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W HILE THE WATERS remained warm, Nyx’s body had gone cold. The glow from her skin dimmed as she stared over at Shiya. Her bronze body was still wrapped in powerful tentacles.

Nyx knew it wasn’t Shiya’s hand that had formed over the dead man’s face. The palm had been far broader, the fingers more thickly knuckled. It was the hand of a man.

Still, there was no mistaking the truth.

The spider was another Sleeper.

She tried to fathom his existence, how he came to be in the Crèche. A thousand questions filled her. He clearly had arrived countless millennia ago and corrupted the raash’ke. But the ancient alchymist who had died had kept a secret, burying it deep under dark waters.

She stared through the mesh of glowing tendrils to the spread of reefs, to the teeming life, to the hundreds of Dreamers skimming these waters, creatures who shared a lineage with the raash’ke, but who diverged along a different path.

She pictured the blood being infused into the specimen on the table.

Was the alchymist’s creation of the Oshkapeers happenstance, or had he known what was coming?

She had no way of knowing. She doubted even the Dreamers could answer it—but there was one question they could. She gathered the last of Daal’s fire and cast it out in a fiery plea.

Where is he?

She waited, bracing herself for another rush of preserved memories. But nothing happened. She didn’t know if the Oshkapeers were holding back or if she was wrong about them knowing the answer. Trapped underwater, they were likely limited in their reach.

Finally, a memory formed, freshened by cold winds and lit by stars.

—atop a raash’ke, she flies high above an ice cliff. She follows her mate, who wings ahead of her. Below, sections of the cliff had calved away long ago, crashing down to a plain of cold and barren rock. In the distance, she spies a massive crack across that endless slab of stone, splitting and dividing as it spreads outward from the cliffs of ice. From its depths, a fiery glow lights the landscape, ruddy and threatening. She shies away.

Time flitted forward.

—she glides over a glittering desert of fallen stars.

—she fights winds that howl through peaks as jagged as shark’s teeth.

—she watches her mate head on foot across a shattered landscape, leaving a crumple of broken wings behind him. Her heart aches. Her mate waves for her to abandon him and return to the Crèche. She knows she must. As she turns away, far in the distance, something glitters under the icy shine of a full moon.

Before Nyx could spy more, she was jolted back into her body, but it was not of her own volition. Her return felt like dismissal. Or maybe prohibition. The underlying sentiment was one of warning, of overwhelming danger.

The message was clear.

Never go there.

For now, Nyx let this slip behind her. Instead, she focused on the worry closer at hand, one nearer to her heart. She pictured the massive fiery crack in the stony landscape. It had to be the Mouth of the World. According to Daal, it was where the raash’ke roosted.

And where Bashaliia must have been taken.

Her fear for him was bright enough that she needed no flames to convey her need to know more, to discover a way to reach him.

The Dreamers responded, pulling her into a flurry of memories, a cascade of horrific deaths. But they all started the same way, at the same spot:

—she stands at the prow of a skiff pulled by orksos. The green seas ahead crash against a wall of broken ice, marking the farthest western edge of the Ameryl Sea. The cliff is pocked with fissures and caves. She heads for the largest opening.

From there, time lines and lives diverged into a chaos of misadventures, tragedies, and death. They all marked hundreds of attempts to navigate beyond the Crèche, to travel under the ice to reach the Mouth. Explorers were boiled in water, frozen under a crush of ice, tumbled over bottomless falls, or sucked down endless chutes. Others drowned or starved or took their own lives while lost forever in the labyrinth of ice tunnels.

Nyx experienced them all.

Still, the multitude of deaths and stories blurred together, slowly forming a map, outlining a path through that maze, until finally…

—she rides an orkso down a tunnel whose walls are lit by a fiery light. She hangs over the saddle, barely able to lift her head. An arm drags through the water next to her, leaving a trail of blood. She is near to death. The faithful orkso under her struggles with a torn wing. She had lost her skiff, both brothers, and the other three orksos. With no other choice, no way back, she lets the orkso pull her the last of the way. The walls of ice fall to either side. The roof vanishes above. She glides out of the tunnel into a river that rides over rapids into a great ravine. She stares up as her life fades out. Far above, distant stars shine and glitter like ice. She finds little satisfaction, only tired relief as she dies.

Nyx returned to her body. A map—the only path through the labyrinth—burned in her mind. Its route seared into place, never to be forgotten. Still, she wanted to know more. She struggled to impassion her need, her plea.

But it did no good.

The lattice of glowing tendrils withdrew from her skin, her body. They wound back to the reef, reeling back into the heart of it. As much as she wanted to continue the communion, she knew why it had abruptly ended. The Dreamers had instilled one last sense. It burned inside her: an urgency, a heavy press of time, underpinned by a well of grief, of love lost.

She understood the Oshkapeers ’ last warning.

I must hurry or lose Bashaliia forever.

She turned to the side. The shroud of tendrils had shed from Daal, too. He stared over at her. She swore that she could feel the pound of his heart in her own chest. He had also sensed that urgency.

We must go.

The Dreamers gleaned her desire. Tentacles tightened around her, and with a strung pulse of its body, her Oshkapeer surged upward. She tilted her chin down, searching below. Daal followed, safely ensconced in tentacles.

Still, she looked until she spotted Shiya. She worried the Dreamers—considering their animosity toward figures of bronze—might drag her to a molten death. But the giant Oshkapeer swirled up after them, hauling Shiya’s heavy body in their wake.

Relieved, Nyx turned away—until movement along the seafloor drew her eye back again. From this height, the full expanse of the reef glowed below. As she watched, the entire labyrinth lifted and shifted huge branches across the sand. The largest mass of reef rolled enough to expose a huge black eye, staring up at her, shining with silvery fire, watching her depart.

Then the eye sank away under a brow of rock and bone. The rest of its limbs, covered in coral, settled back to the sand.

She gaped at the vast spread of the reef, recognizing it now for what it really was: one ancient and massive Oshkapeer. The queen of them all. Maybe the very first. She pictured the ancient alchymist infusing raash’ke blood into a small tentacled beast.

Was this that same creature?

Either way, she understood why this Oshkapeer had been forged.

To be an undying sentinel against the darkness.

Nyx warmed her body and cast down one last message, imbuing it with all her gratitude, knowing the long vigil that this Dreamer had kept for ages on end.

Thank you…