For a long time, Tavras swam with them in tow within the bubble. The great expanse that was Leviathan continued at their side like a boundless wall. Occasionally, they passed by new, red swaths of copepods.

Val’s eyes flitted to and fro, looking between Arius, Tavras, and Leviathan. The latter was the only one that was talkative in its snores. She decided that it would be easiest to start conversation with Tavras, and hopefully Arius would feel comfortable joining in.

“How big is Leviathan?” Val asked.

“Is that your way of asking me, ‘are we there yet?’ huh?”

“No,” she said sheepishly, but Val desperately wanted to know that. Her hand tightened around Arius’s, just now realizing that she had never pulled her hand away from him when Tavras had arrived. If it would take a while for them to make it back to the surface world, then Val wanted to request that they stop to heal Arius.

Instead, Tavras gave no indication of time in answering her question. “Well, proportionally speaking, Leviathan is about the equivalent of twice the size as a blue whale on our world.”

“It’s that small?” Considering the size of sea serpents, serpent snapping turtles, amongst other sea monsters like Charybdis and the kraken, that did not make Leviathan as big as she had thought. Gaping in disbelief, she tried to assess its size.

They had crossed a fin, suspended out into the water like a vast plateau.

“Does Leviathan get smaller when it crosses onto our plane?”

“No. Everything here is just bigger,” Tavras replied. “Do you two realize what copepods are?”

“Yeah,” Arius butt in, “they’re fucking terrible. You healed that thing, would you mind healing my hand?”

Spinning around in the water, Tavras swam backwards so that he could shoot daggers at Arius. “When you ask me like that, yeah, I do mind. Did no one teach you any manners?”

“I’ll say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ after you bring Urru back to life.” Arius rolled his eyes and said no more.

“Um,” Val looked to Arius who was livid compared to when they had been fighting the copepods.

He really hated Tavras so extensively, he would rather keep his hand in its demolished state. It was not like Arius was in pain, she reminded herself.

“Tavras, let me ask on Arius’s behalf. Please heal his hand.”

“I’ll do it when I feel like it or whenever Arius feels like politely asking me himself.”

With that, their conversation had dried up to a stifling silence.

“You were talking about copepods,” Val prodded, anything to fill the void.

“Yeah.” Tavras’s mood lightened at once with the reminder. “Copepods are zooplankton, the most prominent and important herbivore in all bodies of water! Some aren’t herbivores but actually parasitic like the Cradle copepods here, considering how there’s no sunlight for phytoplankton in Leviathan’s Cradle.”

When it came marine life, apparently Tavras liked modern science because he kept telling them more and more fun facts about copepods. Either that, or perhaps Tavras had the years to study these things long before marine biologists had the resource capacity.

“Why did you encourage him?” Arius whispered in her ear. He continued to sulk, bored by the topic of conversation and disenchanted by Tavras’s presence.

She tried to assuage his ill feelings by tracing her thumb along the back of his hand, occasionally massaging his fingers within her own. Ultimately, it seemed to help coax Arius into joining the conversation.

“Zooplankton are microscopic, right?” he asked. “Are you telling me we nearly got killed by some invisible creatures, blown way out of proportion?”

“They’re not microscopic,” Tavras cheered. “They’re only that big.” His thumb and forefinger pinched together in demonstration of the size.

Arius leaned forward and squinted to examine his hand. “I swear. You have no space between your fingers.”

Unable to see the indicated size neither, Val was afraid she had to agree with him there.

Tavras just laughed and started to quote their actual size, how much food they ate in relation to their body mass—more than anybody wanted to know.

Eventually even he tired of talking, and Val lost the heart to ask any more questions. It took them what must have been an hour of swimming to reach the spot in Leviathan’s chest where it beheld a glowing core.

Immense in size as Leviathan, the core rose like an arch overheard and a ring far below. The core beheld the beauty of a pearly bauble in contrast to the dull and lumpy flesh.

Tavras placed his palm to the center of the core and closed his eyes. His lips moved in formation of words in the Water Tongue, what looked to be an incantation.

The snores hitched and ceased. Suddenly, Leviathan’s Cradle became truly silent for the first time. The absence of its snores made the Cradle feel eerie—wrong, in a way.

“You’re not waking Leviathan, are you?” Val gasped.

“Shh. I’m only stirring it enough to ask it something.” From there, Tavras switched languages and continued to speak in the soothing, flowing syllables of the Water Tongue. In contrast to his initial greeting, he sounded more conversational this time.

Booming in its reply, Leviathan’s words seemed to come from everywhere at once. Its voice echoed off every drop of water in this monumental aquarium. Unlike Tavras whose speech had lingering traces of human syllables, Leviathan truly sounded like the babble of a creek and the roar of a waterfall.

Tavras said a final, short goodbye to Leviathan and turned back to them. “Okay! Leviathan is ready to teleport us out. We have to travel one at a time. I’ll come back for Arius.”

“I’m sure you will,” he mused.

“No!” Val cried, equally scared that Arius’s paranoia about Tavras might ring true. “We have to travel together.”

“Impossible,” Tavras said. “Charybdis can suck down many, but Leviathan can only teleport one entity at a time. That’s the only reason we don’t have Cradle copepods taking over our oceans.”

For the first time since they had reunited in the bubble, Val relinquished Arius’s hand in favor of fidgeting with her own. “Take Arius out first then. I can stay here—"

“Did you forget?” Arius snapped. “I’m literally the one keeping you alive right now. If I go first, you die.”

“Right,” she mumbled. Looking back to Tavras, she reiterated, “You really can’t take us both out together?”

“No.” Tavras rolled his eyes. “Do you even remember our whole plan? We were going to isolate Arius in Leviathan’s Cradle so that I could make sure that we understand each other.”

“There’s been a change in plans,” Val said and cast the sweetest look to Arius that she could. “Will you be all right if I go first?”

“Go,” Arius said with a wave of his hand. “If Tavras can’t—or won’t—take us all together, then there’s nothing we can do about that.”

A defeated sigh puffed from her lips. “All right. I’m ready.”

Tavras used Bend Water to remove Val from the bubble. Thereafter, he refilled the reserve of fresh oxygen so that Arius could stay on his own for a while. His hands reached out to her forearms gently, and Val accepted Tavras in the same way with a tentative look back to Arius.

The Ravager had diverted his gaze completely, refusing to see her anywhere near Tavras.

“When we get back to the mortal plane,” Tavras announced, “the taint of Leviathan’s waters will become toxic and send your body into arrest. I will go first so that I will be ready to purify you, Val. Then I’ll come back to get you, Arius. Count up to one hundred for me, would you?”

“Okay,” she said shakily. This means of teleportation across worlds sounded a lot more intense than what Arius could do through the fire.

Tavras released Val to let her tread on her own. His back turned on them, and he placed a hand to the giant pearly ornament, now aglow in its iridescent light.

A blinding flash left Val dazzled by the specks in her vision.

Where Tavras had once been, he had vanished.

Val started to count in her head. One, two, three….

Then Arius’s voice lifted to speak to her. “Thanks for trying to negotiate on my behalf, at any rate. This was perhaps the stupidest misadventure that I’ve ever had in my life.”

Her heart lurched at how somber his voice sounded. Why did he sound like he was giving a final farewell?

“But I don’t regret coming down here with you.” His steady and peaceful brown eyes showed how he felt true to his words. “I won’t say that I had fun, but I will say that this was definitely a misadventure.” Arius nodded along with a partial smirk returning to his face.

Val thought that she was somewhere at twenty now. It had become harder to count while she listened to him. Being underwater as she was, she could not even tell Arius to shut up and stop being so dramatic.

In an effort to communicate that much, she shook her head fiercely.

“What?” Arius asked. “Was that a little too sappy for you?”

Val nodded up and down just as extensively. His formal farewell would sound stupid when they saw each other again in five minutes. She would make sure of that much.

“It’s just in case,” he told her. “You know that I don’t trust Tavras.”

Val would not let him get hurt. Now, she only wished that she could reassure him of that yet again. With that intent which Arius should be able to feel, she gave him a thumbs up once again.

Arius returned her gesture with a snarky grin.

Her gut told her this would become an inside joke between them—cheesy, awkward thumbs up from the time that they could not speak in Leviathan’s Cradle.

Val ended up counting to one hundred, so she gave Arius a small wave and turned to Leviathan’s core. It was her turn to touch her palm and initiate travel back to the world in which she belonged.