Chapter 3 - Into the Abyss
The water didn't feel like spring. It felt like absolute zero.
Splash.
The moment Anya broke the surface, the freezing black water rushed into her mouth and nose, stealing her breath in a violent, crushing shock. The iron chain attached to her ankle acted like an anchor, dragging her down, down, down into the fathomless vertical drop of the Black Mere.
The torchlight from the shore shrank into a tiny, dying constellation far above, then blinked out entirely.
Total darkness consumed her.
Anya expected her lungs to burst. She expected the terrifying, burning panic of drowning—the frantic clawing for air that the other girls must have felt before their limbs went heavy and the dark took them.
Instead, something strange happened.
As she sank past thirty feet, fifty feet, a hundred feet—depths where no sunlight had ever pierced—the water began to change.
The inky blackness shifted. A faint, bioluminescent glow, like pulverized moonstone suspended in liquid, bloomed around her.
The iron chain around her ankle suddenly grew hot, then snapped with a sharp clink, the heavy links drifting away into the murk like shedding skin.
Her lungs didn't burn. She wasn't breathing water, but an eerie, heavy air that seemed to filter directly through her skin.
And then, the lake floor opened beneath her.
Anya landed softly on her bare feet, her toes touching smooth, ancient flagstones covered in pale moss.
She stood gasping, her hands flying to her throat. She looked around, her eyes widening in disbelief.
She was not at the bottom of a lake. She was at the bottom of a world.
Before her stretched a colossal, drowned palace carved from black basalt and white marble. Colonnades of towering pillars rose into the gloom, draped in thick, weeping ribbons of glowing kelp. Statues of winged serpents and forgotten kings stood sentinel along wide, plaza-like avenues where schools of blind, silver-scaled fish drifted lazily through the ruined halls.
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And at the end of a grand processional way, seated upon a throne woven from ancient, petrified tree roots and glowing coral, sat a man.
Or something that had once been a man.
