Small waves rippled from Kael's thighs with each step. The koi still circled him, darting quickly aside before returning. They seemed to be finding some comfort in his presence. Not surprising given what else lived down here.
Blue glowing jellyfish drifted past his legs now and then, like tissue paper caught in water.
Pebbles worn smooth by time crunched under his boots when he reached the shore.
Kael looked at his hand and opened and closed it a few times. Still sore from the climb.
'Can I even build muscle? Can I age?'
It felt absurd to think about. But that was the confusion the primordial eye created. If he was torn to shreds it would rebuild him to exactly what he had been moments before. But how far did that extend?
From what he currently understood, he shouldn't be able to build muscle at all. Muscle growth required the fibres to experience stress and sustain micro damage, which would then heal stronger in preparation for future load. But if the eye repaired that micro damage instantly, returning everything to its prior state, the process would never complete.
Except his hands were sore right now.
So probably not. That was his working conclusion at least.
There was something else that troubled him more though. From a biological standpoint his body was almost fully developed. Almost. The one exception being the most important part.
His brain.
The male brain was widely considered to reach full development around twenty-five, still a few years away. And the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher thinking, planning and self control, was one of the last regions to fully mature, continuing well into the early thirties.
His worry stemmed from a single question. Was the eye preventing his brain from developing?
He had tried to study himself, but studying his own mind was like trying to use a scale to weigh itself. The instrument and the thing being measured were the same object. Any conclusion he reached would be shaped by the very thing he was trying to assess. He was both unknowingly and, in a sense, knowingly biased in his own understanding of self.
The obvious solution would be to ask someone who had known him for a long time. Someone who could tell him whether he seemed different, sharper or duller, more or less capable than they remembered.
Such a person had yet to exist though.
"Hmm?"
It looked peaceful.
The trees grew more than twenty steps apart, which gave the forest an almost empty quality, but that same spacing allowed their crowns to expand far more impressively than they otherwise could, until the canopy above felt like the underside of a sea. Foxtails and dozens of different flowers stretched upward between the trunks, filling the gaps with colour. Fireflies moved between them, landing here and there to rest for a moment before drifting on.
Kael plucked a stalk and kept walking.
'The Depths must be as old as the surface, if not older. Even the plants here have adapted to survive without any light at all... Do they even photosynthesise?'
He twirled the stalk between his fingers before placing it between his lips.
Dew clung to everything around him but he was already soaked through so it didn't register.
Much like the koi, the fireflies took an interest in him, trailing behind in a loose luminescent cloud.
Kael stopped beside a boulder the size of a small hill and looked around.
From what Arthur had described, this place would resemble a massive crater, rock walls rising on all sides. He would need to climb eventually. But that was a problem for later. Even if he were to walk continuously it would take days to cross to the other side.
There were a few things he had already decided on.
One of them was a safe place to sleep. He could stay awake for weeks if he had to, but it would be an understatement to call himself a fool if he didn't take this place seriously. He had made the rule some time ago. The moment he felt even a faint edge of fatigue, he would rest. His mind needed to be at its best here. A single half mistake was all it would take.
He pulled out his notebook and flipped it open.
Ever since he had been forced to take notes to counter the primordial eye, it had remained a quiet habit. He actually enjoyed writing down his thoughts and hypotheses, something to return to later.
It looked awkward though. With only one arm he was forced to rest the notebook against his thigh while writing.
Just as he was about to dot the final period, a low rumble reverberated directly behind him.
Before the notebook had finished falling, he had drawn his blade.
Red streaks cut through the air as he swung more than twenty times in the span of a few seconds. Thin lines appeared across a yellow eye before the wounds fully opened and dark blood began to pour.
Kael created distance, flicked the blade into the air, and snapped a card forward with a crack. It buried itself several meters deep before losing momentum, but it hadn't reached the brain.
He steadied himself and caught the falling blade.
The boulder he had stopped beside wasn't a boulder at all, but a beast of the Depths.
Kael's eyes narrowed as the fireflies drifted back to surround him.
"Tsk."
Twenty more swings. Each firefly flickered once before falling to the ground in two pieces.
'Of course.'
With so little light in the Depths, the beasts down here would naturally be wary of anything that produced it. The beast hadn't noticed Kael until the fireflies caught up to him.
The beast shuddered, and as though its mind hadn't fully processed what had happened yet, a delayed screech erupted, mixed with something almost like a whimper. It raised one massive paw in front of its damaged eye the way a wounded dog would, then screeched again with all it had.
Kael's eyes nearly rolled back. Blood began pouring from his ears and eyes as his eardrums burst.
He clenched his jaw and snorted.
One. Two. Three.
More red glowing cards drove into the eye and disappeared into the depth of it, but the beast kept rising. Higher and higher until its loin sat just beneath the tree crowns.
Blood ran down its face fast enough to paint a lake red in a day. But with its size it probably held enough blood to fill one.
"Bleed."
Compared to other rank threes, Kael's offensive motes weren't high ranked. But they worked in perfect union.
No matter the size or species, every beast had a heart and a brain. And while anatomy varied enormously from one creature to the next, certain laws of nature were almost never broken. Everything that lived needed oxygen, and with it something to carry it. Arteries followed consistent rules regardless of the species they ran through. For someone like Kael, who had spent years studying anatomy, the pattern became almost intuitive. The inside of a thigh. The underside of a limb. The neck. These were requirements. Not choices. Every living thing needed them.
A severed artery was already a fatal wound. A mote that made it impossible for blood to coagulate simply made certain what was already likely.
The beast bared its fangs and shook the pain away, locking its remaining eye onto him. One eye still yellow, close to Kael's own gold. The other a red mess of cuts and fluttering pieces of gelatinous flesh.
It was moments from launching itself at him when it went completely still.
Its ears rose and began rotating slowly, sweeping from side to side.
'What?'
The beast twisted its entire body without warning, legs scrambling desperately for purchase. Its paws slipped, sending plants and dirt spraying outward.
Kael pinched a card between his fingers, ready to flick it. If it was going to run, he could at least try to open an artery on the way out. One less threat in the Depths.
Just as the card left his fingers a new sound arrived, dozens of times louder than the first screech had been.
The card lost all momentum instantly, spinning upward before fluttering back down to the ground.
Kael collapsed to his knees and slammed a hand over one ear. It felt like his blood was boiling inside him. The world was beginning to tilt.
Then it came.
If he hadn't seen it begin its descent he might never have understood what blocked the sky. A shadow large enough to create an eclipse swept down, talons wide enough to tear mountains from their roots closing around the beast. They dug deep. Then deeper still. The sheer force of them closing snapped ribs like twigs, and they kept going. Only when the talons had closed around the spine did the wings beat again.
Every tree within range snapped, the same way the ribs had moments before. The grass pressed flat to the ground as though the air itself had become a weight.
Then it was gone.
An empty space where something enormous had been.
It took some time for Kael's mind to find its footing again.
"How large must that bird have been?"
His breathing was uneven and the world refused to stop spinning.
He had never underestimated the Depths. But wasn't this a little much?