The rift was a black, watery expanse, at first glance similar to the fathoms of the Jermal Trench.

“What...are these?” Ian wondered, his eyes widening. Hammerhead sharks drifted all around them. The rift variant sported tentacles spanning from the skull to the base of the tail, splitting in two and draping behind like stringy exhaust.

Euryphel darted next to Ian and grasped onto his shoulders. “Y’jeni, I’m useless in the water like this.”

“You can use Regret here, right?” Ian asked.

“Yes. I couldn’t use it at the rift entrance to look inside; likewise, if I try to leave the rift in a scenario, it snaps back to the present. That’s beside the point, though–I hate being in the water with a pack of sharks.”

“I can just kill them if they come close,” Ian replied. “I don’t see the issue.”

“Ian...I’m literally blind unless I flash a light. When I do so in scenarios, the sharks all turn toward us with serrated anglerfish fangs. It’s almost as terrifying as my sleep schedule.”

Ian rolled his eyes and kicked forward. “I’ll protect you. Can you tell what way is up or down?”

“The glossY doesn’t have a valid depth reading anymore,” Euryphel replied. “It does have a pressure reading, however. If we assume that less pressure means that we’re ascending, we can move against that gradient.”

“I think that’s probably the best plan,” he replied. The two of them stacked back to back, Bluebird positioning itself behind Euryphel’s shoulders and jetting them forward. As they ascended through the water, they began to see progressively more natural light, though the density of sharks increased.

“It was almost better not to see them,” Euryphel muttered, burying his face into Ian’s shoulder.

“I didn’t realize you had a thing against sharks.” To be fair, every few feet they passed through at least one pair of drapey tentacles.

“That one almost bit your hand off,” Euryphel protested.

Ian raised an eyebrow and gripped his latest kill by the gills. It had beady, bug-like eyes and teeth like overlapping knives, but the tentacles...they made the shark look like it had a mop of stringy hair flowing down its back.

“Look, just pretend that it’s the Eldemari,” Ian suggested. “Even the hair is the right color.” The gray sharks’ tentacles came in weird hues of violet and red; this one sported tentacles tinted reddish brown.

“...I hate you, sometimes,” Euryphel replied. “Please stop holding the dead shark.”

Ian released his grip and let the shark drift downward into the murk along with the others he’d culled. Ian had originally worried that all the dead sharks would create some kind of feeding frenzy, but according to Euryphel, they were in the clear as long as there wasn’t any blood.

“We’re going to reach the surface soon,” Euryphel remarked.

“See any land?” Ian asked.

“No...” Euryphel replied. “But at least I’ll have open air.”

They continued swimming upward until they broke the surface. The water was still, their breach sending out ripples.

Ian shook the water from his face, clearing up his vision. He turned toward Euryphel and followed the prince’s gaze up to the ceiling.

Ian blinked his eyes. “Wow.”

“Didn’t want to spoil it for you,” Euryphel said.

The ceiling looked as though someone had carved a gash into the roof of a cavern, rending the rock in two craggy halves. Beyond was a massive bolt of green lightning surrounded by a slowly-shifting pink aurora. In the far distance stretched a starless, dark-violet expanse.

“The air seems safe as far as I can tell–it’s breathable, and I haven’t dropped dead in sixty seconds.” The prince lifted himself into the air and removed his breathing apparatus, pulling back his hood.

Ian hadn’t even thought about whether the air would be safe to breathe. “Thanks for keeping a lookout,” Ian replied. “Euryphel the Ever-Vigilant.”

Ian joined him, gently floating out of the water and into Euryphel’s drying wind. He took off his breathing apparatus and noted that the air tasted fresh, as though they were outside rather than in a closed space like a cave.

“Are all rifts like this?” Ian wondered.

The prince shook out his hair. “They’re all different, though I’ve seen recordings of ones with similar nethereal energy lines.”

Ian made a face. “Nethereal?”

“You see how the energy is split? There’s the green and purple interposed.”

“Right.”

“If the energy were blue streaking through white auroras, it’d be ethereal class. Nethereal rifts contain riftbeasts with properties more inclined toward Dark, Death, Cloud, Moon, End, and Remorse affinities; ethereal rifts incline toward the others. By the lack of light aside from the exposed energy lines themselves, this rift seems Dark aspected.”

“What about Moon?” Ian suggested. “So far there’s only water as far as the eye can see.”

The prince rubbed his jaw. “That’s not a crazy leap in judgment,” the prince replied. “Dark and Moon: It’s unlikely for a rift to have more than one alignment, let alone two, so that’s probably it. I’d count ourselves lucky: Some of the other nethereal aspects are a pain to deal with.”

Ian frowned. “You know, if I’d had more notice I would’ve actually been able to look more into rifts.”

Euryphel snorted. “Access to rifts was the first prize of the Fassari Summit...and you didn’t bother to learn about them?”

“Eury, as far as I was concerned, rifts weren’t going to help me defeat Ari and ascend. I’m not an idiot, though–I know the basics. I’ve been collecting the Death energy of the sharks I killed.”

Euryphel shook his head. “While their gems will fetch a high price, those small fry aren’t going to produce soul gems with unique properties.”

“Those sharks were almost as big as you or I,” Ian rebutted. “How much bigger are we talking?”

The prince shrugged. “Big.”

“...Let’s just keep going for now. Sounds like you’ll know it when you see it.”

They proceeded further for several minutes until Euryphel stopped them.

“There’s something ahead,” he whispered. “It’s enormous and it’s mostly submerged in the water save for a few...appendages.”

“How big?”

Euryphel’s mouth flattened into a line. “Big.”

“Infinity Loop leviathan big?”

“No, but big enough that it’d help to gain some altitude.” Euryphel pivoted upward on a wave of wind. Ian followed behind; soon they were almost touching the stalactites suspended from the cavern roof.

When the riftbeast came into their vision, Ian almost thought they’d chanced upon a nest of snakes. Part of the riftbeast lay above the water, revealing dark tentacles undulating over one another in the ambient nethereal light.

Ian glanced at the prince. “Is this what I think it is?”

Euryphel sighed. “Looks like the hair of shark mommy.”

Ian frowned. “At least it can’t reach us from up here, right?” As far as he knew, the shark tentacles weren’t fit for grasping: They were more like neurotoxin-laced entangling wire. They almost looked like someone had strapped jellyfish onto the sharks as hats.

Euryphel cocked his head, his eyes narrowing. “It definitely can. In fact, it can even fly.”

What kind of scenarios is he running? Ian wondered, blanching. “It can!?”

“Kidding,” the prince said, chuckling. “As long as we stay in the air we’ll be fine, but the riftbeast is too big for you to simply dominate. We should keep going for now and possibly come back to harvest it.”

After an hour of flying, they weren’t able to find a single stretch of dry land, nor were they able to find an end to the rift. They found a few more “big” riftbeasts, but all were aquatic and they had no reason to engage now rather than later.

Eventually they set up makeshift hammocks between stalactites to sleep in. They decided to rely on Bluebird to wake them if anything alarming happened, both of them too tired to bother taking a watch after the events of the day.

—

Ian woke up to see Euryphel hanging in the hammock, his eyes staring aimlessly off into the darkness.

“Good morning,” Ian said, yawning. He had sweat through his shirt, the heat of the rift having increased since he fell asleep. The humidity made the moderate heat sticky and uncomfortable.

“There’s no morning in a rift,” Euryphel quipped. His expression remained impassive.

“We didn’t have any time to catch up yesterday,” Ian said. They’d made some small talk as they looked for the boundaries of the rift, but had been too exhausted for their typical banter.

Euryphel shifted in the hammock, turning away. “I think I just need time to wallow.”

“That sounds like exactly what you don’t need,” Ian retorted. “We should eat something. I still have an entire stockpile of food in my void storage.”

“Ian...sometimes I just need a moment. I can carve out time for myself in scenarios, but I don’t want more time. I don’t need it. In fact, I’d rather time accelerate. So just...just let me think.”

Ian recoiled. “Sorry.”

Euryphel sighed. “Don’t be sorry. I’m just...processing.”

Ian constructed a platform of bone next to their hammocks and set up a small heating plate. Despite Euryphel’s desire to be left alone, the prince eventually joined the decemancer for breakfast. Ian gave him space while they ate and the duo separated afterward, Ian working on consolidating his experiences from the past day while Euryphel...

Ian wasn’t sure what Euryphel was doing staring out onto the still water, but he didn’t want to bother him.

Honestly, it’s easier to leave and be let alone, Ian thought. When he really started to focus on necromancy, he lost track of time. Soolemar was good at realizing when he needed to be left alone to ruminate for a few hours, where another practitioner might lack his foresight.

After a few hours, it was finally time for them to take another meal break.

“Hi,” Euryphel said, blowing a strand of hair from his eyes as he sat down on a bone stool.

“Hi,” Ian replied. What else should I say?

“I’m feeling more ready to talk,” Euryphel said, raising an eyebrow. “You know, in case you were going to ask.”

Ian felt his ears grow slightly red at Euryphel’s teasing. “I have a feeling you have a lot to think about.”

The prince nodded, his hands clasped between his knees. “I’m not sure where to begin, honestly.”

“How did you make the decision to abdicate?” Ian murmured, his eyes flitting to a pot of soup on the hot plate.

“I was briefly inspired by the moment,” Euryphel replied, shrugging. “I don’t regret it. It’s the right choice, the only way to win...but it was akin to jumping into a metaphorical Jermal Trench. I couldn’t see the bottom.”

“How did the others react?”

Euryphel snorted. “They didn’t seem to care much, in retrospect. Maybe Shivin’i and Diana showed concern, but Ko’la and Ezenti were distant as ever. Ezenti even suggested that I give up and become the Eldemari’s youthful paramour. I just about wanted to murder him.”

“Did you? In a scenario?”

Euryphel groaned. “No.”

Ian nodded: He thought he understood what Euryphel was dealing with. As soon as Ian realized that he was really going to ascend, he stopped thinking about the distant future, the vast canvas of possibility and risk overwhelming. Before two months ago, Euryphel probably had the majority of his life planned out, and now...he had nothing but a wager. And unless Ian was missing critical information, there was little at this point that Euryphel could do to shape his own destiny. He could assist Ian, but at the end of the day...Ian was the one who would determine the ultimate outcome.

He’s probably feeling lost and uncertain, Ian thought. Unfortunately, I feel like there’s little I can do to help other than work as hard as I can to prepare.

“Eury, I had a crazy idea,” Ian said, trying to come up with something for the prince to do. “Remember the leviathan in the Infinity Loop?”

Euryphel deadpanned. “No idea what you’re referring to.”

Ian rolled his eyes. “Funny. Seriously, though, remember how the cultists weaponized it with their strange ritual?”

Euryphel narrowed his eyes. “I had some Beginning practitioners look into the footage; what the cultists used wasn’t even a real language, nor was the ritual they used in any records. We concluded that the terrorists–as well as their occultism–must have been invented by the loop creators, or somehow devised by the simulation itself.”

Way to take the wind out of my sails. “Anyway, I was thinking...wouldn’t it be incredible if we found a way to control riftbeasts? If we could bring a fleet of them to Selejo it’d be a help.”

“A help with what, exactly?”

Ian shook his head: Euryphel wasn’t seeing his vision. “Look. I need to get from here to Pardin to confront Ari, right? As soon as we get out of the Jermal Trench people are going to be able to find us. What better way to protect ourselves as we travel across the ocean and Ramsay Channel than with an army of mutant hammerhead sharks?”

Euryphel nearly spit out a mouthful of water, wiping his mouth. “Y’jeni, what?”

“It would be legendary.” Ian knew his plan was pretty crazy, but it was fun to think about.

“Ian, I think you’re too tired to think properly. Besides, I already have a plan.”

“...More than just waiting for Ari to go hammer-happy on Selejo?”

The prince nodded, shifting his glass of water in his hands. “I’ve had all day to think about strategies.”

Oh. “So...what were you thinking?”

The prince smiled icily and brought out the oversized, blocky glossY, forming a projection in the air before them. “You didn’t see me working on this at all, did you?”

“I was a bit...occupied,” Ian admitted.

“I figured. I don’t think what I’ve come up with is perfect–it’s missing an army of rift sharks, for one–but it’s a start.”

Ian inspected the complex three-dimensional projection of Selejo’s topography. Across its surface stretched curving lines and all manner of microscopic text labels.

Euryphel hovered a finger over one such label and read it out loud: “The most direct path: Ian and Eury enter Cunabulus without any interference. Ari comes to Cunabulus in search of Ian. The two battle, leveling the Cuna and destroying the Eldemari’s End-amplifying arrays. Ian wins and ascends.”

“But there’s going to be interference,” Ian observed, raising an eyebrow.

The prince nodded. “Exactly. That’s what all the other plans are for.”

Ian had the feeling that it was going to be a long night.