Chapter 15
Under the Sea
“Yes,” Cale stated and gestured toward the watery surface below their feet. “Here.”
Again Hamal looked over the edge of the boat, and again he saw nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary. The shore was several miles away—a dark line behind them. Over the last hour, their course had slowly turned north, keeping the shore to their right; this meant they were closer to Dursen Head than before, but what did it matter? This was still the open sea.
“You gentlemen may want to sit,” Vincent said.
The seers sat. Cale grabbed the edge of the bench under him with both hands, as did Masly. Watching them, Hamal quickly did the same, but Rhyan for some reason did not, so he thoroughly and completely lost his seat when the boat dropped. It fell as if the sea had been ripped away.
They cut through darkness and salty, wet air, and Hamal’s stomach felt like it stayed on the surface. With his eyes tightly squeezed shut, he had no idea what was happening, except that it was loud. The wind roared. Cold water sprayed him in the face and quickly soaked through his coat.
When he finally managed to pry his eyes open, he saw dark walls that moved. The boat seemed to be sliding down a tube made of water, and as droplets whipped his skin, Hamal thought, Wait a moment—is Vincent doing this? But Vincent was a weathermaker, and weathermakers couldn’t move water. They could make storms and lightning and thunder and rain, but they couldn’t make water move from one place to another.
The boat slammed into something solid. The impact ripped Hamal’s hands off the seat and knocked him to the floorboards. As his brain stopped spinning, he dragged in a deep breath—he could breathe down here—and discovered the wet air smelled like old shells. He could hear rushing water. It was as if he were lying next to a waterfall.
He pushed himself into a sitting position and tilted his head back. Far, far above them, a small circle of light constantly changed shape, a little like flames moving around in a strong wind. It began as a circle, then it stretched to an oval and then shortened into something that didn’t seem to have a shape at all. It was the beginning of the tube, Hamal realized. They were at one end, and the surface of the sea was at the other. How far down had they fallen? Was this the bottom of the sea?
And Vincent did this, he thought.
“Hamal!” someone shouted in the blackness.
“Cale?” Hamal stood to his feet cautiously and had to fling up his arms as the boat rocked beneath his boots. He couldn’t see a thing other than the shifting point of daylight above his head. It could be fifty feet away, or it could be a mile. He had no idea.
In the darkness Cale found him. Hamal felt a hand on his shoulder and knew immediately who touched him because the blood started talking, like it always did.
Cale leaned close to him and shouted in his ear, “Hamal, how many men are in the boat?”
Hamal knew what Cale was asking for, but it wasn’t going to work. He would never be able to hear a man’s heartbeat in all this noise. He could barely hear Cale shouting at him.
“I don’t know,” he shouted back.
“Where’s Rhyan? Can you find Rhyan?”
Cale was concerned about the flamemaker who had been unprepared for the boat to drop.
Before Hamal could respond, silver-blue light flickered in the darkness. It was sudden and swift—a short, jagged burst. For just a moment, Hamal could see Cale’s face, and the seer stopped talking, his head swinging toward the light.
What was that? Hamal thought.
Somewhere behind him, Ermond shouted a few words that were sucked away in the roar of moving water. The silver-blue light reappeared in between his hands—a fierce, violent storm that twisted from palm to palm.
Lightning! Hamal realized. He’s making lightning!
The light flared and left splotches before his eyes, and when he could see clearly again, Ermond was holding a light shaft: a piece of lightning that was hard and solid, like glass. People often put them in transparent jars and used them for lanterns outside their houses. It wasn’t a bright light, and it somehow matched the chill in the air, but it was steady now.
“There!” Masly yelled and pointed.
In the pale light, Hamal saw they had landed on a pointy outcropping of black stone. The boat sat at an angle, the prow extending over nothing. Oh, he thought. That was why the boat had shifted when he stood up. The rocks were wet and slippery looking, and the boat appeared ready to fall off the side into…nothing. Exactly how deep did that chasm go?
Then Hamal saw Rhyan. The flamemaker was on his back on a flat area of rock just below them. He looked asleep but with blood on his forehead.
The water howled like an angry animal. Cale shouted, “Ermond! Hold that light! Hamal, we need you.”
Cale and Masly studied the rocks leading to Rhyan’s ledge and then cautiously crawled over the boat’s side, choosing their steps and handholds with care. The boat slipped down an inch or two, and Hamal gripped the edge with both hands until the movement halted. Breath in his throat, he slowly climbed out. The rock under his boots was wet and dark, and he could barely see it in the glow of the light shaft.
Vincent hollered behind him, “I told him to sit down.”
Ermond replied, “You should have been more insistent! He might have died—and he’s a second lord! What were you thinking?”
It took five minutes to get to Rhyan. The distance was not far, but the path was almost nonexistent, with the chasm right there to receive them if they took a wrong step. When they finally reached the lord’s body, Hamal dropped to his knees on the rock and set one hand on Rhyan’s bloody forehead and the other on the man’s chest. Rhyan’s lips parted at the touch. If he groaned, Hamal didn’t hear it.
“Is he all right?” Cale asked, shouting to be heard over the roar of the water walls.
Hamal finished his survey and replied, also shouting, “He has a split skull, broken ribs, and every bone in his right arm is shattered. But nothing serious.”
With Cale and Masly looking on, he healed all the bones—bones were easy. You just had to melt them and then reform them. He climbed to his feet. “All right. He is good to be moved now.”
Cale and Masly hefted the lord’s unconscious body, one in charge of Rhyan’s legs and the other in charge of his arms. Cale looked calm even in the middle of the sea, with cold water raging all around them. The watery walls boiled, from top to bottom, and yet the water did not approach them.
Vincent and Ermond had crawled out of the boat, and they waited for them now on another part of the rock. Even from here, Hamal could see the gleam on Vincent’s forehead. It was cold down here, cold and wet and windy, but Vincent was sweating. He wondered how long the man could hold back the sea. Retrieving Rhyan and then healing him—that had taken time. Cale and Vincent probably hadn’t planned for about ten extra minutes.
“How much longer can you hold this?” Cale asked Vincent.
Vincent wiped his forehead. “Another five minutes. Maybe a little longer.”
Cale nodded. “That will be enough time.”
Vincent shifted his weight and touched his forehead again. “I still suggest we hurry, my lord.”
“Yes. Which direction, Masly?”
Masly gestured with his chin toward the rocks to the right. “That way. Twenty paces. On the other side of a…slight rise.”
“Twenty paces over these rocks will take longer than five minutes,” Vincent warned.
“It will be enough time,” Cale repeated and then had the nerve to smile.
You’re doing it again, Hamal thought and frowned at his friend. Cale didn’t want to be safe. He wanted to be dangerous.
Hamal had no idea where they could possibly be going in the sea, surrounded by water.
Vincent was right. Traveling across twenty paces of wet, slippery black stone required more than five minutes. It felt like an hour to Hamal. Poor Vincent stopped talking. The sweat rolled down his forehead, and he started slipping more often and cutting his hands on the stones. Gradually, the roar of the water began to sound different too. It became wetter than it had before, more like a growl from an open throat. That probably wasn’t a good sign.
Twenty paces.
Twenty long, nearly invisible paces that reminded Hamal of trying to climb over ice.
But at the end was a cave.
The entrance was narrow and low, and Ermond’s light didn’t make a scratch on this new level of darkness. Hamal looked at the mouth of the cave and shivered, his clothes dripping like he had just climbed out of a pool. Why was there a cave at the bottom of the sea?
Cale walked inside without hesitation. Rhyan was somewhat awake now and squinting, even though the light was poor at best and couldn’t possibly be hurting his eyes. Masly helped the flamemaker into the cave, supporting him with a strong arm wrapped around his ribs, and Hamal scrambled in after them.
The inside of the underwater cave was wet and dripping but surprisingly empty. It made Hamal think of the spout of a giant kettle that had just been drained. Hands out, back bent, he followed Cale carefully, and the deeper into the cave they went, the quieter the sea grew behind them. He started to be able to hear Cale moving in front of him. He began to hear the others too—scrapes of boots on stones, labored breathing.
“We’re about to get wet,” Masly said from somewhere behind him.
A moment later, Vincent shouted and water thundered. Hamal sucked in his breath as the air pressure shifted abruptly. He felt the change like fingers in his ears. Cold foam sprayed. Water slammed against his legs, and he nearly lost his footing. He thought for a moment he had lost it.
“Lord Rhyan!” he shouted, concerned for his recovering patient.
There was no answer.
The roar slowly lessened into a rumble, then an angry murmur. The sea came up to his calves, just below the tops of his boots. He stood there—arms out for balance, breathing hard, heart racing—and listened as the cave grew quiet. He could hear heartbeats in the darkness, and he began to count them, just to be certain. There should be six, including his own. Six. Cale was at the beginning of the line, following by Masly with Rhyan. Then Hamal, and behind him were Vincent and Ermond. Six heartbeats. He found them all.
“Cale?” he called.
“Here,” the seer replied, his voice loud and rather aggressive in the dark. Hamal could hear the excitement, all the adrenaline pumping through him. Cale took a deep breath and said, “Report, team.”
“Here,” Masly replied.
“Here,” Ermond said.
A moment later: “Here.” Vincent’s voice sounded rough. His heart throbbed like that of a man who had just finished a long race.
Hamal looked around in the dark. It seemed they had made it to their destination, but he still didn’t know what that destination was. He shivered. “Where are we?”
“This is the Dursen Head Mine,” Cale replied.
– H –
🔥 Want to read the chapters early? Join us on Patreon.
Comment below or find us on Facebook. Copyright notice: © 2026 by Lauren Stinton. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events or sapient plants is purely coincidental.
