had assured Thalia that the whale was taking them toward the continent—to the Rimspires.The Wardens could not control the beast, but evidently, some of them had ways of communicating with it, methods that Thalia couldn’t begin to fathom.
