CHAPTER 22

  Zarakaros groaned beneath our feet, the sound like ribs cracking under a great weight. The sea was no longer a cradle. It had turned into a force with intent. Not waves. Not weather. But will. Something beneath was pulling us.

  Chara gripped the wheel with the strength of ten men, her knuckles bloodless, the leather beneath her palms groaning in protest. The wind was no longer a breeze—it was a scream.

  The ship listed to starboard, pulled not by storm but by something deeper. Older.

  "Zarakaros is being dragged," Chara said through gritted teeth, her voice a thread barely audible over the rising howl of water.

  I lunged to the side, rope burning my palms as I seized the rigging. The bore locked his arms around the main mast, eyes narrowed against the salt spray. "It’s not a monster!" he shouted. "It’s the ocean itself!"

  My gaze snapped to the deck where the map had been unfurled beneath glass. I tore open its casing. Ink rippled like flesh as I touched it. The center of the map was chaos incarnate—veins spiraling like a vortex, coiling into the shape of a chasm.

  "The veins!" Chara shouted. "They’re not decorative—they chart ocean currents!"

  "But it’s not spiraling!" I screamed back. "It’s pulling forward. Like it wants us."

  Suddenly, the world twisted.

  Gravity shifted—not downward, but inward. The pull came not as a fall, but as a summoning. The air thickened, draping over us like wet wool. It pressed into our ears, warped sound into muffled echoes. My breath grew tight, lungs grasping. The sky dimmed, not with storm but with something more ancient—light being swallowed, not hidden.

  The sea was no longer below us. It was around us.

  Water rose like sentinels, forming colossal walls that circled us—a liquid coliseum, spinning, towering, groaning. A funnel cloud of sea—a crown of death—and we were its jewel.

  Then came the maelstrom.

  Not a whirlpool. Not a spiral. But a mouth. A void vast enough to drink moons. Water churned in a rhythm too perfect to be natural, dragging Zarakaros forward—faster, deeper, unrelenting.

  The deck splintered.

  The ropes howled and snapped like sinew. Barrels burst into the air, shattering into shrapnel. Crates twisted like broken limbs. The mast arched—wood moaning like a man stretched on the rack.

  I clung to a thick rope, the fibers biting into my skin, drawing blood. The bore wrapped himself around the mast like a scarred vine, every muscle taut. Chara… Chara’s arms bled. She held the wheel still, hair whipping like fire in a tempest, teeth bared like a warrior-spirit.

  Then she did what instinct forbade:

  She turned the helm against the current.

  The ship shrieked in resistance. The deck listed harder. Her muscles trembled.

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  She tried another path—not against, but along, steering Zarakaros diagonally upward, as though she might cheat the sea’s intention. Her whole body moved with the wheel, dragging it like a tethered beast.

  But it failed.

  The pressure grew monstrous enough to shut my thoughts. My chest compressed. My ears popped in bursts of pain. Every heartbeat felt like an iron hammer against my ribs. Vision blurred, breath grew shallow, and in that moment, even Zarakaros, born from Thalakaros’s unbreakable bones, began to fracture.

  Cracks slithered across the hull like lightning across stone.

  “We believed the third continent lay at the center,” Chara whispered, the wheel now spinning loose in her hands.

  “We were wrong.”

  My fingers trembled. “If this is the end... I’m glad it’s with you both,” I muttered, smiling.

  “You fool,” Fane growled, veins rising beneath his skin. “I taught you to survive, not kneel at the first whisper of death.”

  And then—

  The wind changed.

  Not the shriek of the sea. Not the cry of death.

  But a breeze.

  Familiar.

  Gentle.

  Like the winds on Edel’s hills—the ones that once danced through my hair as I stared at skies I did not belong to.

  It curled around me—not cold, not warm, but certain.

  Guiding.

  And it pointed not to safety.

  It pointed into the maw.

  “I think…” I whispered, breath shallow, “…the way forward lies below.”

  “Zilar?” Chara’s voice was ghost-pale.

  “We have no path either way,” I said, fear coiled in my gut. “We jump.”

  “You can’t possibly swi—”

  But before the bore finished—

  I let go.

  The rope slipped through my blood-soaked fingers like silk soaked in dusk.

  And the sea claimed me.

  A second. A third. Two splashes.

  Chara. Bore.

  We were swallowed whole.

  The water closed like stone—cold, dark, absolute.

  Pressure closed in, wrapping my chest in chains, crushing ribs into glass. My ears shrieked. My head split. My body twisted in the grip of ancient tides. Sound died. My heartbeat was the only thing I could hear—and then even that grew distant.

  We were being dragged downward, faster than any descent should be possible. The salt in my mouth turned metallic. My teeth ached. My eyes bled tears that felt like fire. My limbs flailed as the currents churned, turned, and crushed.

  Zarakaros—

  That great vessel of godsmarrow and defiance—

  Screamed one final time…

  Then shattered.

  Its form vanished into the blue-black swirl above us, reduced to wreckage, scattered across the abyss.

  And still—

  We did not die.

  Below the vortex… a gate.

  It shimmered like moonlight on a blade’s edge. A tear in the fabric of the sea. A wound in the world. Not a cave. Not a ruin.

  A passage.

  It pulsed—Not with light. With heartbeat.

  We fell into it.

  And then—Light. Distant. Blinding.

  We swam upward—lungs blazing, souls fraying.

  The water turned warm. Gentle.

  Almost alive.

  I reached.

  My fingers broke the surface—

  And I gasped back into existence.