Edge Hunter 3 by Dante King

Author:Dante King [King, Dante]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Gray hurtled down, down, into the gullet of the tunnel, water sloshing past him at incredible speed. Everything was orange, yellow, red, like fire—but wet, so wet it would have drowned him had Gray not had the magic he did.

He didn’t know what was happening. One moment, he was trying to unlock the secret of his birth, standing in the safe house of the Twin Goddesses (even if they weren’t exactly twins)... and the next, a great slimy tentacle had encircled him and tugged him down, down into the core of Ascentus. If that’s where he was even going.... Gray knew next to nothing about the domain of the gods.

He could have fought the thing wrapped around his midsection, but Gray held back. Since he could essentially breathe underwater using Reversion, he was not currently in harm’s way. He didn’t think this was Vescor, either. Currently, the only thing Gray had to fear was the God of Plenty himself, and Vescor was supposedly hiding away near the Well of Time, waiting for Gray to come to him.

Besides, the Twins had said that Meritza the Goddess of Shipwrecks dwelled here. The tentacle was oceanic in nature.

It must be her.

The tunnel ended, and Gray found himself in her lair.

The water was suffused with the colors of fire, but it remained only warm. The tentacle pulled Gray into a craggy and cramped underwater cavern, but as it dragged him through the silent undersea world, it deftly avoided the sharp black rocks that filled the space like burnt-out trees.

Gray couldn’t see very far ahead despite the diffuse light. He didn’t have much time to look around, though, before the tentacle tensed, its muscles bunching, and flung him in a direction he guessed was up.

Gray broke the water’s surface with a shout. He soared a good ten feet before landing on rough igneous rock, scraping his hands and knees across the black stone. After Reverting his injuries, he looked up to find a hulking wet mass of a creature, bright orange and with a beak like a bird’s, which was large enough to consume him in a single bite. Tentacles flailed around the beak, but they made no move to grab or attack him.

After spitting out a bit of water, Gray said, “Hello, Meritza.”

The goddess watched him with one massive eye, perched to one side of the beak. She was similar to an octopus or a squid in design—and design was the word for it. All gods decided their own shapes, and once set, they could not be changed.

Most gods chose to become human, but not this one. Meritza was once famed for lying in wait in the Zylayan ocean, only ever leaving her hiding places to attack unsuspecting ships. Some tales called her a god, others a simple sea monster.

“HELLO, HEIR OF TIME,” the beak said.

It was a garbled voice, the words chopped up by the great beak. Gray kept an eye on the sharp edges of that mouth as he looked around. The orange light, he could now see, was coming from molten rock.

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