In the ensuing days, just about everything except Gillow tries to kill us. There’s sharks the size of school buses. A swarm of flesh-eating jellyfish. Shadowy creatures that avoid the Prismatic’s spotlights, striking at us from the dark. I’m getting pretty damn good at controlling the ship’s limbs—enough so that I can keep the predator in check while operating all the mechanical arms. I’d like to thank the two months I’ve spent walking around on four glass legs for that.
I’ve also leveled up a few times. Now I’m level fourteen. Spending your days cutting murder fish in half does that to you, I guess.
“Hey, Fishsticks.” Gillow barges into the room without knocking, which has become a regular occurrence. Zyneth seems to have developed a sixth sense for this, and always manages to be awake and out of his cot now whenever they’re nearby. I close the Signs book I was reading.
“What is it?” Zyneth asks. “Need us to mop the decks?”
“I am not cleaning fish guts out of the tentacles again,” I say. “I don’t care what your reasoning is, I am not responsible for viscera stuck in the joints.”
Gillow grins. “As much as I’d delight in watching a repeat of that fiasco, we’ve got a much different task to begin.” They point at me. “It’s time for you to earn your passage.”
Static creeps through my soul. “We’re here?”
Gillow gestures for us to follow. “Come see for yourself.”
Zyneth sends a worried glance my way, and I’m glad he can’t see the trepidation I’m feeling. I know I’d agreed to this, but that was before the predator became what it is.
And before I knew a thousand fish monsters were lurking outside the sub at any given moment, ready to devour anything in their path. But who’s counting?
We follow Gillow back to the deck, and at first I can’t tell what it is they found. Outside the windows is more unending dark. The Prismatic’s spotlights are swallowed by the water only thirty or forty feet from the window.
“What is it?” Zyneth asks.
Gillow places a hand on their console, and a ring of blue magic silently pulses out from the front of the ship. The light disperses in the water, warping with the currents, then abruptly vanishes. Far ahead of us, a speck of blue swirls in the distance before flickering out.
“That, my friends,” Gillow says, “is null magic. Raw, undiluted potential.” They don’t even try to hide the hunger in their tone.
“I don’t understand,” I say, stepping up to the window. “What are we looking at? How is it doing that?”
“You’re the null arcana mage, aren’t you?” Gillow says.
“It’s teleporting,” Zyneth says, peering out the window beside me. “The magic is entering a stream of null arcana just in front of the Prismatic, and exiting through a different portion of null arcana elsewhere. Correct?”
“Exactly,” Gillow says. “Which makes these waters incredibly treacherous. I’ll be needing to send regular pings of magic before us in order to keep from ending up in one of these currents and getting teleported somewhere else. And that’s the best-case scenario of running into this kind of magic.”
“What’s the worst case?” I ask.
Gillow smiles tightly. “Only part of the ship gets teleported.”
I suppress a shiver. And I’m supposed to manipulate that magic? This stuff seems nothing like the void. I’ve never been able to use it to teleport anything. Then again, I’ve never tried.
“So how am I supposed to retrieve it?” I ask.
Gillow shrugs. “That’s your wheelhouse, not mine. You’re a null mage, aren’t you? Can’t you control it from here?”
I mentally reach out, trying to grab the void in the water like I do with my Attuned void or the predator’s stash, but I can’t sense anything.
Echo? I ask. Why can’t I control it?
[A mage may control elements in two ways,] Echo says. [First, by casting a spell designed to manipulate elements in a specific way—such as activating a spell circle—which will cost mana and potentially require other supplies. Second, by Attuning said element, which requires physical contact with an element the mage has an affinity for, and a mana cost. From there, the Attuned quantity may be manipulated without further mana drain. The Attuned element may further be fused with a non-Attuned quantity of the same element in order to manipulate the non-Attuned portion. However, control of the non-Attuned element will become more imprecise proportionally with the quantity of non-Attuned element being manipulated.]
You’re telling me I need to get my void mixed in with it, I say. That I’m going to have to get close enough so it’s within range of my void.
[Affirmative.]
“Damn it,” I mutter. “Can I use one of those emergency escape pods to get closer?”
Gillow scoffs. “The words emergency and escape are there for a reason. Once they fire off, they can’t be hooked back up until we resurface the sub. I’m not about to cripple a safety feature due to your lack of foresight.”
Well, it was worth a shot. What’s the range of my Attuned void now? I ask Echo.
[Fifteen feet,] Echo says.
About double what it was only a week ago, but even that feels far too short. I hate to ask the next question, but I need to know. And the predator’s range?
[Fifty feet.]
The predator’s smugness is nearly enough to make me suppress its mind out of spite. Yeah, yeah. Eat your heart out.
On second thought, maybe not the best choice of words.
Zyneth steps closer to me. “You do not have to do this,” he says quietly.
“I’m pretty sure I do.” I glance at Gillow. “How close can you get us to these currents?”
They chew at their cheek, tipping their head as they look out the window. “Thirty feet, tops. I won’t risk any closer than that—these streams can shift without warning and we’ll need enough space to back off if it moves our way.”
Damn. I could reach it with the predator’s ability—if I gave it control, or risked merging our minds again. With that much access to extra void, though, I don’t know what the predator might be capable of—especially given how eager I can feel it is to engage with the magic outside the ship. I don’t think I can risk it.
Ironically, if I want to be safe about this, I’ll need to go out there and do this myself.
“Can we turn the ship around and back it up to the currents?” I ask. “I’ll need to go out one of those cargo windows, and I want the storage cubes as close as possible.”
“What?” Zyneth says. “You’re not going out there.”
“That’s the only way I’ll be close enough,” I say. Well, not the only only way, but the less bad option of two bad options.
Gillow also seems skeptical. “Is that glass way more durable than it looks, or are you just suicidal?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I mean we’re several thousand feet below the surface,” Gillow says. “That little glass heart of yours will be crushed by the pressure.”
“That wasn’t a problem when we first swam down to the Prismatic,” I say.
“Because we were only a hundred feet below the surface,” Gillow says, exasperated. “There’s a significant difference!”
Sheesh, such judgment. I don’t know these things, I’m not a scientist. “Well that’s going to be a problem then.”
Gillow folds their arms. “It will be. You getting me that void is a required toll to move forward.”
“That’s not what we agreed upon,” I said. “Getting you the arcana crystal was payment for travel to Emrox.”
“Yes, and getting the void was payment for his debts being wiped clean,” Gillow says, jutting their chin at Zyneth. “And I’ve already held up my end of the bargain. You’d be wise to hold up yours.”
There’s a tense silence. What would they do if I refused? Would they take it out on Zyneth? They probably wouldn’t take me to Emrox, at least. I still might be able to get the void from in here, but it would mean giving a lot of power to an entity I have very little trust in. Still… even if something goes wrong out there, I won’t be in too much danger, will I? The predator needs me alive.
But it doesn’t need Zyneth or Gillow alive. I hesitate. Which is the least bad option?
“I can protect you,” Zyneth speaks up.
I turn to him. “What do you mean?”
“I have charms that should work,” he says. “They can reinforce your glass. Make it withstand physical and thermal stresses.”
I take a moment to process this, surprised. “Okay well that would have been incredibly useful like a dozen times before now.”
“Sorry,” Zyneth says. “The charms are only temporary. They won’t last long, and I would have needed advanced notice to put any of them into effect.”
“Still,” I say. “What about that predator fight? We knew what we were walking into. You could have at least shielded yourself.”
He shakes his head. “I’m an artificer. My spells only work on ob—Ah, they don’t work on living creatures.”
Objects. He was going to say objects. You’d think that wouldn’t bother me anymore, especially since I’m ideally only a couple days away from regaining my body. But not being recognized as a person, even if the magic doesn’t know any better, still stings. “Right. Okay, well, I’d appreciate whatever help I can get.”
“Come on,” Zyneth says. “Let’s do it in the cargo hold. Buy as much time as possible. Gillow, can you get us turned around?”
“Way ahead of you,” Gillow says, silt streaking by the window. Without that small indicator of motion, the only point of reference in the dark, I’d have no idea the ship was moving. “Meet you two back there in a minute. Prism Head, I still need to show you how those arcana stowage cubes work.”
“I’ll take a minute or so to cast the spells,” Zyneth says. “We should be ready by the time you make it back.” Without waiting for Gillow to respond, he steps from the room, shooting me a pointed look.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I follow after. “What is it?” I sign. I’ve been teaching him more sign language in our downtime. We’ve been using it as a way to speak behind Gillow’s back, but I am no Noli, and I’m pretty sure I’m passing on bad habits and slightly wrong signs.
“I lied,” he signs back. “No time limit. But drains mana while spell is going.”
I tip my head, trying to puzzle out why he’d want Gillow to believe that lie. If it drains his mana, then he’ll be preoccupied—and he has the potential to run out. Compared to a one-and-done spell, ongoing magic means Zyneth is going to be preoccupied with keeping me alive.
Which leaves him vulnerable if Gillow decides to hurt him—and with me outside the ship, this would be the perfect opportunity.
“How much mana will it take?” I ask. “I can try to be quick.”
“More you, more mana,” he signs, gesturing up and down my body. “All of you, mana gone in two minutes. If just heart, maybe ten.”
Crap. I hate the idea of leaving my body behind when I already have so little protection out there. Ten minutes already isn’t a lot of time, but I’ll need to be faster than that if I don’t want to leave Zyneth defenseless. “Okay. It’s okay,” I sign. “They won’t know. And if anything happens to you, I’ll be able to tell right?”
Zyneth frowns with worry. “If anything happens,” he mutters, “you’ll be crushed.”
“Well,” I say, pushing the door open to the cargo bay, “let’s try to avoid that.”
I unhook my vial from the neck, clustering my signing glass around it. It’s not much, maybe a handful of small glass shards, but it’s better than nothing. And then, of course, I have the void.
As I set myself on the ground, tucking my body off to the side, the void that empties from my coat seems like a tidal wave of dark from this lowly perspective. It puddles to the ground beneath me, spreading flat across the floor like an unnatural shadow, broader and darker than it should be. There’s so much more of it than there was before. No wonder I feel like I’m at a tipping point, only a fraction away from being overwhelmed.
And I’m about to go dive headfirst into more. There’s no way the predator doesn’t try something while I’m out there. Looks like Zyneth and I will both have our hands full.
Zyneth sketches out a quick spell circle on the ground as Gillow steps into the room.
“What, you’re not done yet?” they ask.
“I’ll activate it just before he needs to leave, to buy him the most time,” Zyneth says.
Gillow looks at me—or rather, my body propped against the wall. “He better not already be dead.”
I’m going to choose to ignore that already part. But yeah, I guess they’re not used to this. “Down here,” I say, though the translator is still on my body, which is a bit self-defeating. “No. By Zyneth.” I wave my signing glass, trying to draw their attention to my vial.
Gillow finally catches sight of me and blinks. “What are—you know what, never mind. At this point, it’s not even the weirdest thing I’ve seen you do.”
“Let’s get this over with,” I say. “How do I use those storage containers?”
“I’ll be sending them out with you,” Gillow says. “They were built to withstand these depths. I can use my water magic to maneuver them around close to the currents, but you’ll need to funnel the null arcana inside.” They tap the nearest cube, and a spell circle illuminates across the surface, spreading over the object like lines on a circuit board. “You direct it here,” they say, pointing to the center of the circle, like the snake-eye on a giant-ass die. “The containment cube will do the rest. Don’t let the arcana touch any other part of the surface, however; if one of these containers ends up getting split in half, it will be explosively bad.”
“When you say explosively…”
Gillow gives me a flat look. “It will explode.”
“Yeah, I figured,” I say. “I was just really hoping I was wrong.”
“Is there anything else?” Zyneth asks, hands poised over me. I push the void away from the spell circle he’d drawn on the ground, careful not to mess with it. Gillow watches my void with a look of hunger I associate with the predator. I try not to shiver.
“No,” Gillow says, heading over to the wall and activating two of the tentacles. The floor shudders and the mechanisms beneath our feet grind to life. “I’ll grab the cubes. Ready when you two are.”
“Ready,” I say to Zyneth.
He clenches his jaw as yellow lights glow to life in his palms, and I don’t think it’s the magic that’s straining him.
The light washes over me, tingling against my glass.
[Status buff obtained,] Echo states. [Crushing Damage reduced by 99.93%. Thermal Damage reduced by 99.93%.]
We’re going to need to have a serious talk after this about finding a way to make these buffs permanent.
“Done,” Zyneth says, lowering his hands. The glow around me stays, however. “We’ve not much time now.”
How long until the buffs expire? I ask Echo.
[Quantity unknown,] Echo says. [The spells are being continuously maintained by their mana source.]
Check Zyneth’s mana, I tell her. At the current rate it’s going down, how long until it’s out?
A few numbers pop up in my vision, then rearrange themselves:
[Time Limit: 10 minutes, 27 seconds]
Good. At least I can keep an eye on things.
“Ready?” Zyneth offers me a hand.
“No, I’ve got it,” I say, swirling the void around me. It lifts me into the air, carrying me to the nearest glass-like window. The magic buzzes above, the only thing separating me from tons of water and a potentially instantaneous death, if Zyneth’s spells fail. Something I wouldn’t be worried about if Gillow weren’t involved.
I hesitate at the exit, watching Gillow operate the ship’s limb. They move one of the tentacles in through the opposite window, wrapping the giant arm around the nearest cube before drawing it back out of the ship. How easy would it be for them to grab Zyneth and pull him out the same way?
“Good luck,” Zyneth says, startling me from that image. I guess the only way I can help him is to be as quick as possible.
“Thanks,” I say, pressing through the window. “Be back soon.”
Darkness swallows me. Still haloed by the Prismatic’s light, the surrounding waters seem dense with horrific possibility. Anything could be out there. Another predator, only feet away. The null currents could be right in front of me and I’d never know. I pull my void closer, as if that could abate the sudden feeling of extreme agoraphobia.
A pulse of blue light emits from the ship, washing over me. The magic races into the dark, illuminating no beasts or sea serpents. The light fades, then abruptly twists to the side and blinks out. A speck of blue appears far in the distance before vanishing into the black.
There.
I will myself closer to the point where the magic had warped, hesitantly only moving half as far as I think I need to; even with time against me, I’d rather undershoot it than over. The muted creaking of metal groans behind me as two of the ship’s limbs stretch in my direction, holding a containment cube each. They also stop short, nowhere near where the null current might be. I wait for another pulse of blue to light up my surroundings. The current is closer now.
I peel away half of my void, despite the predator’s protests, and send it out ahead of me. The rest I keep close, slowly swirling through the waters with my Elemental Radar skill. It feels different from using my glass the same way. When I’ve used my glass to touch the surrounding ground, providing a pseudo-radar type of sight, I’m only provided with physical sensations which paint a 2D map in my mind. But the void isn’t solid. It moves through the water like fluid. Instead of a sense of the location of my surroundings, I can feel its movement, its temperature, its density. It almost feels like my sense of self expands into my surroundings.
And it can be more—I can sense that from the predator. It doesn’t just use the void to touch its surroundings, it uses it to see, and smell, and taste. Senses I’ve been missing for several months now. God, I’m desperate to taste again. To just eat an apple. To just drink cold water on a hot summer’s day. I’d give anything for a taste of that last frozen cheese burrito again.
The memory of what the predator last ate—two living souls—returns to me unbidden, and shakes me from my longing. The sweet, electric taste of souls is something forever seared into my memory. Something I doubt I’ll ever be able to shake even after I’ve gone home.
My void brushes up against something tactile and familiar.
The magic crackles as it merges with my own, like sheets of fabric rubbing static between them. It’s so strange, because I can feel exactly what it is—the void that’s come to be such a familiar presence in my mind, yet this is inert and unresponsive. I swirl my void through the wild magic and gently, gently focus on towing it back.
No wonder it’s so rare to Attune null magic. You have to touch whatever you have an affinity with in order to form an Attunement, and touching this stuff might end up chopping your hand off. It was sheer luck the void I happened to touch was already morphed into the predator, the magic and the entity having become indistinguishable in the time spent Between. While I’m not the only mage in the world with an Affinity for null arcana, I might be the only one with any amount of it that they’ve managed to Attune.
I pull the stream of null arcana toward the nearest containment cube, and the void slowly winds its way to the spell circle on the surface. It feels like I’m clawing my fingers through sand, trying to drag as much of the wild void along with me as I can. Eventually, though, I get there.
Ah!
A stabbing sensation cuts through me as I make contact with the containment cube and all of the void in front of the spell circle vanishes. Not just the wild null arcana, but some of my Attuned void, too.
The predator attempts to yank our void away, and the stream of null arcana freezes, caught between a mental tug-of-war.
That void is ours! And that machine is stripping it away. Why are we feeding it when we should be taking all this void for ourself?
Calm down. I haven’t quite managed to wrestle the void away from the predator’s grasp, but I’ve at least stopped it from doing anything rash. That was an accident—I’ll be more careful to keep our Attuned void away from the cube from now on. And I can’t Attune any of that wild magic without risking getting cut in half. If I die, you’ll end up back Between, so chill the fuck out.
This hardly mollifies the predator, but it at least gives it pause long enough for me to wrangle its grip on the void away. Jesus Christ. We can’t do this every time something startles us.
The predator indignantly lets me know it was not startled. It’s only remaining vigilant. Protecting our stash of void. Which could be grown, now, if we wanted.
I swear you only listen to half the things I say.
No. It listens to everything.
Oh great. Even better.
Although… it might actually be onto something. I’ll need an incredible amount of null arcana to activate the giant spell circle in Emrox. Think you can absorb some of this magic to top off our mana levels? I ask.
The predator eagerly agrees, and I wonder why I even bothered asking. I can also tell it’s intending to take a cut for itself to extend its timer, and I wearily don’t object. As long as the Influence stat doesn’t go up, I’ll allow it. In fact, I do a Check, just in case.
[Predator Time Limit: 32.9 hours]
[Predator Influence: 31%]
I wish I could say no change in that stat fills me with relief, but it’s already too high for my liking.
But it’s temporary, I remind myself. Soon, I’ll be going home. Not much longer now.
I return to the null arcana, slowly pulling more through the water like stretched taffy as the predator nibbles at its edges. This time when I get close to the cube, I back off with my Attuned void and let the magic glide in on its own. The black stream of ink vanishes as it touches the circle.
Timer? I check.
[Eight minutes, forty-seven.]
I don’t know how much arcana can fit in these blocks, but it’s probably more than I’ll have time to fill. I’ll just have to keep an eye on the clock, grab as much as I can, and then GTFO.
My work is occasionally illuminated by pulses of blue. The null current drifts slowly around—or maybe it’s the Prismatic and I that are drifting—but it’s still a comfortable distance away, given the range of my void. I fall into a rhythm, lacing my void into the current and slowly drawing the tendrils of ink toward the containment cubes. The predator leeches bits and pieces away as I do so, converting some of it into Bonus Mana while it consumes the rest, extending its timer.
The water around me ripples. In my vial form I have omni-vision, but surrounded by so much dark I can’t see what the cause of that disturbance was. I use the void still clustered near me to push outward in a sphere, but I don’t sense anything nearby. The water is moving, though. Just the slightest thrum of shifting pressures.
I instinctively reach for my translator, but it’s not in range. Damn, can’t even ask if Gillow or Zyneth notices anything. Maybe it’s just my own paranoia. Maybe it’s just how the currents work down here.
A shadow flickers beneath the Prismatic. Oooooh nope. Nope nope nope.
Echo, what was that? Check!
[There are no creatures within line of sight that can be identified.]
Bullshit! I didn’t imagine that. Is it hiding behind the Prismatic? Screw the null arcana, I’m getting out of here.
The Prismatic’s spotlight turns on, and since the ship was spun around backward, it’s pointing in the opposite direction from the null currents and I.
“Kanin, get inside,” a metallic Gillow voice echoes through the water. “Slowly.”
Slowly? Why? What kind of advice is that? Are you trying to freak me out? This is how you freak me out. I pull all my void back from the null currents and begin to propel myself toward the Prismatic. Its eye-window is only two dozen feet away.
Another shadow moves through the dark, this time straight toward me. I snap all my void tight around my core, and the creature rushes past, through the space where my void had been just a moment before, and sends me spinning in its wake. The world is a nonsensical blur of dark and the Prismatic’s lights and bubbles until I use the void to stop my spinning.
Check, check!
[There are no creatures within line of sight that can be identified.]
Are you kidding me? Alright, fuck going slow. I’m getting out of here!
“Kanin?” This time it’s Zyneth’s voice, and I’m not liking how panicked he sounds. “Get out of there, now!”
I rush toward the Prismatic’s light. I’m twenty feet away—fifteen—ten—
Gillow’s voice is in the background. “Hey give that back—and slow! He has to go slow—”
“They’re tempo squids,” Zyneth says. “Get—”
And then it appears, right in front of me. The water pulses outward as it pops into existence.
[Tempo Squid: Level 21,] Echo happily pipes up, as if pleased to now, finally, have the opportunity to identify what I’d been trying to Check before. [Infused with null arcana from the waters surrounding Emrox, this creature has inherited the magic’s abilities to become unstuck from space. Usually found traveling in schools, tempo squids prefer to surprise their prey by surrounding them via coordinated teleportation.]
I slam on my metaphorical brakes but there’s no time to stop—I ram straight into the squid. It’s soft and pliant, and folds around me like jelly. The Prismatic vanishes from view. I lash out with glass and void, panicked, as the creature’s limbs wrap around my vial, and its flesh flinches back from my attacks. Then the world seems to flip—a nauseating vertigo kicks my soul, and the squid releases me, jetting away into the black.
Black. Everything is black. Where did the Prismatic go? It’s lights? The cubes? It’s gone—there’s nothing around me.
I’m alone.