The next monolith puzzle asked them to press a series of levers, the order of which Aya cracked in under five minutes, although she certainly needed Kai’s arm-span to reach the right switches. Meanwhile, Kai grumbled under his breath, his tentacles crossed as if they could somehow hide his embarrassment. Tangled in his own limbs, he glared at the puzzle as if it had betrayed him personally.

“These are supposed to be made for cecaelia,” he groaned under his breath for the dozenth time. “You can’t get to the Twilight Market without one, so why have I not been able to solve a single one?”

For Aya’s lot, she had never felt more needed. Even Adin was getting excited about the next clues in the series.

The fourth monolith, Adin recognized as asking for one of the ingredients that Kai happened to have on him. Though he complained, Aya was inordinately relieved that Kai was the one with them. Having to go back to the beginning now to collect some seasonal plant might have meant a life-sentence.

It was their arrival at the fifth monolith when things began to get complicated.

The stone tentacle rising at the end of their next current was different from the others. In fact, everything was different.

Instead of being deposited at the foot of some empty, sand-covered waste, the current let them out at the base of a colossal tentacle statue, at least ten times the size of the others. To its sides, a seamless black wall of rock loomed endlessly in either direction, stretching up beyond the surface. It was as though an enormous gate divided the ocean at this point from whatever lay beyond.

The wall was perfect, smooth stone, giving it an eerie quality that blurred the line between the organic and the artificial. It was impassable, and unless another current was going to redirect them, then the only way was straight through.

“Odd,” Aya whispered. The sound bounced strangely against the wall.

“At least we won’t have to look for the puzzle this time.” Adin pointed to the tentacle unhelpfully.

In a space devoid of carved suckers and detailing, the words to the next clue were on display for all to see.

“Kai?” Aya prompted.

“A moment,” Kai grumbled, already baring his teeth.

Kai launched himself over the next puzzle, expelling ink into the stone grooves where the fifth clue had been carved. Like with the others, the letters lit up, pulsing blue in the blackness. It was as though they were excited to be read.

The serpent’s path be peril dight,

With scales of silver and eyes of light.

I am the companion that walks beside.

Those who leave me woe betide.

Trace the trail, avoid its bite,

And reveal passage by the name of night.

 

“These are getting worse,” Kai remarked when he’d finished scraping away the barnacles that seemed to insist on growing over the glowing script on each of the tentacles. Here was no exception. The little parasites flashed indignant blue when Kai evicted their colonies. Perhaps they fed on the magic there, which explained why they were so much bigger and clingier than the ones that grew at the surface. She reread the words, subconsciously fiddling with the rubies where they hid beneath her neckline. Her mother’s necklace wasn’t something she remembered her mother wearing, but if it had been so precious to her father, and her father was truly willing to consider her choice in the selection of a suitor, then the last thing she needed was to give him a reason to reconsider.

“Are we going to have to fight some kind of sea-snake?” Adin asked wide-eyed, once more taking the riddles at face value.

Aya brushed against Kai’s shoulder swimming closer to the words, before he swiped himself away from her. He’d kept a stricter distance from her since the second tentacle, and his flinching only underlined any awkwardness left over from when they’d woken up. It didn’t help that every time she swam close to Kai, Adin’s facial expressions seemed to reach new records of pulling and pinching.

Focus on the puzzle…

She reread the clue. Then reread it again.

“Don’t ignore what’s around you for the sake of what you want to see, or you’ll wind up getting stabbed in the back, princess,” Ezra had once said.

Pessimistic, but practical advice.

So what was she missing?

Kai waded around the monstrous curve of the tentacle’s base, restless and distracting.

“I can’t smell any magic. I can’t even smell a current. There should be something.”

Ezra’s words echoed in her head again.

That’s right, she told herself. Kai isn’t angry with me; he’s angry that he’s not solving these as fast as he wants. He’s doing this for me. He’s not going to toss me out into the abyss.

It was then, watching the silvery shadows that Kai cast over her in his anxious pacing, that she saw what she needed to see.

“Kai, do that again,” she said, catching his arm as he passed her.

“Am I about to become the audience to round four of my incompetence?” he asked bitterly, spitting bubbles.

Adin snorted under his breath, just as annoyed. “Incompetent? You?”

“Do what again, Aya?” Kai grumbled, ignoring Adin.

Aya swam behind Kai’s shoulders. He let her guide him back to the place where he’d been pacing.

“I don’t think this trail was meant to be passable alone. By anyone,” she sighed. “Do you see that?” Aya pointed to the water around Kai’s limbs.

“You know already?” Adin darted from where he’d been fiddling with something at the monolith’s side, oblivious to the frustration and tension going on above him.

Funny, Aya hadn’t noticed when he’d left.

“What is it, Aya?” repeated Kai.

She gave a flourish with enough dramatic flair to win a spot in a traveling cabaret.

“The shadows.”

Adin and Kai followed the line of her finger to the faint light that traced the curves of Kai’s limbs. Each sucker reflected the moonlight in tiny, scattered flashes as his tentacles moved through the water. Though this tentacle was just as deep as the others, the eerie black stone wall pulled light unnaturally far into the water. They could see without the help of Kai’s bottled lights.

“What’s special about the shadows?” Adin asked, still confused.

Aya indicated the riddle.

“Look at the first line. It’s a warning,” she explained, “but it doesn’t mean a literal serpent. In old astrological lore, there’s a story about a serpent that loved mischief so much, the waves never stopped moving over his tricks. Eventually, Poseidon himself banished him to the sky where he could still work the tide, but wouldn’t wreck cities or start storms.”

“The moon?” Adin guessed, apparently eager to appear helpful.

“Well caught,” Kai mumbled. Adin preened. “And the rest?”

“The companion that always walks beside is a shadow,” Aya said confidently. “It wants us to stick to the shadows wherever the next current is sending us, but it doesn’t give a direction like the other ones….speak the name of night…I don’t know what that part—”

“Moonshadow,” Kai said clearly. “It’s an ingredient in—”

But he never finished what he had to say, because once the riddle’s answer had finished reverberating up the length of the monolithic stone, the whole thing shuddered into motion.

“Nngh!” Adin grunted as Kai seized him and Aya by the tails and pulled them out of the way.

The monolith descended into the water where they’d been not a moment before. Stirring up sand and silt, this one was so carefully balanced on its pivots that it made no sound as it bent away from the cliff face, and settled suckers-downward into the sand. The statue’s great fall, however, was nothing to the scene it opened way to.

Behind the tentacle, was a gaping entryway into a deepwater valley that stretched like a scar across the ocean floor. Its rocky walls rose all the way up to the ocean’s surface, both magically and naturally pulling down stagnant rays of moonlight. Craggy corners and oddly patterned stones littered just beyond the entrance.

Adin edged forward, but no current swept him through. No magical beam indicated the next current, either. It seemed they’d be expected to swim through this next trial on their own.

Kai examined the gaping opening with a focused glitter in his eye, and his carefully schooled features twitched an infinitesimally small amount. Was it relief? Pride? Awe?

“You solved it,” Aya said, nudging Kai gently.

“I finished solving it,” he corrected. “You solved it. And the others.”

She chuffed his arm playfully, grinning.

“Should I mention this in interviews with any sea witches if I can ever get honest work? Good with words? Extremely clever?”

Kai rolled his eyes. “Call yourself an ex-politician who deals in tricky wording.”

She grinned wider. “So I can put ‘princess’ on a resume?”

“You can put it on a trophy and tote it around the reef,” he said sarcastically.

She threw up her arms. “Why is this bothering you so much? These clues were written by your people. Aren’t riddles written into your nursery rhymes and spoon-fed to you from birth?”

He rolled his eyes. “And trust a politician to turn it around as if it’s all your fault from the start.”

“Dodging the question.”

“Obviously.”

You’re impossible.”

“You’re lucky I am,” he seethed, suddenly inches from her face.

That took all of the wind out of Aya’s sails.

“Will you two stop flirting and just swim?” Adin huffed bitterly.

They looked away from each other immediately. Kai took point into the valley, a position that kept his face conveniently hidden from her. Aya followed. Wearing an uncomfortable expression that Aya couldn’t fathom, Adin insisted on taking the flank position, lurking behind them like some socially-deprived remora.

“Aya,” Adin hissed and grabbed her arm when they’d gone only a few feet through the opening.

She yelped when he yanked her back from a small finger of light she’d been swimming past. “I think…I think that statue wasn’t joking about us having to stay out of the light.”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Adin, I’m pretty sure that was just part of the rid—oh!”

She saw it.

Amidst the rocks and crevices, strange and grotesque shapes loomed in the shadows ahead, but those weren’t nearly as unsettling as what was real. The patterned stones thought she’d seen from the entrance littering the floor of the valley weren’t stones at all. They were bones. All of them.

Thousands of skulls, ribs, and pieces of shattered spines littered the valley floor where the light touched, leaving the only clear spaces where the shadows led through. Most of the bones had belonged to small fish, or the occasional bird that had drifted down, but others were clearly mer-folk. The most unsettling of all was that some were cecaelian.

“K—K—” she found herself trying to call, but her voice had frozen in her throat.

Adin took her hand, and pulled her away from the light. Creeping through the shadows, it took them a full minute to catch up to Kai, who swam through shadow as a matter of course.

“Kai!” Adin hissed again. “Kai, we can’t go through here!”

Kai whirled in a cloud of poise and curving tentacle, and faced them calmly.

“Is there another option?”

“We’ll go over it! Around it! Anything!” Adin snapped in a half-whisper, gesticulating with his spear at the bones.

Kai only shook his head.

“The walls went on for miles, and reach quite literally to the surface. Unless you’re suggesting we somehow fly?”

Adin floundered, his mouth gaping like a fish out of water.

“Still,” he whispered, regarding the piles with the same horror as Aya.

Kai, however, glanced over them with the sort of indifference as though they were pebbles in the sand.

“We don’t know why they’re there! Does the light…do you think it burned them?” Adin whispered, glancing over his shoulder as though the beams of light were some transient, living thing that could get up and chase them at any moment.

The bones that lie in the shafts of moonlight were perfectly clear of any debris or markings. It was as though they’d been sucked or bleached clean. At the same time, the valley didn’t seem stuffy or stale. A steady pull of water was wafting from somewhere. The whole eerie place seemed to breathe.

Kai shrugged.

“I don’t know of any magic that burns like that, but there are certainly potions that are light activated. Right Aya?”

Aya would have rolled her eyes at Kai’s attempt at levity had she had more presence of mind. Their voices were all too loud, somehow, echoing uncomfortably off the cliff walls.

“There’s a current through the valley. If there’s somehow a potion pumped into the waters here, then we should be fine. Many of them are incomplete without certain types of natural ingredients anyway. Either way, it’s like you said. As long as we stick to the shadows, we’ll be fine.”

There was something slightly off about Kai, as though he were leaving something out, but just as soon as the thought occurred to her, it was gone. He made sense.

“Kai,” she finally coughed out in a much quieter voice, “are you sure about this?”

Kai actually snorted bubbles.

“What you two bubble-heads have failed to realize, is that not a single one of these bones is fresh. Look at them—really look. If anything, I’m surprised we haven’t seen more remains down here. Where do you think everything goes from the above? Nearly everything ends its existence down here in one way or another. It just looks like all of the currents we’ve been passing have funneled them here.”

“R—right,” Adin said at last, looking a little foolish. “But the riddle did say we have to stick to the shadows.”

Aya followed Kai’s train of thought faster than Adin. “So if magical currents brought us here, they could be waiting to set us back if we trip through the light?”

“Something like that, perhaps,” Kai encouraged, but he still didn’t meet her eye.

“I’m still not convinced they weren’t burned,” Adin mumbled, curling his fins just a bit.

Kai placed a hand on either of their shoulders and faced them toward the end of the valley in the unmarked distance.

“So we’ve got to stick to the shadows. Should be easy enough for us peasants. Think you can avoid the limelight long enough princess?”

“I am not a peasant—” Adin started to protest over Aya’s own complaints.

“Any of the palace guards would tell you I can.”

He rolled his eyes at her, though without any real rancor.

“If they can tell you that, then they’ve noticed.”

“Let’s just go,” mumbled Adin. “I still don’t like this place.”

Aya squinted forward. “If we hug the left, we should be clear for most of the way.”

“Let me lead this one, Aya,” Kai said gently, turning her to the right. “Yes, it’s clear for about a hundred meters, but then it runs up against a wall.”

“You can see that far?” Adin asked, though she couldn’t tell if he was impressed, or disturbed.

“When he tries,” Aya confirmed.

Kai flicked her arm playfully with one of his feet, and even he looked surprised at that particular tentacle’s behavior.

“Just swim.”

*

It must have been about an hour that they spent picking through the light patches behind Kai as they moved along the valley floor. Time did wonders to soothe the creeping feeling the walls gave Aya when she stared at them too long. Eventually, the many identical piles of bones were indeed as boring as Kai had treated them. Eventually, Adin began whistling a jaunty tune that Aya recognized from the third ring, and was mildly surprised when Kai began to hum along.

After a few minutes of humming, and uneventful swimming, the place was downright cheerful.

“Aya, have you ever wondered what it would be like to replace the giant seahorses in the king’s jousting matches with other things?” asked Adin, daydreaming.

Aya let out a quiet laugh, watching Adin curl gently through the water after Kai. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d called her by name so casually. It was a relief.

“Like with what?” she asked.

“Something faster,” he said. “We could use kelpies, sailfish, trained sharks…I’d really like to see the sharks.”

“I have it on good authority the guards in your contingent are pretty fast, too.”

Up ahead, she could have sworn she saw Kai’s cheek lift.

“What are you saying?” Adin asked hotly.

“Don’t tell me you wouldn’t like to see Pastian trying to out-horse Kael,” said Aya trecherously.

Adin smirked.

“See? Not the worst idea.”

“It’s not the sort of idea they’d let me pitch, though…” Adin said a little quieter.

“What sort of ideas do they let you pitch?”

His silence confirmed suspicions she’d held for the last few seasons. Adin was new to the guard, and being new meant little respect, bad shifts, and plenty of unrecognition, but she hadn’t thought it would last so long.

“They’re puffer-faced idiots for not listening to you, Adin,” she huffed, indignant on his behalf. “But, I’m sort of glad they are. If they weren’t they’d have found us before we got to the drop off. When we get back, I’ll recommend you to day-shift security.”

“Thanks, Aya” he said, brightening up considerably. “But, I mean…wouldn’t it have been better if they’d found you? There are other mages in the kingdom. One of them could have done something for whatever…whatever this is.”

“You can’t still think I wasn’t potioned, right?” she tried gently.

Kai admirably pretended not to hear.

“I think…I know there’s something up,” Adin said eventually. “I just don’t know if all this was necessary,” he motioned to the nearest ominous rock as if it had personally offended him and sent them on this journey, “and if…well, Aya, are you sure it was the prince?”

Aya had to stuff the anger that flared up at his question under three layers of mental sea-sponges.

“Yes, Adin, I’m sure. Nothing else makes sense. And when the sun rises again…Adin, I hate what this thing makes me. You can’t think I’d want it to be permanent? That I’d want to be like that forever? When I think of what I said—”

Of the things it might make me do if I had more power behind my orders. Of the monster it could make me…. But she said none of those things out loud. What she said instead was:

“When I think of how I treated you, I hate myself.”

“I think it puts you in a frame of mind to act more like a princess.” Adin’s words shocked her. “And, you know you’d have to be one eventually, right?”

“Is that what you think royalty should be?” she said quietly.

“I think royalty should act like it has the power to keep the kingdom’s order, and then do it. If you learn to direct that force, I’m not so sure it’s a bad thing.”

It was like a slap in the face. Did everyone close to her see her kindness as weak?

“I know I’m not usually very...commanding,” she said more to herself than Adin. “But I’m the youngest. I’ve never needed to be. I just don’t think that insults and demands are the way to anything better.”

Adin either didn’t hear her, or didn’t answer. The shadows were getting harder to stick to, and getting thinner as they neared the valley’s halfway point. She and Adin were forced to swim one after another to stay away from the widening light. Without her friend swimming next to her, a looming sense of loneliness that had nothing to do with having company threatened to overwhelm her.

“I can’t believe I’m the one pointing this out, but you two need to liven up back there. Adin, what happened to singing Sugar in the Rum, or My Maiden Was a Fish? I didn’t think you knew any tunes from up above!” said Kai, as always, breaking into her thoughts just in time to save her from drowning in them.

“Those are songs from the above?” Aya gasped. “How do either of you know those?”

“It makes travel easier sometimes to latch onto the ships if they’re going the direction I need,” Kai said, as though dragging himself through a ship’s wake were the most normal thing in the world. “And they say and sing all sorts of things—mostly drivel. Most humans aren’t that intelligent.”

Adin nodded as though this were a well-known fact.

“Adin, you’ve gone up, too?” she demanded, almost running into a rock in her surprise. “What’s it like?”

“Well, there’s not really anything to see up there, except for the constellations once the sun sets, but you know that. I’m amazed they all don’t just stop existing from the boredom,” Adin complained.

“Probably why they sing,” added Kai.

It was obvious to Aya that he knew more than he was letting on, but wasn’t really in the mood to explain. In fact, as they passed the midway of the valley, he’d been growing more and more twitchy, and now that she paid more attention, the piles in the light here were larger and more complex, containing the remains of creatures she’d never seen before.

“How do the songs go?” she asked, curious. “Do you two know the words?”

Kai might have hummed along, but Adin obliged her by starting into a song about a drunken sailor set to sea to hunt whales and find a fish for a wife. After a few verses, she had to admit it had a good story, even if she suspected Adin had made a few of the words up.

When he’d done, however, Kai was quiet, and began pulling them through the shadows under logs and through crevices where the light narrowed their path so much, Aya had to squeeze her fins to fit.

Adin wriggled through the crack ahead of her, when his spear stuck and fell from his back.

With a clatter that felt deafening to Aya’s sensitized ears, it tumbled into one of the piles of bone.

Together, they all froze.

“Um…it’s not sizzling or anything,” Adin pointed out after a long, silent minute. “It’s not even changing color.”

“Don’t, Adin.” Kai whispered so quietly, Aya barely heard him. “Leave it.”

“What?” Adin looked scandalized. “I can’t just leave it! That’s my only weapon! It was issued by the chief himself! I wouldn’t get another one issued if I offered him my fins in a pearl dish!”

Tentatively, Adin edged the tip of his tail into the light. It disturbed the moonbeam, sending a shadow up from where the light touched, but otherwise, nothing happened.

Kai hissed.

“It’s fine. Nothing’s happening,” Adin sighed, relieved.

“Leave it!”

Adin lunged for the spear, and, quicker than Aya would have thought possible, Kai shot out three tentacles, and yanked him back, this time thrashing and cursing.

“You’ve only got one life, too, Adin! Is it worth a fancy stick?”

The stream of curses Adin let out at Kai would have made Aya blush steam if she’d heard them, but Kai clamped a tentacle over his mouth to deaden the sound.

“Please Adin,” Aya pleaded, cringing away from the light. “Look, you’re not going to win a fight against Kai. I’ll get you a different one when we get back. It’ll be fine—”

Adin thrashed harder, until he landed a lucky hit to Kai’s jaw, and squirmed out of his tentacles and into the light.

Aya gasped, sure that Adin was about to start screaming, or that some magical current would rip him away from them…but…nothing happened.

Adin scooped up his spear, brandishing it, and poked at an oddly-shaped fish skull.

“Looks like you were at least right about something, Kai,” he grumbled angrily. “These bones are ancient.”

“Stop moving!” Kai urged under his breath.

He edged around the pool of light as though afraid to go in, himself, but ready to snatch Adin out at the first sign of opportunity. Adin danced out of his reach, unharmed, disturbing the light in the patch where he swam, and casting shadows on the walls around them, and straight up.

It was odd. Weren’t shadows only ever cast downward?

A chill touched the back of Aya’s neck.

“Um, Adin…” Aya examined the skeletons just under Adin’s fins. The ones farther down certainly looked as though they could have been there for millenia, but the ones on top were still tinged with a faint shade of pink.

“Those don’t look so ancient to me. Get out of there! Now!”

But Adin didn’t listen to her, opting instead to examine his spear for any damage.

“There’s nothing out here at all!” he argued vehemently. “No currents. No potions. Look! I’m fine! I bet whatever is supposed to be here is worn-off. We could just swim right down the middle of this thing and be out of here in ten minutes!”

“Adin, move!” Aya begged, but the problem was that he was moving too much. His movements were casting huge shadows on the far wall, and his voice was getting uncomfortably loud.

“Now you decide to go all princess-y on me. Aya, let’s just get out of here first. I promise I’ll be a model guard when we get back, and all,” he grumbled, but showed no signs of following her command. Instead he grabbed at her arm, and began tugging her into the light. “Come on, let’s just get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

She struggled, trying in vain to pull her arm out of his much-stronger grip.

“Adin stop. Let go!”

Aya turned to Kai for help, and she couldn’t fathom why he hadn’t done so already, until Aya noticed something that made her fins drop cold. Kai was no longer watching Adin. His eyes had trained on something above him—something much more pressing than one errant merman.