The Rifts of Psyche by Kyle West

Author:Kyle West [West, Kyle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ragnarok Press

28

When he hit the cold water, the shock was unreal. He reached for his Focus to calm his nerves as he plunged deeper into the darkness. This was not the night on Volsung he had almost died. Here, the water was still. There were no waves. The surface was above, just a few meters away.

He clawed upward and took a deep intake of breath.

The others were already swimming, so Lucian joined them. They swam for a good fifteen minutes, enough time for the cold to settle into Lucian’s bones. He saw Fergus’s sphere shining ahead, the only light in this darkness. At any moment, he expected the Sorceress-Queen’s soldiers to be right behind them. But every time he looked over his shoulder, there was only darkness.

Lucian was the last to pull himself onto the shoreline. The sand gleamed white, soft beneath his boots with shiny crystals mixed within.

“I’ll stream us a fire,” Cleon said.

“Not yet,” Fergus said. “Let’s find a better spot.”

Serah was jumping up and down to generate body heat. “There must be some tunnel to follow here.”

“I thought you said you saw a way out,” Cleon said.

“This is it.”

They followed her up the shoreline, and Fergus increased the intensity of his sphere, revealing stalactites, stalagmites, and an endless labyrinth of rock formations.

“Rotting hell. We’ll get lost in there for days,” Cleon said.

“We’re deep in it now,” Fergus said. “The only way out is through.”

“It’s the perfect place for them to get lost in, too,” Lucian said. “We have food for weeks. There may even be good fishing in this lake, for all we know.”

“Forgot my rod,” Cleon said.

“Don’t need a rod,” Lucian said. “We’re mages, remember? A good shock and we’ll eat like kings for weeks.”

“Pipe down,” Fergus said. “Sound carries far here, and it’s not just people we have to be wary of.”

There was silence for a moment, but only for a moment.

“I’ll eat my boots if we ever find this mythical Slaves’ Run,” Cleon said.

“It’s not mythical,” Serah said. “I’ve seen it before.” She looked back toward the shore. “This lake must be the same one we saw earlier. Just a different spot.”

“Is this the Moon Sea?” Lucian asked.

She shook her head. “We haven’t gone far enough underground to reach that. If we were there, you’d know it.” She peered into the darkness. “Let’s get farther into these rocks, then we can see about a fire to warm up.”

Shivering, they followed Serah deeper beneath the surface of Psyche.

They crunched over rock formations that had not been disturbed in eons. They passed bony skeletons of what appeared to be ancient, alien fish. Or more like alien monsters. Some were up to ten meters long. They even walked through one of them, tail to mouth. The lake they had swum in was already deep, but clearly, it had been deeper long ago. The thought that Lucian had been swimming in that dark water was enough to give him chills. These things, or at least their evolutionary descendants, likely lurked the dark, fathomless deeps.

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