by Eric Asher
CHAPTER TWO
It wasn’t necessary for Nixie to step outside the Queen’s Sanctuary to use the gauntlet, but somehow it felt right. She stared out at the sea crashing against the columns of Giant’s Causeway.
Damian had unintentionally set her on a path to change the fate of her people. To give them a better life, a more fulfilling time as they lived through the ages. The least she could do was try to save Sam and Vicky. It’s what he’d want. Somewhere, in the darkest part of her heart, she knew the chance of even Gaia being able to save Damian was merely a spark in a crushing darkness.
But Nixie knew darkness. And she knew what to do with it. Fire could light the shadows, and rage could burn them down. There was a time for mercy, but this was not it.
Nixie struck the back of her gauntlet and ripped two fingers down it. The light left the world, and blackness rose to greet her.
* * *
Nixie strode forward before the light resolved around her. The golden path, so dim as to be only an afterimage at first, solidified beneath her feet. Gaia wasn’t here, but she didn’t need to be. It gave Nixie a small comfort knowing the titan was keeping watch over Damian. If anything too untoward moved on him, Gaia could hopefully keep Damian far away.
But the fact Gaia wasn’t there meant Nixie’s senses were straining at every whisper around her. The Abyss, infinite in its darkness, was not a silent place. A thunder like the groan of a giant rumbled around her. As she cocked her head to listen, the gauntlet produced a tug on her being that was familiar now, and she kept to the left at the first intersection she encountered.
It was there, in the golden glow beneath the road, she saw the churning mass of what could have been mistaken for thunderclouds. If clouds were covered in a thousand eyes and the gaping maw of the damned. Teeth like needles flexed, layering together until they seemed a mesh screen, only to expand and blossom once more, revealing the rotten black and green flesh within.
There were few sights that unsettled Nixie. She’d seen more than one apocalypse befall her own people, and that didn’t touch on the atrocities she’d seen the commoners endure. But this undulating mass, the slow swivel of a thousand blood red eyes focusing on her, caused Nixie to step away from the edge of the golden path. Her steps accelerated, carrying her away from that nightmare ever faster.
Nixie frowned when the path dove into a steep descent. Every step felt as though she could lose her balance and slide off into the darkness. For there were no rails in that place, no place to catch yourself if you fell into the pit. She wondered if there would be another path below, or if falling from the path was a death sentence. But that’s where Damian was now, wasn’t it? She shook her head to clear the thought.
The golden glow beneath her feet leveled off at another fork in the road, but now there were three paths. Times like this, she wished she had Gaia’s ability to walk a more direct line to her destination. Every time she entered the Abyss, the path was unpredictable, ever-changing, though it did not normally split so often. Perhaps it made some kind of sense because her destination was different each time, but it felt wrong.
Nixie closed her eyes and held the gauntlet to her chest, but there was not a single pull waiting to show her the way. There were two.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Nixie said, her eyes flashing open as she scowled at the gauntlet. Once again, the familiar throb pulled her forward, toward the middle path, but a second pull coaxed her toward the right. “Shit.”
“It’s Damian, isn’t it?” she whispered to the gauntlet. “I confused you somehow.” Nixie closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing all her energy and intent on Atlantis. That’s where she needed to go, but the gauntlet didn’t respond.
Nixie growled at the metal wrapped around her hand. She steadied herself again, this time remembering the walls of the fort on the corner of what the commoners called San Juan.
The thought triggered a memory she’d nearly forgotten.
* * *
She stood upon the walls of that place with Euphemia soon after the commoners had built it. A pirate they’d met had told them about the legend of Atlantis. It had been such an entertaining, if somewhat inaccurate, tale that the undines had let him live to find the rum he’d been so desperately seeking for his wife.
But what the pirate hadn’t known was that he’d been standing on the fragmented shores of what had once been the great continent of Atlantis. And deep beneath his feet waited the ruins of the old city. That’s where she needed to be now, to save Damian, to preserve the empire of the water witches.
* * *
Nixie gasped when the tug from the gauntlet almost knocked her over. It was the middle path, of that there was no doubt. Her eyes flew open, and she screamed.
Marching before her was an army of stone undines. Lewena led them all. While they appeared to be still at first, a shimmer of light like an oil spill washed over them, and the bodies moved. Caught in their death poses as if finely carved marble, the faces twisted and contorted, weapons rising as the odd shimmer bled across them.
Nixie looked down at the gauntlet, and it spoke once more. The way to Atlantis was through them, through that field of damned souls trapped for all time. She ground her teeth and drew the stone sword from its scabbard.
Mercy had no place here.
Lewena screeched as Nixie’s blade shattered her body into its component pieces. Witch after witch fell until she slowly realized every face she knew, every body one she had fought or loved or slayed. Faces she’d nearly forgotten from the past. Opposing soldiers who only lived in her memory as victories. They were all here, all taunting her, all digging their rough flesh into her psyche.
The farther she crashed through the line of living statues, the deeper a path she carved into her own memories until finally he was there, chin raised to the black heavens, and the crown upon his head. The last king of the undines. The man she’d helped throw down into oblivion and establish the matriarchy that would reign for over six millennia.
But he’d been a father, a husband to the first queen, and though it was the queen who betrayed him to his death, the vision of the child beside him tried to tear Nixie’s heart from her chest. She raised the stone sword and screamed.
“I’m sorry!”
The sword crashed down onto the old king’s crown, shattering it as surely as his body crumbled around her. With that there was a path, a way through, and the gauntlet tugged on her once more. Nixie’s guilt washed away in a rage as she realized something was toying with her, pulling memories from her mind to obstruct her path through the Abyss.
She focused on every step and let the anger well up as she sprinted past the last of the echoes of the past. They would always be a part of her legacy, but the world was different now. There was more to this world than surviving, more than killing. But if she had to, she’d kill to protect the ones she loved. Channeling that rage would be the easiest thing in the world.
The gray bodies vanished and the gauntlet pulsed around Nixie’s hand. She wiped the tears from her cheek with a violent swipe of her fingers and let the gauntlet rip her out of the Abyss.
CHAPTER THREE
Darkness gave way to light, and the blue skies of the Caribbean threatened to blind her with their fury. Nixie blinked in the brightness, raising her hand to shield her eyes. She winced when the sunlight reflected off her armor and hit her eyes again anyway.
“Cool costume!”
Nixie turned to find a young girl looking up at her. “It’s not … thank you.”
“Did you see her, Mom?” the girl asked, skipping away and tugging on an older woman’s arm. “Is that how the guards used to dress here?”
“I … don’t think so,” the mother said, lifting a skeptical eyebrow. “I really don’t think so.”
Nixie looked around at the old gray and beige weatherworn stone beneath her feet. Cannons lined the wall between ramparts. The breeze picked up and she caught the scent of the fishing boats in the bay mixed wit
h the salt of the ocean. A watchtower jutted out over the sea from a narrow path. Nixie hurried down that path, her armor scraping against stone so dark it was almost black. From the narrow windows, she could clearly see the ocean and the structure of the western walls of the fort around her.
The gauntlet hadn’t led her wrong. This was El Morro. She was in Puerto Rico, one of the surviving fragments of the continent of Atlantis. That meant the ruins of the city rings were due north, deep in an oceanic trench.
Small waves boiled along the shoals on the shore below, a low rocky barrier that would have protected this place from erosion and invaders alike in the past. And the fort had done its job in that, repelling more than one navy with their sights set on the island.
Shouts of alarm drew Nixie’s attention. She turned away from the seas and hurried deeper into the fort, climbing stairs through a dim tunnel that flanked either side of a rough ramp. The sky opened again, revealing bright goldenrod walls and graceful white arches. Nixie sprinted through an archway and up another, gentler slope, crossing back onto the exterior of the fort until she came to a watchtower jutting out from the wall.
Beyond the outer wall of the fort waited a sweeping vista of neatly manicured grass populated by dozens of families flying kites in front of Old San Juan. But another scream rose up, and her gaze snapped to the south. Her stomach churned and her knuckles whitened between the joints of the gauntlet.
There, deeper in the bay, a shadow rose.
“Gods no,” Nixie whispered. “Nudd, you bastard.”
A slender fin crested the water near a cruise ship, and at the other end of the ship, tentacles as thick as dolphins erupted from the water. They snapped out, tearing away lifeboats and railings as if they were paper.
Nixie ran flat out. She needed to get to the ocean, and now. Commoners knew what giant squids were, but this … this was something different. It didn’t need the depths of the trenches to survive. It was a different kind of monster altogether, more like the leviathans. She hurdled a wall and dropped to a lower ramp, sprinting toward water. Her boots scraped and clanged against the massive stones of the shoreline, and then she dove.
Warm water embraced her, and Nixie shot through it like a bullet. She couldn’t battle a leviathan like that alone, but those people were going to die by the hundreds if she did nothing. The only chance she had, they had, was a guardian out of legend. A beast the likes of which the commoners had never seen. But was it still alive? And would it still heed the order of a queen? She’d have her answer soon enough.
Nixie passed out of the bay, circling around the old fort until she reached the saltier waters of the ocean, and then dove straight down. It didn’t take long for her to find the ocean bottom, skimming along the mud and silt and rather surprised fish. She was close to the edge of the trench that would lead her to the ruins of Atlantis, but those pits weren’t her goal this time.
Instead, she closed her eyes, held her hand over her heart, and spoke an incantation that had not been heard in millennia.
“Omnes Orbis Periculum!”
The world shook.
* * *
The shells and sand and mud of the ocean floor shifted. Nixie felt the wave as a titanic slab of earth rose. If she wasn’t careful, the force would escape, rush to the northwest where it could scour islands on its journey to drown the Florida coast.
But she felt the surge of line energy that poured through her crown with a fury, concentrated, amplified, until she could direct the force of the ocean skyward. Amber eyes rose from that cascade of mud and death. A guardian who had not woken since Atlantis sank. A beast the commoners thought of as nothing but a relic from the time of dinosaurs.
The massive jaws flexed, revealing hundreds of deadly triangular teeth and a long scaly head as its body shook off its lengthy sleep.
“Leviathans have attacked. Guard this place.”
Mud swirled around the beast, and though its reptilian head, not so different than a crocodile, dwarfed Nixie, it waited for her to swim up and settle in at the base of its skull. She gripped a ridge that tapered off behind one of the nearly person-sized eyes. The giant gave one violent swipe of its tail followed by a broad stroke of its flippers. They surged forward, leaving a tower of mud and debris to settle once more to the ocean floor.
This was one of the guardians of Atlantis. A creature the humans had come to call a Mosasaurus, but they couldn’t have imagined the power and magic that kept the immortal guardians alive through the ages. Those they’d discovered in the fossil record had been children of giants, rivals to the titans of old.
The return to the bay was swift, and Nixie couldn’t deny the thrill that lanced through her stomach riding the legendary creature. This was right. This was good. The leviathan wouldn’t stand a chance. She leaned in against the small smooth scales of the beast’s neck.
“Do you see it?”
They rose higher in the water until both Nixie and the guardian’s tail would occasionally break the surface of the waves. The guardian growled beneath her, a vibration that sent ripples to her core.
The giant squid came into focus, fragments of the cruise ship splashing down around them, some sinking to the floor of the bay while others remained floating. More than one of the beast’s arms snapped inward to where its beak would be. Nixie’s exhilaration soured at the thought of what the thing might be eating.
“Spare the ship. Kill the leviathan!”
The mantle of the squid breached the surface of the water as it hoisted itself higher with three of its eight arms. The guardian stayed near the top of the ocean now, angling for the leviathan like a torpedo.
But the eldritch things hadn’t destroyed worlds and survived the Abyss by being blind to their environment. The Mosasaurus opened its jaws and gave a violent snap of its tail. But one of the squid’s tentacles lashed out, carving a path along the guardian’s head and nearly taking Nixie’s hand with it.
Nixie drew her sword out of instinct, landing an awkward blow against the thick appendage, scarcely giving it more than a paper cut. But the Mosasaurus sensed its prey. It gave a savage twist of its head and locked down on the leviathan’s tentacle.
They broke the surface of the water as the beast tore at the tentacle. The entire ship listed as the guardian dragged the squid and the hull closer to shore. The guardian released a booming growl before its jaws opened and it lunged, latching onto the siphon below the squid’s massive eye.
Ink blasted out across the guardian’s snout, but the Mosasaurus held fast. It shook its head violently enough to dislodge Nixie. She summoned the waters to rise before her, directing a stream to wash away as much of the ink from the guardian’s eyes as she could.
The squid’s tentacles tore deeper into the ship, and the shouts from above grew more frantic. Nixie looked up and saw the family. A young mother with a chair in one hand and the other holding back her son. She bashed at the tentacle, bellowing at the beast attacking her family. The squid searched blindly, but it would only be moments before it found them, or the guardian’s attack dumped them out of their room.
Even as Nixie thought it, the Mosasaurus started a death roll. Its jaws locked into the squid, the guardian spun. The ship tilted, and the family screamed as they fell.
Line energy spiked through Nixie’s armor, lighting her crown like an electric blue beacon, and the ocean responded like she’d never felt before. She’d meant to raise the water to greet the falling family. Instead, the bay itself rose to push against the ship, steadying the vessel as the family splashed down, and the arms of the squid broke away to the gory sound of snapping flesh and cables that could not bear the weight.
The severed appendages writhed on the lower deck while another appendage, that had been attached to a smoke stack, spasmed and fell away. Nixie swooped beneath it, gathering up the family in the ocean and raising them back onto a higher deck with a torrent of water.
She didn’t pause as the mother shouted her thanks. Nixie used the momentum of
the water to rocket through a shattered bank of windows on the bridge.
“Who the fuck are you!”
Nixie turned toward the voice and found the disheveled captain pointing a flare gun at her. She raised her hands anyway.
“Nixie of Atlantis, Queen of the Undines, here to save your ship. Unless you’d prefer to shoot me?”
The man’s eyes hadn’t gotten any wider, so Nixie was pretty sure he was in shock.
“Can you steer?”
The captain shook his head. “That … that thing damaged the propellers.”
Nixie glanced out the window behind her. The ocean boiled, blood and ink churning up as the guardian spun. Whirlpools of gore and ink spread out around the beast.
“It’s dead now. Let’s get you to shore.”
The captain hesitated.
Nixie gave him a small smile. “I’ll push. You steer. Be ready.”
“What?”
But with that she was out the window, and the water rushed up to greet her. The water might have been brackish before, but now it was downright muck. The fight between the leviathan and the guardian had stirred up mud and debris, and that didn’t count the sheer quantity of blood all around.
Nixie reached the mangled metal that had been a propeller blade, but the rudders were still intact. The hull was dented, and the captain was lucky his ship hadn’t been sunk. If they’d been any later … She shook her head. Nixie opened her palm and the waters responded.
This wasn’t the overpowering surge she’d felt when she’d been in a panic to save that family. This was a constant pressure, a gentle prodding, that slowly pushed the ship forward.
It wasn’t far to the docks, and for that she was thankful. Whatever additional strength the crown gave her, there was still a limit, and the fatigue was real by the time they reached the docks at San Juan a few minutes later.
Once the ship had settled, she waved to the captain. She didn’t see the family again, but she wasn’t surprised. Who in their right mind would want to be anywhere close to the railings after that? A few people, apparently, as they poked their heads out, but not many.
