Quinlan studied the water around him.
They had just agreed that Thalorind might contain monsters far beyond them. He was delighted to have an ocean at his disposal, but he wanted to know what was in it before taking his wives farther out.
Through his feet in the sand, he sent his earth magic through the seabed. The shore continued beneath the waves, sloping toward a broken shelf, and he followed its shape down into the rock.
Hollows opened in his awareness, then ridges, then the deep cut where the shelf ended. He had used this same sense to read footsteps through the dwarves' mountain. Here, he wanted to find the places a creature could hide.
"Quin?" Sera called from the beach.
"A moment. I'm scouting."
Quinlan pulled the sea away from the beach with his water magic. The retreating water exposed a widening stretch of seabed before piling up above the shelf, where he held it in an enormous curved wall.
