As Arius had said, Val looked around. Their surroundings were not wonderful. Therefore, their chances of dying must also be really low. “So, you’re saying that we are not going to die?”

In response, Arius scowled at her.

“Actually, why does that make you freak out all of a sudden?”

“Have you not wondered why Tavras hasn’t shown up already? We’ve been down here, talking for a long time. The Sea Itself isn’t going to come because he wants us both dead.”

“No,” she moaned. Unlike Arius, her hate did not blind her when it came to Tavras. Her love did, and now a seed of doubt made her question the faith that she had put in him.

In the miserable, cold, dark sphere of water that was Leviathan’s Cradle, Val refused to see how they would end up trapped here. “But that can’t be right. We’re soulmates, and that means we can’t die until we’ve actually, like, fallen in love or something.”

Arius stared at her with glazed over eyes. “This could totally be enough for our soulmate connection, you do realize that, right?”

“How?” As things stood between them, Val could not see how this could qualify as love.

“What would be more romantic than dying together in Leviathan’s Cradle?” he mused.

“That would just be tragic.” Also, it would be kind of pathetic for their love to culminate in this.

“Yeah, it would, but love is sometimes tragic.”

“This isn’t love though.”

“Is it not?” Arius asked with a raised brow. “If love is characterized by the propensity to do stupid things, well then, I think we absolutely take the cake on that one. Look at where we are!” His voice dropped down quieter to say, “I don’t see how I can get us out of here.”

She joined him in swiveling her head around to assess the resources available to him. They had nothing but endless, dark waters and Leviathan below them.

“This isn’t love,” Val repeated, more resolute.

“Val,” he said, slapping one hand to his face, “it literally doesn’t matter whether you think it is or not. Only the Weaver’s opinion matters—another extremely powerful being that hates me. This does not even surprise me at all, if this is the sort of ‘love’ that the Weaver had in store for me!”

Destiny was not impartial. Some people absolutely received the Weaver’s favor with better fortunes than they deserved, and others drew the Weaver’s ire. If hated by fate, Arius would doom Val just the same as her soulmate.

“Seriously, this would be the lamest thing ever if the Weaver tried passing this off as love.” Val huffed and folded her arms over her chest.

“There’s probably a low bar for first love.”

“It would need to go both ways,” she objected.

Arius diverted his gaze and fell silent. His cheeks tinged pink with what little blush he could manage in the freezing pocket of air. That was her first hint that Arius the Ravager had never fallen in love throughout the hundred-some years of his life.

Her voice became more tender as she enwrapped her arms around him more securely, trying to offer him more reassurance. “Arius, I still think you’re overreacting. Tavras is going to save us—”

“If Tavras isn’t going to save us though, we’re going to die here. I’m not going to let us die here,” Arius announced for quite the oxymoron. “Believe me: I will be happy for the first time in my life, seeing Tavras if he comes.” Arius held her tighter to his chest in return and whispered, “Until then, let’s prepare for the worst-case scenario. I don’t know how long I can keep us alive like this, so we have no time to waste.”

More dire in his intonation, Arius said, “I need you to help me think, or at the very least, stop interrupting me so that I can think.”

“Okay,” she said, shrinking back.

“Fuck, don’t move,” he said all of a sudden. His arms seized around her, as did every other muscle in his body tighten.

Her heart started to beat faster in her chest, especially given how she could feel Arius’s heart pounding away from the way that he held her. “What is it?” Her words came out smooshed, one cheek shoved up against his body.

“I think that was a fish.”

If a fish existed other than Leviathan in its Cradle, Val and Arius were positively doomed. She could not imagine another creature living in this grim plane that could offer any hope of affability.

While they stayed entirely frozen, Val flitted her eyes to see what little she could over his shoulder.

The fish had swum out of Arius’s view, behind his back. Its new location allowed Val to catch a glimpse of the aquatic creature.

A giant fish with a cylindrical body rushed in its movement. Its length spanned somewhere between the height of Val and Arius—larger than her but smaller than him. It surpassed them both in terms of its swimming velocity.

Water, bubbles, and dark vapor rushed across its exoskeleton at the speed of a car on the freeway. It would make a dash, glide to a stop, and then launch itself at full speed all over again. Its massive antenna flowed in its movement, reaching longer than the narrow abdomen that finalized the creature like a tail.

Close to the head portion of its thorax, Val thought that she noticed some crab-like limbs. The reddish tinge of the otherwise translucent creature reminded her of a lobster.

Her heart skipped a beat, as she swore this was the scale that she had seen detach from Leviathan. That thing had not been a scale at all, but another animal.

“Do you have eyes on it?” Arius whispered in her ear, hardly even audible to her much less the fish.

“Yes.” She kept her eyes trained on its darting, shadowy form through the haze. “What do we do?”

“Stay put and wait for it to pass. I don’t want to fight the denizens here if I can help it.”

When the monstrous arthropod swam far away from them, her heart lifted with hope. Val sunk with equal dejection when it dashed back towards them in its erratic movements.

“Keep your voice low,” Arius hissed, “but analyze it for me. Any place look like a vulnerability?”

“It looks like a crustacean of sorts,” Val began. “Its shell is translucent. You can see some of its organs but it looks… simple. I don’t know if it would be worth trying to bust through its exoskeleton—looks like armor.”

“Thanks, but I need to know where to hit not where to avoid. Where are the chinks in the shell?”

“Um, there’s exposed joints on its legs, but those are tiny and curled up by its head. I don’t even see any indication of a neck on the thing. If you could compromise its tail, that could slow its movement substantially.”

Arius sighed so that his breath filled her ear. “It sounds like that’s what I’m going for if it comes down to that. Thanks, Val.”

The two of them fell completely silent, while Val watched and waited to alert Arius if it should attack him from behind.

“It has a singular eye,” Val added on for her final observation about the creature. “That could be even better to take out than the tail.”

It was that blackened spot, indiscernible in what it gazed upon, that Val held in her own vision for too long. Silently, the crustacean rushed straight for them at full speed.