End of the First Day…

The current that grabbed them as the black waters closed around Adin’s sightline was feistier than the last, whipping him around like an angry cook’s dishrag for several minutes before calming to a more helpful, tolerable slipstream. The deep open ocean was dark and frigid, swallowing everything but a stale, sulfur smell. It felt like being sucked into a whirlpool and drowning in it before Kai provided little glowing lights from vials in the pouch he always kept at his waist.

It wasn’t wasted on Adin that despite Aya’s...irateness, she still found Kai’s lights absolutely magical, reaching out to touch them when she thought neither of them were looking.

Adin couldn’t deny it. Aya wasn’t acting like herself—but not so different as to be cursed. Right?

Of course she’d be irate, he reasoned. She’s been kidnapped on the eve of her engagement. This week is supposed to be all balls and fancy lunches and swims through the garden talking about her illustrious royal future, not…not tumbling down a slipstream into an empty trench—or at least, he prayed to Poseidon it was empty.

The stinging current made him miss his helmet and pauldrons, but he didn’t regret leaving them behind. If anyone came searching, then his missing armor would mark where the invisible current began. It was only the slightest chance, but it was possible that the clues he left behind would be found.

Please follow us, he hoped silently. If I could have gotten her away from him on my own, I would have!

At the tentacle statue, he’d left another piece of his uniform—nothing too noticeable, in case Kai had gotten suspicious—but the bit of sash he’d fastened at its base pointed the way they’d gone.

Kai’s lights flickered like fireflies around Adin’s head, occasionally bonking into each other. Once, one of them even knocked into his cheek, telling him that the little baubles were solid, like glowing glass marbles. Tail bound, and mouth gagged by Kai’s disturbing limbs, she’d made a game of trying to catch them, giving Kai dirty looks whenever he kept them out of her reach. While it was a comfort to be able to see a few feet down the tunnel as they traveled, Adin didn’t see nearly the appeal in the eerie glow that Aya did.

It should have made Adin happy to see that Aya was finally distancing herself from the creepy cecaelian. Instead, it rankled his scales. At her angriest, Aya had never looked at Kai like that. He tried to lose himself in that thought as the hours in the roiling current ticked by, but there was one poisonous vine of doubt that kept creeping in.

If he could be happy for Aya; for the change she wanted—for the change that he disliked TOO, then why couldn’t Kai? Wasn’t Kai supposed to be the better merman between them?

It’s wrong! Something inside him screamed, every time a flash of Aya, bound and gagged by Kai’s creepy appendages, passed through his line of vision. So wrong!

After what felt like half the day, the current at last spat them out on another deep, dark sandy bank at the trench’s bottom, except that this time, the tentacle statue was directly at the end of the water’s force.

“Oof!” he grunted, when his speed carried him right into the stone. His breastplate thumped into a detailed carving of one of the suckers on its underside with an uncomfortable smacking sound.

Kai and Aya, of course, did no such thing. Kai cushioned their landing before the princess could get too close to the stone, taking most of the impact himself.

“Showoff,” Adin grumbled churlishly.

The water here wasn’t any lighter here than the last tentacle, but at least it wasn’t any darker. The statue was as big around as a palace turret, and several times as high.

Considering how much the tunnels had curved and turned, there was no telling which way they’d actually gone. His heart sank when he at least had the presence of mind to realize that if they’d been traveling that quickly for so many hours, they'd have been carried several leagues away from Atlantis.

“No wonder no one knows where this market really is,” he huffed, examining the empty waters around them, gray and shimmering in all directions. “Who would want to find it?”

Ignoring him, Kai swam up the length of the statue, already searching. Adin made a pretense of helping, without actually paying attention to the task. As far as he was concerned, Kai could take as long as he needed, if it meant there was more of a chance that they could be found.

Then near the silt floor, a movement swished in the shadows in the corner of Adin’s periphery, and this time, he didn’t have the churning current around him to be able to tell himself it was just a trick of the light.

Maybe someone found my clue? he hoped, though his inner fears whispered a different thought: had something followed them?

Adin scanned the shadows, visibility starkly limited around the monolith. Nothing moved or approached them, but he could have sworn…

“It’s past midday,” said Kai, the sound in the emptiness making him jump. “We should rest. We have six more of these to go once night falls.” At that, he gave a weary glance Aya’s direction.

“What, you mean sleep?” Adin blurted, tail swishing in agitation. “Sleep here?”

“Why not?” Kai answered wearily. “The sand’s soft enough.”

“But…” Adin paused, debating whether or not to tell Kai what he’d seen, but eventually decided against it.

If his contingent was coming, then the last thing he wanted was to put Kai on his guard.

Kai was still waiting for him to speak.

“Nothing,” he grunted, looking away. “That’s fine. I’m tired.”

Kai only hummed in return. His limbs hung heavily from fighting the current. All that swimming would take a toll on anyone, but Kai had done the work for two. Adin might even have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t been taking Aya away against her will.

“I’m going to let you stretch out for a bit, Princess,” Kai said, his voice full of such obvious, bone-weariness, that even Adin couldn’t miss it. “I need to make us a warmer if we’re going to try and sleep down here, and I actually need all of my limbs for that...”

Aya whined more dramatically than needed when he unrolled her away from himself, stretching stiffly.

As Kai went about making a flameless fire at the base of the second tentacle, Adin couldn’t resist watching. He’d seen the cooks start the boilers in the kitchens before, but this was different. So contained. Only certain species of fish and mer were allowed in the kitchens during cooking—typically those who had been bred to withstand things like volcanic vents and lava-outshoots. Regular merfolk were banned from going anywhere near for the sake of burns.

Kai collected the little lights that had guided them through the current into a single pile at the place where the stone monolith met sand. Then, he poured a bottle of sticky purple goop on top. The lights oozed and melted into each other, then glowed red, sending out little orange crackles and a wave of pleasant heat.

“Don’t touch,” Kai warned as Aya swam close enough to do just that. “You’ll get chemical burns if you do.”

This ‘warmer,’ as Kai called it, was just enough to warm just the space at the base of the tentacle-formed monolith, and despite the pressurized cold and shadow all around them, it made the smallest bubble of water around it feel cozy and safe.

“That’s…impressive,” Adin mumbled begrudgingly.

“It’s just how people travel out here,” muttered Kai.

“Now my guard is complimenting my kidnapper?” Aya snapped out of her silence. “How do I know you’re not helping him take me? I can’t count on you at all, can I?”

Adin flushed in indignation, and was about to deny the accusation when Aya turned tail, and swam back into the current where they’d come in. Adin was too shocked to follow her, but Kai traced her path calmly, waiting for her to reach the current.

“Kai!” Adin balked when she disappeared into the churning shadowy water just above them, the current taking her just as easily as it had back at the first tentacle. “Aren’t you going to go after her?”

Kai lifted his chin ever so slightly in a motion of indifference, not taking his eyes off the spot where she’d disappeared into the magical pull. “Aren’t you?”

“Well, even I know she’s going to get—”

Then, with a spitting, sucking sound, like a limpet being popped off a rock, Aya came flying back out of the current, right toward the tower. Kai caught her before she dashed her fins on the rocks and pulled her back down next to his flameless fire with a weary sigh.

“Please try not to get your head bashed in before we get there, Princess,” Kai said blandly, taking the seat across the warmer—farthest from her. “Unless you need to try that a few more times?”

“No,” Aya bit out, shoving him away. “No, you’ve clearly got me trapped.”

“Thank you,” Kai said sincerely.

“We wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d just come to the ball like I’d asked, and I’d have been able to say a normal goodbye instead of…of whatever this is!” Aya blurted, unbidden.

Hesitantly, mostly because he didn’t fancy placing himself in between their glares, Adin sat a little farther back, trying to shove the pebbles fallen from the monolith far enough that they wouldn’t dig into his scales. He would have given a lot of things not to be hearing this conversation. However, Kai didn’t fight her.

“You’re right. This might have been prevented if I’d been there on time. I will make amends, Princess. That is all I can offer you.”

An uncomfortable silence fell over the group as Aya stubbornly turned her back on them both, and went back to examining the warmer like neither of them existed.

“Aya really did invite you?” Adin said quietly, when after a few minutes, no one said anything.

“You thought I lied to a whole contingent of Titus’s guards?” Kai sounded amused, although it didn’t touch the shadows under his eyes.

“That’s certainly how it looked,” he pointed out.

Aya didn’t deign to comment, but started to toss bits of emaciated leaves and pebbles at the warmer, evidently enthralled at how they sizzled and melted into the goo.

“The door guard kept the invitations she’d given me when I asked for entry. I was…late,” Kai said finally.

“If she invited you, then why didn’t Krill come?”

Kai’s face grew cold, and any amusement vanished.

“He couldn’t,” he said simply, and something about the way he said it, Adin was afraid to ask what he’d meant.

“Adin,” said Kai, so abruptly that Adin had to fight the instinct to salute at his tone.

How annoying.

“Adin, I know you may not believe I’m doing this for Aya’s own good, but should she choose the eel when this is all done, I will not stand in the way of her decision. As for my appearance at the ball—” Kai didn’t have to say it. Adin wouldn’t fight him that her behavior that day had been different. “If Aya did not want me, I would not come.”

Adin heard the truth in his insufferably calm tone.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, and found to his surprise as much as Kai’s that he really meant it, even if Kai was still the cause of most of his troubles this week.

The shadows around them were suddenly shaking with the deafening sound of grinding stone. The monolith ground into movement, and began to turn on its stony pivots, knocking the warmer over, and sending them jumping back. With a rougher scraping sound than the first—almost as though this tentacle was far less used—it bowed to point a direction to their left, and a bead of faint light pulsed from its tip, guiding the way to the next current.

“Well. That will save us a bit of time,” said Kai, running a hand through his hair.

Even as huffy as she was, apparently Aya couldn’t resist her own curiosity in any state.

“Sorry? ‘Sorry’ was the password?” She asked, wide-eyed. “You didn’t even have to light the words. What was the riddle?”

With a groan, Kai pushed himself up from the sand, and swam up to where words were glowing the color of the pulsing light, and read down to them:

Grant to me unfeigned a token.

Mend the break where bonds are broken.

I begin where pride ends,

A spoken tie to make amends.

“Interesting…” Kai mumbled, almost so he couldn’t hear it. “Something that has to not only be spoken, but meant. What absolute dumb luck.”

“You’re welcome,” Adin grumbled, feeling foolish. So much for trying to stall.

“I’m not complaining,” Kai retreated back to the warmer wearily, and used a few discarded stones to scrape it back together. “I’m starting to get nervous, frankly. That’s the last word that would have come to my mind, and Poseidon knows what it would have taken for one of us to get it right.”

Adin didn’t know whether to feel pride, or shame. On the one hand, it was nice to be appreciated. Poseidon only knew that his contingent didn’t.

Yet! he reminded himself steadfastly.

Before Kai could get the idea to swim on, Adin yawned loudly. He didn’t even have to fake it. Aya, who was still pretending not to look at them, yawned too, followed shortly by Kai.

Kai settled into the sand unceremoniously, covered his eyes with an arm, and fastened one tentacle back around Aya’s tail. Adin didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue. If Aya got it into her head to swim off again, they’d never find her in the dark.

“I’ll take first watch,” Adin offered, more out of habit than anything.

“Sleep,” said Kai, eyes already closed. “If anything approaches, believe me, I’ll know.”

“...You’re sure?”

Kai hadn’t said anything about the moving shadows earlier, and while it could have been a trick of the light—or lack thereof, what if it hadn’t? Nevertheless, Adin knew that if he was to be of any use to his princess, he needed the proffered rest badly.

As Adin curled on the ground toward the warmer, he fell into an unsettled sleep. Nothing he told himself could shake the feeling of eyes on his back.