Reckless, wretched thing. A creature of impulse, shackled to folly, driven by the fevered ruin of your own making. You linger at the precipice, the wind clawing at your skin, urging you forward. Below yawns the ocean, vast and unfeeling—an abyss without mercy, a beast whose hunger knows no end.

  It calls to you. Murmurs through the gale, lacing its whispers with promises it will never keep.

  You believe it holds an answer. You believe it holds salvation.

  The lie will sink its fangs into you.

  For the ocean does not save. The ocean devours.

  Yet you leap.

  Wind keens past your ears, a lament as hollow as the void. The world upends—sky, cliff, breath—all swallowed in the crushing embrace of the deep.

  And the sea reminds you.

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  It is not the river you once waded through, not the orphanage’s timid streams lapping at your ankles. It is vast. Endless. A thing of salt and suffocation.

  Water scalds your throat. Your lungs seize. Your foolish, unseeing eyes sear with abyssal spite. You thrash—gagging, choking—groping for breath that does not exist.

  The waves scorn you, laughing in their eternal cadence.

  You tear free from the tide’s grasp, wrenching yourself from the abyss with riven limbs and bared teeth. The ocean has rejected you. Cast you aside like a feeble thing unworthy of its depths.

  You kneel upon the shore, panting, seawater dripping from your lashes. The salt stings your lips, but it is not pain that tightens your fists. It is fury.

  No.

  Defeat is a Wraith unfit to Hunt your path.

  So you plunge back in.

  This time, the sea does not seize you so easily. You do not flail. You do not beg the waves for mercy. You carve through, a blade among tides. Chaos buckles. Rhythm takes root, uncoiling into something abyss-born. Something chthonic, older than the sky’s first shudder.

  Instinct.

  Your body moves as if it remembers what your mind has forgotten. The strokes sharpen, breath steadies, muscles flow like currents long known to the marrow of your bones. This is not the way a man swims—no.

  This is the way of something more will-wrought. More zeal-forged.

  Something that does not merely dream of celestial strength—it hungers for it, bone and breath bound to the pursuit.

  The suns sink, their embered gazes fixed upon you, silent arbiters of your ascent. And then, at last, the land rises to meet you.

  Ah, Zett. The trial of the tides is not the only one, for the shore is no sanctuary.

  Within the jungle, darkness wades.

  They see you.

  What’s More Dangerous?