Pillars of the Deep

by Harper Alexander

  Abraxia regrouped, looking startled.

  You see? I wanted to brag, but glared indignantly at her instead.

  She ducked away from a small cloud of blood that plumed out from her lip, distaste evident on her face. Then, not one to accept defeat so easily, she came at me again.

  Almost unbidden, one of my tentacles flailed forward to lash her across the face. A zap of pink light fizzled across her cheek, and she recoiled, looking stunned.

  Even I was taken aback. Evidently, I could sting.

  And why not?

  “Not just a pretty dress after all. Perhaps,” I remarked bitingly.

  Recovering with a bit more of a drunken quality, this time, Brax struggled to pin her focus back on me. A bright red welt glared across the side of her face, further evidence of the secret weapon I wielded.

  A silvery shimmer flitted amongst the rafters, drawing my gaze up.

  He was here.

  A peculiar curiosity etched into his face, he peered down at us from above. A flash of triumph went through me. He had heard my call! At the same time, my heart ached. He looked like a lost little puppy, confused about why he had come, not really sure where he was.

  I had to keep playing. Draw his soul further out of the woodwork.

  I aimed myself back toward the organ, but it was as if Abraxia realized what I was doing, then. With a desperate cry, she hurled herself at me again, taking care to avoid my tentacles this time as she rammed me from behind.

  I lurched downward under her force, pushed below the platform where the organ stood. Ink it, I had to restart the song while I had Coda’s interest!

  I twisted so that I was facing her again, sending my tentacles to sting her again. She screamed as they zapped her chest and tail, but either mermaids weren’t as susceptible to the effects of jellyfish stings or my stinging power was diluted as a hybrid, because the lashes failed to knock her out the same way I’d been affected.

  And now she had the high ground and was determined to keep me away from that organ even if my defenses razed her with agony.

  I stung her again, repeatedly–little pinpricks all up and down her body. Howling through gritted fangs, she lashed out with an arm, swiftly wrapping one of the offending tendrils around the limb from wrist to elbow, and gave a ferocious yank.

  The fluid appendage tore from my waist, ripping out of my skin.

  It was my turn to let out a cry of pain, my defenses faltering in light of her new tactic. So she could play this game, too. Savage vs. ruthless. We both had something to fight for.

  “I don’t have to remind you,” Brax growled through her pain, “what happens to him if I die.” She shook the disembodied tentacle off her arm in disgust, and it drifted down to the dark, untraveled shadows of the cathedral floor, wriggling like a dying worm. A squeamish feeling slid through me as I watched that bloody stump settle on the mildewed stones, stirring up a puff of musty sediment.

  Curls of steam rose from Abraxia’s body, little fissures of varicose veins spreading out from the center of each sting. Clearly, they were taking a toll, even if they hadn’t debilitated her just yet. But she wasn’t going to remove herself as a barricade between me and the organ, and I didn’t know the likelihood of mermaids dying of broken hearts like she claimed, but could I really risk it?

  I peered past her to where Coda still hovered in the upper reaches of the cavern. He was staring at the organ, a puzzled familiarity haunting his face. Was a fragment coming back to him, cutting through the wool Brax had webbed over his eyes?

  Yes! It was there. I just had to keep our song echoing in his awareness. How could I get past Brax without killing her, when she was so obviously willing to call my bluff and hold herself in the line of fire?

  She slurped herself into a domineering position above me, knowing the convoluted power she had over me, and as the swish from her tail fanned out and created ripples in the water, a butterfly effect warping my visual of the cathedral at least two tail-lengths beyond her, a wild idea came to me.

  What if I could use the currents my appendages created, projecting the same kind of extended effect but in a controlled sort of way? If I could harness the force, direct the pattern…

  It was either a farfetched stroke of insanity, or another spark of genius instinct released from my evolved savvy. Either way, it was worth a try.

  Instead of trying to get to the organ, I aimed myself away from it, able to skim past Brax’s blockade since I went in the opposite direction. All I needed was a direct line to the organ, which I gained as I rose again to its height, albeit in the center of the cathedral.

  Brax adjusted herself between me and the instrument, suspicion written all over her face.

  Settling my balloon of appendages, I let instinct take over. It hadn’t steered me wrong yet.

  With a flourish of ruffles, a slew of ripples arced across the cathedral, blowing past Brax and billowing against the organ. I was rewarded with the indenting of certain clusters of keys, a warble of sound screeching out.

  Startled, Brax’s gaze cut over her shoulder. A sly grin spread over my face. I could do this!

  A random clang of notes was one thing, though, and my smile slipped as I honed in with more concentration. To some extent, it was like the muscle memory programmed in my fingers translated to my tentacles, grasping the general scope of the pattern. It was just a little clumsy as I started out, in need of fine-tuning.

  But I could keep my distance from Brax and toy with this melody all day, practicing until I got it down to perfection same as I’d done a thousand times before. It was no different than starting out any song with clumsy, unsure fingers, conditioning the rhythm as I went.

  I glanced at Coda as I landed the first bit of the song. Was it just me, or was a tinge of silver diluting the emerald lens that had possessed his gaze?

  Encouraged, I played onward. Glancing between us, Brax’s keen mind narrowed in on exactly what was happening. Seeing her blockade was failing to thwart my plan, she sent herself after me with renewed fervor, intent on severing my efforts any way that she had to.

  The symphony faltered as I dodged her attack, but even in my twirling and feinting there were always half a dozen tentacles I could aim in the right direction, and it was becoming second-nature to use them to manipulate currents. Brax had accused me of parading around like some sea goddess, but, well–maybe that’s exactly what I had become.

  I surged closer to Coda in our lethal dance, stealing glances at him every chance I could. His eyes were almost fully silver now, our song sparking the enlightenment I’d hoped for, connecting with the true soul that belonged in his body.

  It just went to show that there were still two separate entities at war inside him–an eclipse of awarenesses, but not a full fusing of the two.

  If I could strike Brax dead while Coda was the most present sentience possessing him, it stood to reason the part of him that was Turoxo, that part of him which would die of a broken heart, would do so while faltering in a disconnected space and it would be the sentient currently in control of the body that would remain, retaining the body. In other words, if the essence of Coda had a hold when Brax died, it would be the spirit that didn’t have a hold that died off.

  At least, that was my theory. And really the only hope of anything returning to its rightful order.

  Trusting that this was Old Jelly’s intuitive wisdom shining through and guiding my actions, I began to set the plan in motion.

  Keep the song going, clear and strong. Loop back around and restart the second verse because we were nearing the end, and I couldn’t afford to allow a lull. Grapple with my increasingly agitated opponent. Sneak in a sting, delivered to her side. Now one to her neck. Now one to the base of her tail. Dodge her attempts to pull a repeat of the severed tentacle that now lay limp and lifeless on the cathedral floor. Dance closer to Coda to gauge the color of his eyes. Put my heart and soul into the crescendo of our symphony, pulling on his spirit with every pang of sentiment I cou
ld charm from those enchanted abalone keys. Brace myself against a murderous frenzy of slashes as Brax torpedoed through my defenses, no longer caring about what harm may come to her. Plant a charged feeler squarely in the center of her back at the base of her spine, watch her arch backwards and seize up at the shock. Fight the pang of grief that came as I remembered she was my friend. Stab another tentacle into the side of her ribcage, another into her navel. Blink back tears at her convulsing, take one final look at Coda, hovering in an oblivious trance as our song flooded him with life-saving nostalgia.

  That’s right, Coda, I choked in encouragement through my heartbroken resolve. Sweet Abyss, how I wished I didn’t have to do this. That it hadn’t come to this. But Brax had dug her own grave, her ambition folly. And as Coda’s eyes bloomed the color of pure, flashing mercury, I turned back to the ruby-and-violet beauty who writhed at my mercy and sent every last one of my tentacles into her body.

  Putting her out of her misery.

  Chapter 34

  A heart-shattering sound tore out of Codexious, and for one dreaded moment I feared I had been terribly wrong, and should have heeded Brax’s warning. My tear-hot gaze whipped to him, where the force of his grief had flung him back into a pillar.

  A crack resounded through the cathedral, a fissure snaking out from behind him to mar the column.

  Coda’s tail thrashed flat against the column, his back arching much like Brax’s. I stared in horror, my appendages retracting from Brax’s body and drifting back to my sides.

  But then Coda’s body relaxed–albeit in a limp, exhausted releasing of energy–and as he slid a fraction down the pillar his eyes fluttered open. They shifted listlessly about the cavern, pained and confused.

  But silver and lucid. Silver clear through.

  A strangled sound of relief escaped me. As Brax’s limp body began to drift down and away, I sent myself toward Coda, ballooning to the top of the cathedral.

  “Coda,” I blurted, and his bewilderment slurred through the water before finding my face.

  “Sayler?”

  A hysterical laugh bubbled up inside me, which I barely contained. I swallowed the delirium, trying to focus. “It’s me. I’m back.” In case my transformed bottom half left him less than convinced he knew the creature hovering in front of him.

  “What…” But there were so many things he could have followed that beginning with, and he seemed unable to settle on which one took precedent.

  “It doesn’t matter.” I was shaking my head, dismissing all this unpleasant confusion for another time. What mattered was that he was alive, the spell broken and the threat vanquished, and I knew what the Deep wanted from me now.

  And what I wanted from it.

  “I’m back,” I repeated, but the second time sounded completely different, laced with an entirely different meaning.

  Coda’s head cocked to the side, and he eyed me thoughtfully. I got flutters all over from the questions–and the hopes–in that look. Yes, I came back because I rethought your offer, and I want you, I wanted to blurt, but reined myself in. Everything in due course.

  Sidling away from the pillar, Coda winced abruptly and rubbed his back, shifting to take stock of the column. He frowned at the crack. “What…” he started again, and when he turned back to me I thought I might laugh at how utterly out of touch he appeared. Another delirious urge, no doubt. “…happened?”

  Oh, Coda. So much.

  He took in my gown of tentacles as if seeing it for the first time, his brows riding up on his forehead.

  And then he saw Brax’s body adrift in the cathedral shadows below us.

  His face stilled, his jaw locking in consternation. “Brax,” he blurted, concern slashing across his features. I drifted to the side as he brushed past me, an objection rising to my lips and dying there just as quickly. My gaze followed him sorrowfully, my tendrils drawing closer against my body in lament.

  Coda rippled to the bottom of the cathedral, cradling Brax into his arms. Her tail and arms slurred listlessly in the water as he peered into her lifeless face. His frown cut to me. “What happened?” he repeated, and this time it was more of a demand.

  “You don’t…remember anything, do you?” I asked gently.

  A crazed look flitted across his face–the look of one who had lost a piece of time and missed a world of conflict.

  Suddenly, I felt weary. Too tired to relive what had happened by explaining it to him. But I couldn’t just leave him in the dark.

  I sank slowly down to his level, shifting closer. How did you explain to someone that he had been tricked, betrayed, and make him believe it?

  What if he didn’t believe me?

  It was a fear that hadn’t occurred to me before. What if it all sounded like one big crazy story to him, and he couldn’t find it in him to believe Brax would do such a thing, and with her unable to tell her side of the story he found himself unable to overlook a sense of doubt regarding my account? What if he was unable to get past the inevitable twinge of denial, and in a twist of fate totally turned against me?

  But I couldn’t think like that. He deserved to know the truth, so I would give it to him.

  I stared down at the cathedral floor long and hard, gathering my thoughts, before meeting him with an answer. “She was after the crown,” I decided on as my starting point, matter-of-fact and regretful. “When she escorted me to the Surface, Old Jelly intercepted us. It showed me another series of visions. They were of Brax. Murdering Turoxo and using his lovestruck essence to create a love potion that would…” I struggled to say it, hating the light in which it painted the girl who had been my friend. “…That would enspell you into choosing her as your queen.”

  As I had expected, the information only fed Coda’s frown. “What?” Disbelief edged his voice, causing a flutter of that new worry in my gut. But I soldiered on, summarizing the rest of the debacle that had taken place.

  He seemed duly resistant to the treacherous details, but also unable to ignore the state in which I returned, and the implications that corroborated my side of the story. I did have the essence of Old Jelly on my side, and that was a sacred sign he would be hard-pressed to ignore.

  “Coda…” I probed dolefully when he only met my tale with silence. I wafted a margin closer, perhaps about to offer him some form of support, but he tensed.

  “I just need a moment,” he declared curtly, and I stopped.

  “Okay.”

  I could see the conflict in the hard lines of his face as he looked down at the woman I had just pegged as a traitor. She had been a friend to him a lot longer than she’d been mine. I wondered how many times she’d made subtle advances before realizing he would only ever view her as a friend, or if she’d planned it in the dark from the beginning, always a secretive plot that would leave none of the details to chance. Why roll the dice trying to win his favor or go to the trouble of elbowing her way through the flocks of other catty hopefuls if she didn’t have to?

  There was no point on wondering, but I couldn’t help it.

  By ‘I need a moment’, apparently Coda meant he needed to skip out and brood by himself in a corner somewhere, because all at once he whisked Brax toward the top of the cathedral and disappeared with her through the gap in the ceiling.

  My shoulders sank in dismay. He hadn’t taken that very well at all. But I supposed I could expect no less.

  I floated there, alone in the cathedral shadows, which had gone too quiet in the wake of our song trumpeting through the expanse. I wondered, suddenly, where Inaja had been through all of this. How did he fit in with Abraxia’s plan?

  On a suspicious hunch, I left the cathedral and went back to the palace, wending my way through the halls until I came upon the spiral staircase that spooled down into the dungeon. All down its dizzying flight I ghosted, peeking into the dungeon to check the cages. Just in case.

  My hunch had not steered me wrong. There, clutching the bars with his back to me and forehead resting forward against the
rungs in crestfallen defeat, was the turquoise-maned merman himself, snared in one of the middle cages.

  “Inaja?”

  Apparently I was silent as a cat in my new form, because he whipped around at the sound of my voice, no other signs alerting him to my presence. It took him a moment, like the others, to recognize me.

  “Sayler?”

  “Brax put you in here?” I surmised, and something about my knowledge of her as the culprit caused a faint shade of relief to pass over his face.

  “You know about her? Does she know you’re here? Does Coda–”

  “Coda’s safe. He’s fine.”

  Looking unconvinced, Inaja made no move toward the door of his cage–the kind of thing I might expect of someone anticipating his release. Did he not think I was here to let him out? “It was Coda who put me in here.”

  Oh. “For what?” I knew Coda hadn’t exactly been himself, but he’d seemed like such a hypnotized zombie when I saw him, it didn’t seem like he would have the presence of mind to be calling the shots on putting anyone in the dungeon.

  “When he announced his betrothal to Brax, it was obvious something was wrong,” Inaja spat in disgust. “Brax and Turoxo have been inseparable for as long as I can remember. When I sought out Codexious in private to find out what had compelled him–well, let’s just say he wasn’t exactly spending a whole lot of time alone, with an affectionate new betrothed. Every time I went to see him, there she was, ushering me on my way because they were having alone time. And when I finally confronted her, that was all it took for her to play the victim, the inking damsel in distress, and manipulate Coda into throwing me in here for crossing his beloved betrothed.”

  My blood boiled all over again, hearing about the extent of her manipulation. Until I remembered she was dead, now. At some point I would have to explain it all to Inaja, but I just didn’t have it in me to delve into it all again. “Coda’s…back to his normal self now.”