Nine Moons in a River of Stars: Phase Two (Marrow Book 2) by Xen

Author:Xen [Xen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-02-17T18:30:00+00:00

x

THERE WAS A MOMENT, PAST noon—at least, noon by the clock—when Genji thought he dreamed the sun.

A sun beneath the waves, rising from the farthest depths in glittering arcs of gold, wavering together in strange patterns but making up a swarming sphere of shimmering, pale yellow light nonetheless.

He stood on the deck of the Marimo, feeling the dead air, waiting for it to move. He didn’t know what to do without the wind to tell him which direction to go, and with no wind off the sea there was no spray, no biting chill against his cheeks. The cold was simply leaden, unmoving around him.

But there was a sun beneath the sea, and as he watched it rise toward the surface he clutched at the rail and leaned toward the edge and wondered if he’d fallen asleep and, even now, dreamed that burning bright light that made his chest thump and tighten with wonder and fear.

Ah, he thought. So that’s where you’ve been hiding yourself.

Brighter, it glowed—brighter, larger, rushing toward the surface about a cable’s length off from the boats still clustered around the pier and the blocky shape of the canning factory. The surface of the sea rippled, but not like the waves, not as if the tide had returned; something underneath made that glossy sheet churn and froth, the pressure from below pushing against it as that glowing sun—luminous enough to hurt Genji’s eyes, blazing enough to make spots dance against his vision—rose and prepared to erupt from the sea, making it bulge with surface tension on the verge of breaking, breaking, broken.

Except what broke the surface wasn’t a sun; wasn’t a sphere at all.

The water went choppy and strange as leaping fish burst past the surface—a school of thousands of sleek silver-sided things whose bodies glowed with bioluminescent stripes, places where they turned translucent as lantern-walls to let the liquid gold inside them shine through.

Genji had never seen any such fish in his life.

At this distance he could only make out minimal details, but those minimal details were odd. Their fins, trailing and fronded almost like manes, glittering and glowing in thrashing threads. Their eyes, massive and black and deep as a shark’s, catching their own light and reflecting it back in sparks.

And their teeth.

Their curving rows of jagged, lengthy teeth like an anglerfish’s, the beauty of their light framing a horror of killing edges, and that was when he realized…

They were feeding.

He didn’t know what they were feeding on, couldn’t see in the darkness, especially when the glare rising off that school of fish obscured everything in the hazy glow around them.

But he smelled blood, beneath the scent of brine.

Blood on the water.

Then he saw it—another ball of gold rising up from the deeps, several more fathoms out. And another and another, as these schools of fish churned upward to the surface, leaping and twisting as they fed, lighting up the water until they became a strange galaxy of writhing stars dotting against the dark.

But there was something else, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.