Page 48 of Lore of the Tides

The Sunken Garden

Chapter 16

Lore awoke drowning.

Pressure was crushing her from every side. Lungs, arms, skull, ears battered by colossal weight.

She was in agony.

Lore pressed her palms flat against a sandy floor and heaved herself to a kneeling position. Deprived of sight by darkness, she clawed at the sand, desperate for an anchor against a suffocating tide of water. She flung an arm wide, trying to feel anything in this pitch-black hellscape. All she felt were the currents of ice-cold water that threatened to freeze the blood in her veins.

This was becoming a pattern for her. This wasn’t a new dance—someone claiming her mind, plunging her into oblivion, she’d been here before. Only now there was no air to breathe, she was underwater, and she was being crushed to death.

A flicker in her peripheral vision, then a blessed blaze!

Lights, ethereal and strange, bathed the chamber in a hazy glow. It wasn’t fire, not a lantern, but something alien, casting an underwater visual of distorted shapes and shadows.

The glow illuminated a door, the handle just above her. She reached up to it and tried to turn the knob, but it was locked.

Of course it was locked. Lore was doomed to always be hinderedby others’ lock and key. She searched the room desperately, her eyes barely able to see through the watery haze, but she noticed—gods, she wasn’t alone!

In the corner, a figure writhed, a silent symphony of agony echoing through the water.

Why would they take the time to drag her beneath... deposit her and this stranger in a room... just to drown them?

Drown. Gods, she was drowning.

No. She couldn’t panic. Goddess. She needed air.No, no!Panickingensureddeath. If she panicked, she would pull water into her lungs and she would die.

She focused on the figure on the other side of the room. There was someone in here with her, bent over at the waist as if in pain too. She was about to drag herself over to them when one of the unfamiliar glowing lights on the wall caught her eye.

It wasn’t a light like she was used to, not an oil lamp, a candle, a torch; nor was it a glowing crystal like they used in Queen Riella’s mansion. This was round and flat, in the shape of a seashell.

That glowed and pulsed withSource.

Lore placed her fingers on it and pulled what littleSourcethe shell possessed within its casing. TheSourcedid not help her to breathe, but it quelled her panic for a moment, her need for breath, and some of the weight crushing her was alleviated. If she hadSource, it would sustain her for a moment longer.

The shell winked out, and there was no more magic within it.

She waved her arms and maneuvered herself toward the person in the middle of the room. She hurried, as much as she could, her bare feet slipping on the sandy ground, growing weaker with every second without air. The only remaining lights in the room were positioned above the drowning figure. A chandelier, a beacon, drawing her as a moth to a flame, flickered out as she was cast into darkness.

But then the lights flickered back to life, steadied.

She squinted her eyes, which burned. She was almost to them.

Her heart dropped to the sand-covered floor.

Black shirt, black trousers. Locs that spread around him, moving to and fro in what little current Lore was creating as she swam toward him.

Finndryl, she tried to shout, but she had no air to speak, and opening her mouth did nothing but let out precious air bubbles.

He glanced up from where he stood, bent at the waist, his hands on his throat. For a moment, his eyes widened, and he looked agonized to see her as realization hit. If she was here, then she was in danger too. He shook his head side to side—no, looking around the room frantically, as if he had given up on saving himself, but seeing her here, in danger, was too much for him.

The room had not changed; neither a way out nor a glass orb filled with sweet air appeared, and so, his shoulders slumped, defeated, and he mouthed her name. She did not have to hear it to feel his anguish. It only took a moment for him to drop his hands from his throat and pull her to him. As if he did not need air, he only needed to feel her here with him in these last moments.

Lore’s bare feet lifted off the sand. She was weightless in his arms, in this underwater tomb, and she folded herself into his chest. Finndryl, at last.

She was dying, but at least she got to see him one last time.