Celeste lay with her cheek pressed against the crystalline floor, watching the way the violet glow pulsed under her translucent skin. They’ve been staying there for a while now to recharge. She had no idea what was waiting beyond the walls of this glass tower, but she knew the trench wouldn't be a clean swim. They wouldn’t make it to the deep water without a mess, and she couldn't afford to die—or almost die—for a second time. The charging was a slow, agonizing crawl. Each percentage point ticked up in her peripheral vision felt like a needle stitching her back together, fiber by fiber.
[Energy: 40% — Ambient Recharge Capped.]
She sat up, her tail feeling less heavy, but it still felt like a thing that didn't quite belong to her yet. Across the dome, Rowan was staring at the water above them. He looked like he was waiting for the sky to fall but only there was no sky, his fingers tracing the golden veins that spiderwebbed beneath the skin of his forearms. It seemed to be spreading as the time ticked by.
"I don't understand it," Rowan said as if he felt the heat of her gaze on him. His voice was a thin, dry rasp that seemed to catch on the water. "I didn't hit my head. There’s no sign of it. So why is there just... a wall in my mind? I know how to speak and I remember things. I know what a 'pendant' is. But the person who owned it? I remember nothing about him. This is… very weird. Like someone or something intentionally erased my memory."
“You remember where you lived before?” She asked, and the look on his face made her regret it.
“Maybe Seattle? I— fuck, I can’t remember. Do I have anyone up there waiting for me? I don’t know. I don’t know shit. The important shit, at that!”
Celeste stared at his troubled face. "Maybe your brain is protecting you," she offered carefully, though the words felt stupid to her own ears the second they left her mouth. She had no idea how to console someone who had just forgotten themselves. It felt like a cruel fate, a hollowed-out kind of existence, and she knew nothing she said could actually make him feel better.
"Then why do you remember?" Rowan snapped, finally turning to look at her. His blue-veined eyes were frantic, searching her face for a logic that wasn't there. "You changed more than I did. You’re a different species, Celeste. You’ve got gills and a tail and a 'System' talking to you, yet you can tell me about Seattle. You can remember everything. If anyone should have lost their mind, it’s you. So why am I the one who’s hollow?"
Celeste flinched. The unfairness of it stung. She remembered everything, he was right. The smell of the espresso beans at the shop, the specific way the light hit her room in October, the taste of a cheap burger after a long shift. Those memories were anchors, but they were also weights. They made the lavender scales and the crushing pressure of the ocean feel like a nightmare. Maybe if she remembered nothing of it like him, she would have maybe enjoyed this beauty a little without losing her mind?
"I'd trade you," she whispered, her tail giving a slow, weary flick. "I’d give anything to wake up and not know what I’m missing. Remembering makes this skin feel like a prison. Forgetting... maybe that's just a different kind of freedom."
Rowan let out a bitter, bubbling laugh. "Freedom? It feels like being a ghost in a body that’s still alive." He floated up, his movements jerky. She got nothing to say to that, maybe remembering and not remembering, both were a curse. So after a beat of heavy silence, she directed the conversation elsewhere.
"Forty percent," Celeste said, rising to meet him. She didn't use her tail to loom over him this time. She stayed at his level. "That's all the geode is going to give me. If we stay here, we’re just wasting time. We have to find that trench."
“Which trench?”
Right. He didn’t know about the mission.
“I need to get there in what,” she glanced at the timer flickering at the edge of her vision, “7 hours and 15 minutes. If I don’t reach it by then, this body dissolves. Either I die or… hopefully wake up in my own skin.”
The thought was a dangerous spark in the back of her mind. She felt a sudden, sharp urge to just stop. To fail. To let the timer hit zero and see if the world would shatter like glass, depositing her back in her bed in Seattle. She could almost see it—the damp smell of her apartment, the blue light of her phone on the nightstand. She imagined the shock, the wide-eyed disbelief on Leah’s face when she tried to explain this nightmare of a journey through the belly of the sea with a man who forgot himself and about the creatures that were hungry for them.
What time would it be in the real world? Had she already missed her shift? She wondered if her phone was currently vibrating off her nightstand with a thousand missed calls from her boss. She wondered if Leah was worried, or if she was just working the morning rush without noticing Celeste’s absence at all.
Was she a missing person yet, or did she just completely disappear, like she never really existed?
"You think this is a dream?" Rowan’s voice broke the trance.
"I think it’s a nightmare," she corrected, her voice going cold as she looked back at the dark archway of the geode. "But the pressure in my chest feels way too real."
She didn't give him a choice. She moved toward the exit, the heavy weight of her tail dragging through the silt. "Let's go. If I'm wrong and this isn't a dream, I don't want to find out what 'dissolving' feels like."
The transition out of the glass cave or whatever that was felt like stepping off a cliff into a pool of ink.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
The violet light vanished, replaced by a suffocating, heavy grey. The water here felt like a physical pressure, a thick velvet that resisted every movement. Celeste led the way, her white hair trailing behind her like a shroud, while Rowan clung to her scaled shoulder, his grip white-knuckled and desperate.
They descended into the throat of the trench, a jagged scar in the seabed that seemed to swallow the light. As they sank deeper, the silence began to change. A low, sub-harmonic thrumming began to vibrate through Celeste’s ribs, a frequency so deep it made her teeth ache. It felt like the ocean was humming a song in a language made of tectonic plates and grinding ice.
Then, out of the silt, the pillars rose.
They looked grown, like glowing trees that had been twisted into the shape of a cathedral. Huge, arched ribs of stone spanned the ceiling of the trench, and between them sat the statues. They were massive—monolithic figures carved from jade and obsidian, their faces smooth and featureless, yet their bodies were terrifyingly detailed. Some were coiled in mid-strike, their tails thick with muscle; others held their hands open, their palms etched with the same runes that pulsed on the walls she had swam past before.
[Entering: The Luminous Graveyard — Location Anomaly Detected.]
Celeste slowed. Her tail gave a sharp, involuntary flick, hitting the base of a pillar. The moment the scales touched the stone, a jolt of electricity shot up her spine. Her gills flared, snapping shut and open in a rhythm she couldn't control. She felt a heat blooming behind her eyes, a pressure that made the HUD in her vision flicker and bleed.
"Do you hear that?" Rowan asked, his jaw clenched so hard the muscles in his neck stood out like cords. He looked at the statues, his blue-veined eyes tight with a cold, focused dread. "The sound. It’s... like my skull is being rubbed against a whetstone."
"I do," Celeste said, her own voice sounding distorted to her ears. She looked at the red text blinking over the statues. Anomaly. Anomaly. "The screen in my head is going haywire. I think... I think the stone is doing something to the water."
She drifted toward the largest statue—a figure that stood at least twenty feet tall, its arms outstretched toward the surface. As she got closer, her body began to ache. Her back muscles spasmed, her shoulder blades pushing against her skin as if trying to sprout the stone wings the statue possessed. It felt like a visceral, biological demand.
"Who walks among the lost?”
A voice thrummed in her head. The sound seemed to be originating from the floor of the trench, or the statues, traveling through the water and into their marrow. It was a deep, tectonic frequency that turned the liquid in their ears into lead.
Rowan stumbled as he gripped his head, his knuckles white, staring at the central altar. "Who the fuck is that.” he grunted through his teeth.
"Don't listen to it," Celeste warned, not really knowing why, though her own hand was twitching toward the stone. The altar in the center was a slab of white jade, and upon it sat a shard of glass that looked like a tear frozen in time. It glowed with a sickly, rhythmic gold—the exact same frequency as the veins in Rowan’s arms.
The vibration intensified. The statues seemed to lean inward, the featureless jade faces tilting down. Celeste felt a wave of crushing grief that wasn't hers. She looked at the statues and felt a sick sense of familiarity, like seeing a car crash and realizing you recognize the license plate.
"Rowan, get back," she said, her voice dropping into a choral hiss, her tail was coiling tight. Rowan didn't move back. He swam forward. He looked at the shard with a hard, desperate need to make the noise stop.
"If this is what’s making the noise," Rowan said, his voice straining against the pressure, "then I’m stopping it."
He reached out with a maddening gleam in his eyes.
"Rowan! It’s not the time to be childish!"
He slammed his fist against the glass. The "shimmer" of the statues ignited. The dim, bruised teal light of the trench turned into a searing, clinical white.
[CRITICAL ERROR: MEMORY LEAK DETECTED.]
“Who remembers the light?” The voice came again. It came with a torrent. Celeste was slammed backward, her mind flooded with images that felt like hot oil. She saw the city above the waves falling into a black sun. She saw thousands of things that looked like her marching into a fire.
The vibration was so violent that the obsidian pillars began to crack. She felt her heart begin to sync with the altar. She was terrified—she didn't know why her body was reacting this way. She watched in horror as the vibrant lavender of her scales began to leach away at the edges. A dull, calcified grey crawled up her arms, turning her skin into the same bone-white material as the ruins around them. She can’t move. She can’t shout for help.
"Celeste! Focus on me!"
The sound of Rowan’s voice broke through the static. It was the only thing that didn't sound like it was made of stone. He lunged toward her, his fingers digging into the calcifying scales of her shoulder. The contact was violent. It felt like a circuit breaker blowing in a thunderstorm.
The instant their "Link" closed the circuit, the space snapped. It wasn't a fade. It was like a TV being unplugged. The sound was a loud boom. Celeste’s vision went pitch black, and for a second, she felt like she had ceased to exist.
When she opened her eyes, the place was gone. There were no pillars. No statues. No stone floor. They were suspended in a featureless, bottomless blue void. The floor of the trench had dropped away, replaced by a limitless emptiness. Rowan was gasping, staring at the spot where the altar had been. "Where is it? Where's the statues?"
Celeste looked at her hands. They were still lavender, but they felt extremely cold. She looked at the HUD flickering in her eye: [Location anomaly resolved.]
"I don’t know," Celeste whispered, her voice trembling. "How can it just vanish like that?"
"It felt real," Rowan said, his voice hardening. He looked into the dark below. "I felt the stone under my hands."
"I don't know," Celeste said, and for the first time, she sounded as scared as he felt. "I don't know anything about this place."
From the empty blue, a final, soft echo reached them.
“Not yet, Veil-born.”
Goosebumps raised all over her skin but Celeste didn't look back. She took Rowan’s hand, her grip way too tight. "Just swim," she said. "Don't think about what we saw. Just swim."