Seven hours until we kill him or he kills us.

  The guards change shifts at midnight. Until then, we prepare, plan, and run through every contingency in a cold barn on the outskirts of Lyon, waiting for nightfall to give us cover.

  Mei uses the time to review our approach routes, our fallback positions, our extraction plans if everything goes wrong. She spreads maps across the hay-strewn floor, marking distances with her finger, murmuring calculations too quiet for me to hear. Corrine cleans her blade—the one I taught her to hold, the one she's never used on anything living—with the obsessive focus of someone trying to quiet her own thoughts. The repetitive motion of cloth against steel seems to calm her, each stroke pushing back against the anxiety I can see building behind her eyes.

  I try to sleep. It's a mistake.

  The water is black. Endless. It stretches in every direction, and I'm falling through it—not swimming, not sinking, just falling, the way you fall in dreams, weightless and inevitable. The cold doesn't touch me anymore. I've grown too accustomed to it, too connected to the depths that spawned it. But something else is wrong.

  Something is missing.

  I reach for the marks beneath my ribs, try to feel the familiar pulse that has become my second heartbeat. Nothing. The marks are there—I can trace their raised edges with my fingers—but they're silent. Dead. Carved flesh without connection, without meaning, without the thread of awareness that ties me to the ancient thing below.

  The Deep One is gone.

  I try to call out to it—not with words, but with that pressure of attention that usually draws its focus. The way you might tap someone's shoulder to get their notice. Nothing responds. The dark around me is just absence now. Empty. Indifferent in a way that has nothing to do with cosmic entities and everything to do with simple absence.

  I'm alone.

  Truly alone, in a way I haven't been since the ritual. The marks are silent. The vast attention is gone. There's nothing but me and the black water and the terrible certainty that I've been abandoned. That whatever gift the Deep One gave me has been revoked. That I was never really saved at all—just borrowed, for a time, for its entertainment.

  And now it's done watching.

  The water rushes in. Fills my mouth, my lungs, my throat. I try to scream but there's no air, no sound, just the cold and the dark and the crushing pressure of depths that go down forever. I'm drowning again—really drowning this time, without the connection that saved me before. The ritual is completing itself seven months too late. The offering the congregation promised is finally being collected.

  I claw at the water, at nothing, at the memory of air—lungs burning, vision fracturing into fragments of shadow and deeper shadow. And somewhere far above, receding like a star going out, I see a face I almost recognize—

  I wake gasping.

  Our barn is dark, lit only by the faint glow of banked coals in the small stove Mei found in the corner. My body is rigid, every muscle locked, my heart hammering against my ribs like it's trying to escape the cage of my chest. The marks are burning—not the usual pulse, but actual heat, as if they're trying to remind me they're still there, still connected, still tied to something vast in the depths.

  Still here, they seem to say. We didn't leave. We're still here.

  I force myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The technique Mei taught me for managing pain, for thinking through crisis. It works for nightmares too, apparently. The terror recedes slowly, like a tide withdrawing from a beach, leaving behind the cold sweat and racing pulse of a body that doesn't yet believe it's safe.

  "Eleanor."

  A voice in the dark. Close but not touching. Waiting.

  Corrine.

  She's sitting on the edge of my pallet, her gray-green eyes catching the faint light from the stove. She's not reaching for me, not trying to comfort with unwanted touch—just present. Witness. Her hands are folded in her lap, deliberately still, giving me space to come back to myself.

  "I'm here," her voice is barely audible. "You're not underwater. You're not there. You're in a barn outside Lyon. It's November. It's cold. You're alive."

  Simple facts. Anchors to the present moment. I grab onto them like a drowning person grabbing a rope.

  "How did you—" My voice comes out cracked, barely above a whisper. My throat feels raw, as if I really was drowning, as if the dream left physical marks on my body.

  "I know what the water sounds like in dreams." She says it simply, without drama. "I hear it too. Every night, for six years. The rhythm of it. The way it fills everything until there's no room left for air."

  I look at her. Really look, for the first time since she appeared in the barn. Her face is pale in the dim light, shadows pooling beneath her eyes. She hasn't been sleeping either. The blade-cleaning was just distraction. The nightmares are hers as much as mine.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  "You were there." It comes out flat. Not an accusation. A recognition.

  "I was there." She doesn't look away. "In the cellar. In the ritual chamber. In every place the water found me, even though I was never the one drowning. I've dreamed about it every night since I ran. The sound of children crying. Smell of salt and blood. The way the candles flickered when the chanting reached its peak."

  "I dream about drowning. Every night. Sometimes I'm myself—sixteen, in the tide pool, feeling the water close over my head. Sometimes I'm someone else. The counting girl. The twins. The children who didn't survive." I pause, force the next words out. "Tonight I dreamed the Deep One abandoned me. That the connection was gone. That I was drowning for real this time, and nothing was going to save me."

  Corrine is quiet. Then she shifts closer—not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth of her body in the cold barn air.

  "Worst ones are the ones where you're alone," she says. "I dream about running, sometimes. Running through forests, through cities, through places I've never been. And no matter how far I go, I'm always alone. No one to help me. No one to hide me. Just me and the dark and the certainty that they're getting closer."

  "Do the dreams ever stop?"

  "I don't know. It's only been six years." She almost smiles, though it doesn't reach her eyes. "I'll let you know if they ever do."

  We sit in silence. Coals shift in the stove, sending up a brief flicker of light that throws dancing shadows across the barn walls. Outside, an owl calls into the night—a hunting cry, predator seeking prey.

  "How did you know?" I ask. "That I was dreaming. That I needed—" I stop, not sure how to finish the sentence.

  "You talk in your sleep." She says it matter-of-factly, without judgment. "I heard you through the thin wall in the village, too. That first night you came. You were saying numbers. Counting, over and over. One to ten. One to ten."

  That counting girl. Even in dreams, I carry her with me. Her voice has become part of my voice. Her endless rhythm has become my heartbeat in the dark.

  "I used to wake screaming," Corrine continues. "For years after I ran, every night. I thought I was going mad—that the guilt was finally destroying me. And then I realized: the screaming was how I survived. The nightmares were how I processed what I'd seen. If I'd been able to sleep peacefully through it, that would have meant I was truly broken."

  "The dreams mean we're still human."

  "Something like that." She hesitates, then reaches out—not touching, just offering. Her hand hovers in the space between us, palm up, fingers slightly curled. An invitation without pressure. A question without demand. "You don't have to face them alone. The dreams. The memories. Whatever comes after."

  I look at her hand. At the burn scar visible beneath her pushed-up sleeve, pale and raised against her skin—the permanent evidence of the choice she made six years ago. She burned away the congregation's mark. Burned away her old identity. Became someone new, someone free, someone still haunted by what she left behind.

  We're the same, I realize. Both branded. Both running. Both wounded in ways that will never fully heal.

  Slowly, I take her hand.

  Her fingers are cold, slightly trembling. Or maybe that's mine. In the dark, with the stove-light flickering and the owl crying outside, it's hard to tell whose fear belongs to whom. Whose grief. Whose desperate need for something to hold onto.

  "Thank you,"

  "For what?"

  "For not pretending it's going to be okay. For not telling me the nightmares will stop, or the void will fill, or any of the other lies people tell when they don't know what else to say."

  She laughs—a small, broken sound, but real. Human. Alive.

  "It's not going to be okay," she answers. "It's never going to be okay. We're both going to carry this until we die—the water, the dreams, the faces of people we couldn't save." Her grip tightens on my hand. "But at least we're carrying it together. At least we don't have to drown alone."

  I feel something shift in my chest. Not the void filling—it never fills—but something else. A small warmth, fragile as a candle flame, flickering into existence beside the void.

  "My mother told me to stay kind," I say. The words surface without warning, rising from somewhere I thought I'd buried. "Night before they took me. She said kindness was strength. That I should hold onto it, whatever happened."

  "Did you?"

  "I tried. In the cellar, with the other children. I tried to be kind. To comfort them. To make them feel less afraid." I pause. "But then they pushed me under, and something died. The kindness. The gentleness. All the soft parts of me that made me human."

  "They're not dead." Corrine's voice is quiet, certain. "They're just buried. Hidden somewhere the horror can't reach. I've seen them, Eleanor. In the way you talk about the children. In the way you're sitting here, in the dark, letting me hold your hand instead of pushing me away."

  "This isn't kindness. This is—" I stop, not sure what it is.

  "It's something." She squeezes my fingers. "It's a start."

  We sit together in the dark, hands clasped, until the cold in my chest begins to ease. Until the nightmare recedes far enough that I can breathe without feeling water in my lungs. Until the marks settle back into their steady pulse, synchronized with something vast and patient in the depths—still there, still connected, still watching with its eternal, curious attention.

  Something strange happens then. The marks—always restless, always humming with the distant tide—go quiet. Not silent exactly, but... calm. Peaceful in a way they've never been before.

  Perhaps it's the congregation blood in her veins—the same lineage that carved these marks into me. Perhaps the Deep One recognizes something familiar. Or perhaps it's simpler: perhaps even the abyss understands that some connections run deeper than ritual.

  I notice, and she notices me noticing. Neither of us says anything about it.

  "Mei will wake us soon," Corrine says eventually. "For the final briefing."

  "I know."

  "You should try to sleep. Really sleep, if you can."

  "I don't think I can."

  "Then we'll sit here together. Until it's time."

  I lean my head against the rough wood of the barn wall. Close my eyes. Not sleeping—I won't sleep again tonight—but resting. Letting myself exist in this moment, in this quiet dark, with another empty person holding my hand.

  The marks keep their unusual quiet. The owl calls again, somewhere in the night. And beside me, Corrine's breathing slowly steadies into something approaching peace.

  We're not healed, not whole, not going to be okay—but we're not alone, and for now, that has to be enough.

  In a few hours, we'll climb the hill to the monastery. In a few hours, I'll face a man who has spent twenty years hunting people like us.

  The Deep One stirs beneath my ribs—and shows me something. A flash of vision: Ashworth kneeling in his chapel, lips moving in prayer. But he's not praying to God.

  He's praying to the same thing I am. And it's already chosen sides.