The world vanished in a single breath.
One heartbeat he was gasping for air, the next there was no air left to take. The canal swallowed him whole, and silence devoured the roar of the storm. The cold was not just temperature—it was memory, pressure, a weight that pressed thought into instinct.
He tried to kick, to rise, but the water refused to be water anymore. It was everywhere. Inside his mouth. Inside his lungs. Inside his heartbeat. His vision blurred until there was no up, no down, just endless shifting blue, lightless and infinite.
He screamed, but only bubbles came out—each one bursting into echoes that didn't sound like his voice. They whispered back at him from the dark.
"You always drown, Jayden."
"You never climb out."
The voices sounded like his own.
Shapes moved around him—faint, wavering silhouettes. Dozens. Hundreds. Every one of them had his face. Every one of them was dying the way he had died before—struggling, failing, sinking with open eyes.
He spun, desperate to escape them, but the more he thrashed, the closer they came. Fingers made of water touched his skin. They weren't cold; they were *familiar*. Each reflection whispered the same word, over and over, until the word itself became a current dragging him down.
"Weak. Weak. Weak."
Jayden's chest burned. He wanted to scream again but had nothing left. His vision tunneled, edges flickering black. For a moment, he thought about letting go—about closing his eyes and joining the hundreds of other Jaydens drifting here.
Then another memory surfaced—Bram's laugh, rough and real; Marla's soft voice calling him stubborn. The taste of broth, too thin to fill him but warm enough to pretend.
He clenched his fists. The current bent.
"I won't die here," he said—though it came out as a thought instead of sound.
The reflections froze. Then the entire sea convulsed.
---
Pressure cracked through the water like thunder. The darkness peeled back to reveal something vast moving beneath him—an eye the size of a house opening in the deep. The pupil was a spiral of lightning; veins of current pulsed through the blackness around it.
A shape uncoiled from the abyss: not flesh, but a creature made entirely of storm and tide. Its body was the ocean's will given form. Scales shimmered like runes; every heartbeat was a tidal wave.
The Leviathan.
It moved without moving, its presence rewriting the current itself. The weight of it crushed his mind until even thought bled. The voice that followed wasn't sound but vibration—like words carved directly into his bones.
"Why do you resist the tide?"
Jayden's body shuddered. The voice came again, each syllable a pressure that broke the rhythm of his pulse.
"All water returns to the sea. You are a drop pretending to be a storm."
He tried to swim upward, but upward didn't exist. The Leviathan's eye followed him, infinite and patient.
Something primal in him screamed *run*. But another part—smaller, sharper—refused.
He bared his teeth in the dark. "Then I'll be the drop that scars it."
The water erupted.
---
The Leviathan surged. The sea became teeth and current. Jayden spun through whirlpools, struck by waves that felt like stone. Every motion tore at his body; his strength vanished like air through cracks. But somewhere inside that chaos, a rhythm began to beat—slow, deliberate, matching his pulse.
It wasn't the creature's heart. It was his.
Each beat sent a faint shimmer through the water around him. At first it looked like heat distortion. Then it grew—light bleeding from his skin, tracing the shape of veins, pulsing outward in circles of blue-white radiance.
The Leviathan lunged. Jayden didn't dodge. He stared into its eye—the spiral of lightning, the endless whirlpool—and pushed the light outward.
The current screamed. For the first time, the Leviathan hesitated.
Pain tore through him; his chest felt like it would collapse. But the more the creature pressed, the brighter the glow became. The sea began to turn.
The Leviathan roared, voice shaking the world:
"Defiance is not strength."
Jayden shouted back, "No. But it's enough."
He drove his will into the current.
The water bent around him, reversed, twisted back toward the abyss. The Leviathan's body began to unravel—each scale a ribbon of current snapping loose, dissolving into the glow that surrounded him. Its eye flickered, broke, and the sound it made was not a roar this time—it was a sigh.
Then everything went still.
---
Jayden floated in the center of the dark. His body trembled, blood mixing with light in the water around him. The glow crawled up his arms, reached his face, and settled in his eyes.
For an instant, he saw himself reflected again—but now the reflections bowed, rippling outwards before fading into calm.
A voice followed, colder than the Leviathan's, older than the sea. It came from everywhere at once—inside the water, the air, his bones.
[Runes ignite across the dark.]
"Aspirant recognized."
"Element: Water."
"Status: Unlocked."
Jayden's body convulsed. Blue light burst from his irises—concentric ripples etched like runes inside the pupils. The mark burned, then cooled, settling into something alive.
And just as his lungs screamed for air again, the world above cracked open—light pouring down through the waves, pulling him upward.
He didn't resist.
He let the current carry him, eyes still glowing, as the last echo of the Codex faded into silence.