The harbor hung suspended like a string of stone bells beneath the cavern's sky. Ancient stalactites plunged down in jagged spears, their tips wrapped in mossy ropes and spindly wooden bridges that seemed afraid of their own creaks. Below, the water lay black and gleaming—its surface so perfectly still it mirrored the mushroom canopies above, as if the night possessed a second sky with no stars, no moon, only the trapped green-blue glow clinging to the cavern's porous walls.
The air was damp and salty, pushing into the lungs like the stubborn remnants of a dream that refused to leave. Iron, mushroom, and brine mingled into a bitterness that lingered on the tongue. From fissures in the rock on either side of the cove came delicate click-click bursts, darting across the surface like rain that had forgotten where to fall. A Pelagor dove, leaving only a faint white scar in the water. Blind amphibian—skin pale, eyes no more than dead pearls—yet hearing far beyond any creature blessed with sight. For it, the world existed only in echoes.
"We're really getting on that?" Brug rasped, pointing at the vessel moored beneath one of the stalactites. "A whale-bone ship underground. Sometimes I'm convinced Noctarion was built by a craftsman who liked his own jokes too much."
Rae Althorne didn't answer at once. The ship looked less like it had been built and more like it had been forced to remember being a body. Its hull was shaped from the arched ribs of some great beast, the spine running unbroken along the keel. Wide, flattened bones unfurled into fins that became thin sails sheathed in dried fungal membrane. Along the deck, glossy knots of resin gleamed like scars that refused to fade. At the bow, a disk of glass—clear, as wide as a dining table—sat within a cage of metal. Mycelial cables trailed from it into the hatch like veins feeding a false heart.
Lua tapped her staff against the hanging rail—three beats breaking the hush. "If you've got a safer choice, Brug, now would be the most polite time to share it."
Brug sighed, shoulders broad as a barracks door rising and falling. "Choice and safety are like siblings separated at birth—they rarely sit at the same table." He looked to Rae. "You ready?"
Rae's gaze lingered on the stalactite harbor. Behind them, the narrow road to the southern warehouse was already sealed. They'd left the rescued mothers and children in a safe room connected to the Glassveil workshop; the warehouse head—owing Brug a debt—had promised to move them when the mushrooms dimmed, marking the shift of "day." But Noctarion had no true guarantees. Only promises braided to a fragile rhythm.
"Ready," Rae said. She didn't ask for what—lying to herself wouldn't delay the danger, only numb it.
They descended the slick rope ladder. Below, the crew moved like shadows long tired of being thin. Barefoot to hear the deck through their soles, they wore coats woven of fungal fiber slicked with oil so the water remembered not to cling too long. Among them strode a tall man with square shoulders, hair shorn to necessity, beard salted with grains even the air feared to soften.
"Admiral Tholl," Brug greeted, holding back a grin for someone he had once fought but then chosen as a brother. "Still bathing your ship in pride?"
"Better pride than blood," Tholl replied, his voice sanded raw by winds that never existed here. "I hear you've brought a storm. One that dresses itself as a tax."
"Abyss Tax," Lua said. "They've taken the workers' families."
Tholl's eyes weighed the news in his skull before he nodded. "You know the fare if I carry you through the Subteric Sea?"
"Everything we have," Brug said, "and a little more that doesn't yet have a name."
Tholl gave a short laugh, then pointed to the glass disk at the bow. "This wants something different from you," he told Rae. "You're the one with an ear for structure. You'll stand here. You'll learn to breathe as stone does."
Rae stepped closer. The glass disk was cold as metal steeped in shadow. Along its rim, faint carvings—circles, broken lines, blind dots—emerged. The mycelial cables pulsed slowly. "Sonar?" she asked.
"A city's word for a village's tool," Tholl said, stripping off his glove and pressing his palm to the disk. "We call it the back-listener. You send it your breath. The cavern answers. If you're lucky, it answers honestly." He met her eyes. "You'll strike in a rhythm it understands."
Rae nodded. "Three in, five out."
Tholl was still for a heartbeat, eyes narrowing as though he'd spotted a familiar face in a crowd. "Who taught you that count?"
"Warden Irix."
"The old man who still believes in sharp pages," Tholl murmured, nodding—whether to Irix or to fortune, Rae couldn't tell. "All right. Everyone aboard! Cast off!"
The crew slipped the mooring ropes from the stalactites like cutting loose the long hair that had begun to grip the skull. Lunasa—the whale-bone ship—swayed gently, then floated silent. Above, the mushroom caps lowered their light; the underground sea wrinkled briefly, then smoothed again, unwilling to hold any reflection.
"Where to exactly?" Brug asked. "If you say 'out of here,' I'm in. But better name a place on the map we can lie to."
Tholl pointed toward a cleft in the eastern wall where the water crept into a space not entirely dark. "We take the Pelagor run to the back trench of Glassveil. From there, into the Subteric Sea, through the forest of pillars, then under the coral-steam layer. If we're still whole, we'll surface in a bay that leads toward the Sutura range."
"Sutura?" Rae echoed. The word was new—felt like thread about to close a wound.
Tholl glanced at her, something on the edge of speech, but swallowed it. "Later," he said. "If you still want to hear after tonight's hum."
"Why?"
He turned the glass disk, pointing to a near-invisible spiral etched along its rim. "Because that range isn't for people who like naming things, Rae. It's for people ready to be seen by their own name."
"I hate sentences like that," Brug muttered.
"Because they don't need your approval to be true," Lua smiled.
The ship moved. Two Pelagors rose beside the hull, like skeletal fish shadows that had forgotten to shrink. They pressed their soft bodies against the planks, listening to the keel's vibrations. "Don't drive them off," Tholl told a crewman who twitched to kick. "They're not passengers. They're a living map."
The man lowered his foot, shame mingled with wonder. The Pelagors tilted their blind faces toward the glass disk; their clicks were met by the disk's low hum, as though the machine were stroking the heads of the sightless and asking to be shown the way.
Lunasa slipped into the cleft Tholl had indicated. The walls closed in, the water thickened. The air grew saltier, colder, more honest. Rae pressed her palm to the disk, held her breath, then released it, feeding the rhythm in. Three—in… five—out…
The disk sent out a soft pull; waves that weren't waves rolled forward, struck stone, swallowed secrets, then returned with their shapes altered by the rock. The etchings along the rim lit faintly, one by one, like shy stars.
"Bow eight degrees starboard," Tholl ordered.
"Eight degrees starboard," the helmsman echoed.
From far off, Rae caught another answer: the clink of metal, the rattle of chain, and something sharper—the hiss of fungal sirens. The Abysm Guard wouldn't surrender her to mist; they were preparing the chase.
What followed was the passage through the pillars, the hunters' skiffs closing in, the living map of the Pelagors, the deep pulse of the cavern's hidden heart—and beyond, the widening dark of the Subteric Sea. The chase bent into legend's shadow: the secret spiral on the glass, the whispered name of the Sutura Temple, the maps that only ears could read.
By the time Lunasa slid into the open chamber, the hunters were falling behind, and the portholes of the mind filled with that single stitch of light—the seam that might close the wound of a world, or open it anew.
The chapter didn't end in safety. It ended with a direction.
And sometimes, direction is more dangerous than any enemy.
But also, far more honest.