*Weekly updates* "There are no leashes now, no bindings," she says, her voice a dark lullaby in the flickering candlelight, "and it is their sacrifice that gave us this. Nothing can ever repay it. No one can ever take it from us. So now, in this hal...
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It seems inevitable that it should come to this. Perhaps that is what Ruben might have said—what Ben, so fond of fate and destiny, would say. But it wasn't fate that pushed her to these shores. It was choice.
The icy water laps at her legs like a lure, like a messenger of the cold things that shimmer below. And the farther she walks in, the more it embraces her.
Welcome back.
It's to her shoulders, pawing at her throat, when she looks back, just once, at the dark, solitary figure waiting for her at the shore.
I will come back for you, she thinks. I will always come back for you.
And then she dives.
It is a swirl of every memory, every nightmare—the black-blue; the pale bubbles; the long, pressing silence. Her hair threads out around her, an obsidian halo, and her hands—pale in the sea light—are a sickly blue-green.
She moves like a shadow amongst it, going not by sight, not by touch or sound, but by call. It doesn't matter if her consciousness doesn't know the way; there's still some part of her that remembers.
She enters with ease the cave Ruben had once swam inside, letting its chilly shadow absorb her, letting the current push and pull her along. When she reaches the end, when the crown of her head breaks the icy mirrorglass, she does not splutter, or blink owlishly in the faint green glow. She stares up at the thing that has been waiting for her.
"You came back," it rasps, water dribbling on its chin.
She nods.
She came back to see. She came back to understand. This, at least, these creatures comprehend. They pad on soft, wet feet in front of her, around the glowing stones and all the voices trapped inside them. She hadn't realized, the first time she saw those rocks. Hadn't understood that they were not rocks, but tombs. But now, now that she has seen Abadi Chaudri's army, now that she has touched that mother metal, she can see.
Echoes, whispers from the library's bones.
Ben, as he so often could be, had been cleverer than he realized when he said that.
Ben... Ben, who once brought her here to chase his dream. A dream she now comes to destroy.
They know it, these beacons, the stones; it hums underneath everything, flesh and rock, water and flickering, dim glow. The lights weave, spin ahead of her in the dark, leading her into the musk, into the quiet dead spaces in these hollow bones.
We are making things that should not see the sunlight.
She blinks, owlish in the blackness, and shakes the voice out of her head.
The creature stops just ahead, its stooping, scraggly pale body outlined by the green glow behind it, and she knows, shadowed as it may be, that its lidless eyes are watching.
