The Descent

The water was cold.

Colder than I expected, though I'd lived beside the sea my whole life. The waves had always been harsh, salt-bitter, relentless. But this cold went deeper than temperature. It sank into my bones, wrapped around my chest, squeezed.

I kept walking.

The white dress billowed around me, heavy with water now, dragging at my legs. The shore disappeared behind me. The lanterns of Saltmere faded into distant stars.

They were watching. The whole village, gathered on the rocks to see their sacrifice disappear. Mother would be there, somewhere in the crowd, her face carved from stone because she'd spent twenty-two years preparing for this moment.

I didn't look back.

The water reached my waist. My chest. My chin.

I filled my lungs one final time.

Then I walked deeper.

The sea swallowed me whole.

This was the part where I should have panicked. Where the survival instinct should have kicked in, made me claw for the surface, fight against the inevitable. That's what the village expected, the thrashing, the struggle, the final surrender.

But I'd made peace with this years ago.

I was Sea-Touched. Born during the great storm that killed seventeen fishermen and shattered half the fleet. My first breath had been salt air and thunder. The elders said the god had marked me then, chosen me for this purpose before I could even open my eyes.

Twenty-two years of knowing how I would die.

Strange, how calm it made me.

The cold sank deeper. My lungs burned. The darkness pressed in from all sides, and I could feel the current pulling me down, down, into the deep where no light reached.

This is it, I thought. This is the ending they wrote for me.

My chest seized. The pain was worse than I'd imagined, a tearing, desperate thing that made my body rebel against my mind's acceptance.

I opened my mouth.

Water rushed in.

And then,

Nothing.

No pain. No burning. No drowning.

I breathed the water like air.

My eyes flew open.

Light.

Impossible light in the impossible dark. Bioluminescence blooming around me in spirals of blue and green, illuminating a face that hovered inches from mine.

Horror.

Wonder.

Both at once.

His features were almost human, high cheekbones, lips like polished obsidian, features that shifted between beautiful and terrible. But his skin shifted like the surface of deep water, colors moving beneath it that had no names. His eyes were the color of the trench floor, ancient and lightless.

And he was looking at me.

Truly looking. Not at a sacrifice. Not at a ritual offering.

At me.

"You do not scream."

His voice was the sound of the deep. Resonant. Layered. It echoed from everywhere and nowhere at once. It should have terrified me.

It didn't.

"Should I be?"

The words came out clear despite the water filling my lungs. Another impossibility in a moment made of them.

Those depthless eyes narrowed, just slightly.

"Every other bride screamed."

"I'm not every other bride."

Silence.

The bioluminescence pulsed around us, creating halos of light that made his terrible features almost beautiful. Or perhaps they'd always been beautiful, and the terror was what I'd been taught to see.

"No," he said finally. "You're not."

He extended a hand, long fingers, webbed slightly between, tipped in something closer to claws than nails. An invitation. A beginning.

"Come. I'll show you where brides go."

I took his hand.

His skin was cold as the deep water, smooth and strange against my palm. But there was something beneath it, a pulse, a warmth, a life force older than the village that had sent me here to die.

The current shifted. Responded to him.

We descended.

Down past the reef that marked the edge of the fishermen's maps. Down past the twilight zone where the last light died. Down into darkness so complete it felt like a physical weight.

But I could see.

The bioluminescence followed us, trails of light that lit our path through the impossible deep. Creatures swam past, things with too many eyes, too many limbs, too many teeth, but they parted for us like subjects before a king.

"You are not afraid," he said.

It wasn't a question.

"I was afraid my whole life. Of this. Of you. Of the sea that would eventually claim me." I watched a creature that looked like a living constellation drift past. "Now that I'm here... what's left to fear?"

He didn't answer.

But his grip on my hand tightened. Just slightly.

The descent took hours or seconds, time moved differently in the deep. When we finally stopped, I found myself staring at something my mind couldn't quite comprehend.

A palace.

Walls of pearl that glowed with their own light. Arches of bone that curved into impossible shapes. Towers that stretched upward into the dark, crowned with gardens of coral in colors I'd never imagined.

Home, some part of me whispered.

The thought made no sense. I'd never been here. Never seen anything like this.

But the word echoed anyway.

"The Drowned Palace," he said. "Your prison. Or your sanctuary. The choice, bride, is yours."

I looked at the god who'd brought me here. At the home that waited. At the future I'd never expected to have.

"I thought I was coming to die."

"So did the others."

"What happened to them?"

He studied me with that lightless gaze.

"They got what they came for."

A chill ran through me despite the water's embrace.

But I didn't let go of his hand.

"And me?"

The pause lasted an eternity.

"You," he said slowly, "are something I haven't seen in a very long time."

He released my hand. Gestured toward the palace gates.

"Welcome to the deep, bride. Let's see if you survive it."