By the time they exited the riftbeast’s slick hide, Euryphel was just thankful to breathe real water again versus the inky blood of the squid. While their masks could filter both liquids for oxygen, breathing blood was, to put it lightly, disgusting.

“I think the shift in orientation is permanent,” Euryphel said. “We should head downward and try to reach the new surface.”

The duo swam with Bluebird’s assistance. The prince had no compunctions shining a light into the depths, no longer wary of disturbing an apex predator. That, they’d already accomplished.

As they drew closer to the new surface, they periodically paused to let Bluebird blast apart cavernous layers of rock. The obstructions almost looked like ossified coral reefs, coming in different pastel colors and winding organically for leagues. Some of them were covered in glowing, spidery cracks and even had small anemone-like creatures coating them.

The further they went, the warmer the water became. Euryphel had the sinking suspicion that the sweat-inducing temperatures they’d felt on the other side of the watery divide would pale in comparison to their destination.

Bluebird shattered another barrier of rock. Light shined onto the party from above, glorious violet and green rays filtering down to their recessed position.

“Finally...” Euryphel transmitted.

“Let’s go up,” Ian replied. Bluebird pushed them forward, water jetting out behind it until the duo breached the surface, a plume of water rippling around them.

Ian removed his breathing apparatus first, followed immediately by the prince. They pulled down their hoods and shared an expression of distaste.

“It’s really hot,” Ian murmured. “Not even sure I want to get out of the water.”

“If I were blind I’d almost believe we entered a sauna.”

They suddenly burst into laughter. Euryphel’s head rolled back into the water, blond locks scattering behind him. He peered up and was left speechless: a deep indigo stretched overhead. Unlike on the other side of the rift, there was no ceiling, no stalactites nor gaping rocky maw superimposed over nethereal energy. Instead the entire sky was filled with streaks of dancing, crackling light, violet auroras electrified by green filaments.

“What a day,” Euryphel said. “That was not an experience I’d repeat. If I had to do it over I would’ve gone as far away as possible while you engaged the riftbeast single-handed. I was little more than dead weight.”

Ian rolled his eyes. “At least now we can proclaim that we’ve drunk the blood of riftbeasts. I bet the Eldemari never did anything like that.”

“I can’t in good faith claim such an...accolade.” Euryphel replied wryly, not even bothering to point out that the Eldemari had probably done far worse. “No blood got past our masks, thankfully.”

Ian chuckled. “Hey, if we both agree on it, nobody can say otherwise.”

They floated on the water’s still surface for a few minutes.

“Ian.”

“Yes?”

“Let’s see the soul gem. I know you made one but I have no idea what it looks like. I couldn’t see anything.”

Ian lifted his neck off the water, shooting the prince a regretful smile. “In retrospect, I would’ve given you a soul gem to crush against your eyes so you could see, but there wasn’t time.”

More like neither of us thought to do it, Euryphel sighed.

Ian kicked his feet down, his torso rotating to be perpendicular with the waterline. His hands and arms were visible just beneath the surface. Hovering between his two hands was a dusky egg with streaks of cyan frozen within. It almost looked like dark glass cast into an eye-catching decoration.

The egg rose up above the surface, water dripping down from its sloping contours. The water’s glint revealed that the egg wasn’t smooth like a sphere but was instead a many-faced polyhedral. Above the water, Euryphel could see the streaks of cyan more clearly, noting that they almost looked like blistered rime crossed with liquid lightning.

“It’s beautiful,” Euryphel murmured, turning over onto his stomach and kicking himself over. “I’ve never seen a soul gem like this.”

“Me neither,” Ian murmured. “I’ve made a blue soul gem before by using Bluebird’s energy, but it wasn’t like this...it’s so...dense.”

“How can you tell?” Euryphel asked. He knew that professional appraisers had instruments to judge soul gem quality, but this one seemed too different from the norm for the standard evaluation scales.

Ian ran his tongue over his teeth. “I can feel the energy contained in it; that’s enough. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to find out if the gem has special properties, but if I experiment a bit...”

The gem began to glow softly, rays of icy blue shining out.

Ian’s brow furrowed. The energy increased in intensity, the water closest to the gem beginning to stir.

“It’s getting slightly colder,” Ian muttered, sending the gem up to his forehead. “Huh. I don’t think that’s the full extent of what this soul gem can do, but it gives me an idea. If we’re trying to stay cool up here...I might be able to get something working if we grab tentacles from the leviathan.”

Even though Bluebird had already carved a path through the coral-like rock, they anticipated that going back for the leviathan’s carcass would take the better part of an hour. Ian went alone, leaving Euryphel to wait absently in the water to keep cool. Floating on his back, the prince began to slowly doze off...

—

“But what does it mean?” Euryphel murmured. His mother was at her official desk, papers splayed in front of her.

“It’s a prophecy; you can interpret it as you wish.”

“Then why have me hide this scar? It can’t just be because...” he swallowed. “Because of the obvious.”

“Stop asking questions to which you know the answer.”

Euryphel felt fury bubble up. “This is all that’s left of her, isn’t it?”

His mother looked at him coolly, her knuckles white.

“I need to hear you say it.”

Her lips began to tremble. “You know it pains me to speak of this.”

“It pains me more to have you and Father refuse to talk about it!”

“Yes, it’s your sister, Euryphel,” his mother snapped, expression twisting into a grimace. She continues on, her words like venom. “I’ll confirm what you’ve figured out on your own to satisfy you.”

Euryphel whimpered, stepping back. This wasn’t what he had wanted...he didn’t want Mother to tell him like this. He didn’t want to make her so angry, he just wanted to know.

“You were born together, as was prophesied, but...not as we expected. You were born conjoined, sharing an abdomen; her head was shrunken and undeveloped. She would never grow up properly. To separate you both was to kill one of you, and we chose her to die. And so the second half of the prophecy was fulfilled when you were scarcely a month old.”

Euryphel’s mother laughed bitterly, a tinge of madness in her eyes. She loomed over him, a shadow in the light of the window. Her face began to distort, becoming old and wasted, flesh withering on the bone from emaciation.

“My prince of ascending arrow, princess of ceaseless circle...”

Euryphel fell backward, his heart hammering in his chest, limbs frozen in place.

“M-mother...”

She swept over the floor like a wraith, her skin beginning to blacken and mummify. Her eyes alone remained pristine white orbs with green irises and large, black pupils. As she drew closer, shadows expanded around her like the grasp of the grave. Even the eternal light of the sun room’s primary window–the one arranged right before the well-loved divan–began to fade and suddenly winked out.

His mother began to chant to the beat of her own footfalls. Euryphel found the contrast between her youthful voice and ruined exterior extremely eerie. Everything beneath her knees was swallowed in shadow, giving the impression that she wasn’t walking at all.

“A willow warps alone...”

Euryphel scrambled to his feet, his limbs shaking, tears streaming down his cheeks. He ran over to the side of the room and tripped, catching himself on the length of a navy wall tapestry before continuing forward.

“...And the fallow falls barren...”

Suddenly he knew that she was just behind him, her hand inches from his shoulder. He screamed and–

“Eury!”

The prince looked around, startled, his heart racing. He was in the rift, not the sun room. Ian was in front of him, a splatter of blue blood staining his neck.

“You missed a spot,” Euryphel muttered, taking in a deep breath. “There, on your neck.”

“What the hell was that?” Ian growled, ignoring the prince’s comment. “I came back to find you asleep with your heart pumping a mile per minute.” His face fell, wet hair tracing lines of water down his cheeks, droplets accumulating along his jaw. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing slightly. “I thought something had happened to you.”

Euryphel ducked his head into the water, only his eyes and above visible.

Ian sighed and shook his head. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” the prince transmitted.

“It was another nightmare, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Was it the same one as before?”

“Related.”

“What on earth was it about to scare you like that?”

Euryphel didn’t respond; instead, he swam away. He rolled over and floated on his back, staring up at the violet aurorae. The prince could feel Ian swimming along next to him, the air alighting on the necromancer’s exposed face and torso. They lay floating for a few minutes while Euryphel calmed down.

“Ian...I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay. Well, if you want to focus on something else...I brought back the riftbeast.”

“What parts of it did you bring back?”

“All of it.”

Eury lifted his neck and peered over, trying to determine if Ian was messing with him. “How?”

Ian gave him a shit-eating grin. “Pure mastery of the decemantic arts.”

Euryphel narrowed his eyes before setting his head back into the water. “No way.”

—

Euryphel and Ian swam back to the rift portal. After the orientation flip during the riftbeast battle, it’d proven more challenging than they expected to find the exit: They’d searched for a full day before tracking it down. After the first few journeys, they established a fairly direct path that only took an hour each way.

A smattering of sharks still patrolled the water, but none were in the rift exit’s immediate vicinity. The duo treaded before the portal, Bluebird casting an ambient blue glow over the area.

“I’ll be right back,” Euryphel transmitted, gesturing his head toward the exit.

Ian nodded and waved him off. “See you soon.”

As soon as Euryphel swam through the portal, he entered into a scenario. He pulled out the rugged glossY and connected it to the distributed network, a booster built into the glossY’s construction allowing him to grab hold of whatever faint signal made it into the Jermal Trench’s depths.

He waited for any messages to arrive, his brow furrowed in concentration. No news was good news, but...he knew that Ari would come eventually.

They couldn’t hide forever.

His breath halted as a message arrived from one of his hidden contacts in Sere.

He began a search on the distributed network and immediately found corroborating evidence: Selejo had issued an emergency evacuation warning for the entire province of Pardus, not to mention Pardin.

Ari was really coming.

Euryphel ended the scenario and started one anew, telling himself that he just needed to be sure that there wasn’t some mistake. But the more he looked, the grimmer his expression, his hands gripping the glossY with white knuckles.

He bit his lip, blinked, then stepped back into the rift.

“So?” Ian asked.

Euryphel stared at him blankly. “Let’s go back.”

—

They returned to the leviathan’s carcass, its body floating on the surface of the water like a giant island. Ian had found a way to use the body to produce ice, forming a ring with severed tentacles and creating an icy tent to stave off the heat. Euryphel and Ian had their own “rooms” separated by a tentacle barrier, giving them some sense of privacy appreciated after days of constant company.

Ian stripped off his hood and breathing apparatus and headed for his section, already beginning to shrug the wetsuit off his shoulders.

“Ian, wait.”

The necromancer turned around, a quizzical expression on his face. “Hmm?”

Euryphel knew he needed to tell Ian about Ari’s arrival...but whenever he tried to mention it his mouth refused to move.

This might be the last time I see him, the prince thought, his lips pressed thinly together. These are the final hours before destiny is determined. I might die; he might die...but even if he lives he’s going to disappear, likely never to return again in my lifetime.

Euryphel went into a scenario.

“Nevermind,” the prince said, heading for his own section of the riftbeast. He sat down and stared dejectedly at the astral ceiling, a crushing loneliness settling over him. Tears began to bead up at the corners of his eyes, the only outward sign of his despair.

You need to tell him.

When Euryphel pulled himself out of the scenario, the necromancer was once again standing before him with a questioning look.

“You asked me about my dream a few days ago. Do you still want to know what it was about?”

Ian blinked. “If you feel comfortable sharing.”

You need to tell him about Ari, Euryphel’s thoughts blared. Stop beating around the bush.

The prince stepped up onto the leviathan, a gust of wind drying him off and allowing him to alight onto the riftbeast in a single bound. “What do you know about my mother?”

“Not much, other than that she was a powerful End practitioner.”

The prince nodded. “Her inspiration was ultimately similar to Suran Rindo’s. Where he uses a set of carefully inscribed cards to conduct augury, my Mother needed no such crutch, but her auguries were more cryptic, coming to her in muddled dreams. She prophesied about the birth of her children.”

Ian ran a hand through his hair. “Plural?”

Euryphel hummed his assent. “I had a...twin sister but she died when we were infants. That’s part of what my nightmare was about. The other half was about my mother wasting away after the death of my father, refusing to eat.” The prince shook his head and shuddered.

Ian narrowed his eyes. “You have the worst nightmares.”

The prince chuckled bitterly. “I’m more surprised you have so few.”

Ian’s lips screwed into a scowl. “I usually don’t dream at all. It used to be worse the first year or two of the Infinity Loop, but eventually...it was almost like my mind couldn’t handle any more trauma and forcefully shut off when I slept. I haven’t really had the chance to slow down like I originally planned after escaping, and honestly, I’m worried that if I ascend, all of my experiences will come back to haunt me. It’ll depend in part how I handle Ari’s descent.” Ian rubbed his jaw. “I know the plan is to kite her to Cunabulus, but I’m worried about the collateral damage...”

You need to tell him!

“Ian...Ari’s coming.”

“Of course, and I know we need to destroy the arrays around the Cuna to have any chance of victory–”

The prince grimaced and averted his eyes, his fists clenched at his sides. “No, Ian. She’s coming tomorrow.”

“She–oh.”

“Yeah.”

Ian shifted his weight onto his left leg and rubbed his hands over his face, fingers shuttering his features.

“Eury...I don’t think I’m ready.”

The prince walked over to Ian’s side and placed a hand on his shoulder, gripping it firmly. “You’re ready, Ian. I’ve seen you practice alone and with me day after day. You’re the most powerful practitioner I’ve ever met.”

Euryphel gently peeled back Ian’s hands, revealing an ashen, anxious facade.

“I believe in you.”

The necromancer leaned his head forward into Euryphel’s shoulder and stayed there for a minute. Finally he spoke, his words whispered into the prince’s wetsuit: “It’ll have to be enough.”