{"Those who don't believe in magic will never find it."}
The current grew strange as I had been swimming hard, breath steady, muscles burning, but this stretch of water suddenly felt thicker, not just from the cold. The pressure changed. The salt carried something sharp, metallic. I slowed my stroke, and the sea darkened around me not from depth but from shadow. Something massive loomed below.
I hovered in the water, claws flexed, heart pounding with the instinctive warning that something was wrong, and then I saw it. A chasm split open beneath the sea floor, a long, jagged wound in the earth that pulsed faintly red. It was not coral, not volcanic, not blood, or something close to it.
Tendrils curled from it, like seaweed, but they twitched when I came near, moved toward me. I jerked back, and one snapped like a whip, barely missing my snout. Its tip was barbed. Alive.
