System Report:

  Narrative Alignment nearing completion

  Final Threads Spooling…

  Yenna had always found comfort in margins—of books, of maps, of plans. Even before signing up to become a Delver, her talents had lain in reading texts no one else wanted and knowing obscure facts that were rarely worth knowing.

  Now, that wasn’t to say she was unfit. She could run a hundred meters without leaving a lung behind like a dropped scarf. But what she was currently doing—vaulting over crates, scrambling across rain-slick wood, and dodging the occasional barnacled and belligerent fish-person—had never been her forte.

  She barely realized to roll out of the way as an elderly townsfolk, mid-screaming demise, came hurtling through the air. She didn't stop to check if he lived. She just slid the rest of the way across the crate, landed hard, nearly slipped before getting back on her feet, and kept running. Breaths ragged, vision cloudy, she kept running.

  The rope came out of nowhere. One second: clear path. Next second: ankle-high trap line. She jumped. Narrowly avoided getting clotheslined by the next one—strung through the air with ill intent—and landed on a wobbling barrel.

  Without wasting a second, she hurled a Spark Bolt across the fray.

  She didn't aim. No time. Just pointed her fingers and thought loudly in the direction of violence.

  The shrieking projectile howled through the air, briefly turning the rain into something more dramatic. Fast. Crackling, white-hot, and just shy of frying Alek, the Spark Bolt struck the sea monster that’d been sneaking up on him mid-clamber.

  Alek, spared from being eviscerated from behind, ended his duel with a final, wholly unnecessary spin. The head of another creature of the deeps did a dignified separation from the rest of its body, and Alek twirled toward her as the reminder of her Spark Bolt fizzled out behind him.

  “Yenna?” he called, a wide grin spreading across his lips as the last sparks faded into the rain. "I knew you had a flair for artistry. That must have come out positively marvelous. Didn’t it, Mari?"

  Mari, who was currently engaged in the far less glamorous art of not falling to her death, responded with the tiniest whimper of agreement.

  Desmond was there, too.

  "We… we need to hurry!" Yenna called out, each syllable chased by a gasp. Then, in case reason failed to penetrate the man’s skull, she followed up with: "The others are stealing the limelight!"

  That got him.

  With a flick of his rapier, Alek skewered the same sea-spawned horror Yenna’s Spark Bolt had failed to finish. There was a meaty schlup, a casual kick, and the slimy creature slid off the end of his blade.

  He didn’t even look.

  His eyes were locked on the Gallywag’s deck, which—technically—was still a deck, in the way a teetering seesaw balanced on one leg over a whirlpool is still a structure.

  Among falling cargo and splintering integrity, Alana, mid-leap, had just finished reloading her repeater crossbow. It clicked once, twice, and loosed twin bolts before she even landed, both finding their mark with surgical precision.

  Gami, having reached the listing ship as well, took a different route—through a wayward sail, slashing clean through before triggering Spear Thrust in midair. The resulting maneuver could only be described as “aerodynamically disrespectful.”

  She didn’t so much stab the tentacle that’d been coming for her as she skewered it, driving it deep into the collapsing mast.

  Without pausing, she let go of her weapon and kept moving, her body a blur of forward motion, empty-handed, not slowing, gaining on Alana’s heels.

  Down at the far edge of the jetty, meanwhile, Jodi was rapidly approaching the place where plank met sea. Even so, she continued scrambling backwards. Not with grace. Not with training. Just panic—a raw, desperate need for survival.

  Perhaps she didn’t see the waves rising behind her. Perhaps she didn’t hear Alana’s cry. Perhaps, in the rush and roar of everything, she simply hoped the jetty would go on forever.

  The last plank trembled beneath her, and then there was no more. Just air, and water, and waves that opened up to greet her, peeling back like a flower made entirely of nightmare and dentistry—a gaping maw of endless teeth.

  Yenna heard none of the screams. Nor the crashing of waves. Not even the ominous church bell tolling out over Ashenmoor.

  All she could hear was her own heartbeat.

  Jodi's flailing arms, her terrified expression, forever burned into her memory as the creature beneath the waves swallowed her whole.

  And then came Alana.

  She leapt from the Gullywag’s deck in a flurry of hair, steel, and screaming defiance. Her crossbow had been flung aside, replaced for two daggers whirling through the air, a third one clutched in her hands as she dove towards the waves.

  It was desperate. It was foolish. And she never made it to the water.

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  Gami snatched her mid-leap. One moment, tragedy. The next, momentum redirected.

  They crashed back onto the Gullywag’s listing deck to thrashing limbs and screams of fury. And below them, tentacles, thick and deliberate, began curling over the railing in search of new sacrifices to sate its hunger.

  “Ah, tragedy.” Alek’s voice threaded through the chaos, snapping Yenna back to the moment. “Much as it pains the heart, every good tale needs it.”

  He turned her way then, and for a heartbeat, just a sliver of a second carved out by fate and foreshadowing, she saw him—not the Alek who winked too much and fought like he’d choreographed his battles to a private audience of mirrors, but the one who’d dominated the tutorial rankings through sheer, terrifying brilliance.

  And then the mask snapped back on, complete with a flourish.

  “Let’s go save our friends—shall we, Sparkle Girl?”

  ***

  Gami hit the listing deck shoulder-first, barely keeping her grip of Alana as they rolled and slid across the violently tilting surface. The woman thrashed. She kicked. She bit.

  “Let me go!” she howled, clawing at Gami’s arm. “My sister is still down there! Let me—”

  A loud groan, followed by a sharp crack, passed through the ship. The Gullywag, no longer just leaning over, was being actively pulled under as pale tentacles, easily the size of Gami’s torso, slithered across the deck—a deck that was no longer a floor so much as an increasingly steep wall.

  Their slide was picking up momentum.

  As another ominous splinter passed through the ship, Gami narrowly managed to snag a loose rope with her free hand, her other keeping Alana firm as they were both yanked to a halt.

  Below them, the sea roiled. Frothing and foaming waves, painted in streaks of blood by a moon that hung over them like a guilty conscience. More tentacles slid from the water, wrapping themselves around the Gullywag’s hull like it owed them money.

  “And what, precisely,” Gami growled between her teeth, “are you planning to do to that thing? Offer it your supple limbs as tribute?”

  Alana said nothing.

  Maybe it was the view—dangling from a ship that was being rapidly unbuilt by aquatic existentialism. Maybe it was the way Gami held her: not roughly, but firmly, like someone who had seen far too many people charge into death with love and swords and not enough sense.

  Or maybe, just maybe, it was the first time Alana truly saw the thing below for what it was. The mindless hunger. The gaping maw.

  Tightening her grip, Gami tested the rope. The ship groaned again—louder this time, splintering in ways they had yet to see.

  “Right,” she muttered over the shrieking monstrosity beneath them, bracing her boots. “Up we go.”

  Just as she was about to start hauling them both skyward, however, it came:

  The snap.

  There was no drama to it. No slow unraveling. Just the dry, unceremonious twang of physics winning.

  Whatever the rope had been tied to—mast, post, a misplaced sense of hope—was no longer there.

  “Ah. Fuck.”

  Then came gravity, and gravity did not forget.

  Gami could hear the triumph of the thing below them as they fell. She twisted, fully intent on landing somewhere less lethal—though, she had no clue where that would be.

  Everything below them were thrashing tentacles and hungering teeth.

  Just as her boots were about to kick off against the deck, aiming for a “calmer” part of the churning waves, someone seized her wrist.

  Firm. Unshaking.

  “Need a hand, fair maiden?” came the voice above her, and there was Alek—smiling.

  Suspended in a near-vertical sprawl, one arm gripping the net of a cargo pile that had, through sheer defiance or dumb luck, not been torn loose, his other arm was wrapped around Gami’s wrist.

  “No need to fret, your savior is–”

  The shriek below changed pitch, and a breath later, a massive tentacle came whipping through the air.

  It split the deck in a shower of airborne timber. Planks shattered. The hull groaned. And water began eagerly surging upwards.

  “Damn, you guys are heavy,” Alek hissed, his earlier bravado having vanished somewhere mid-swing to avoid being reduced to a smear upon a sinking ship.

  With Alana and Gami having simultaneously thrown themselves to the side to avoid being flattened—putting a lot of strain on his grip in favour of their boots finding traction along the listing deck—their situation had somehow been reversed.

  As the two of them now clung to the barely secured cargo, Alek dangled freely from Gami’s grip.

  “Appreciate you, though,” the man still got out, through gritted teeth and cheerful delusion.

  Gami didn’t answer. Her breaths were needed elsewhere.

  Around them, the Gallywag was rapidly coming apart at the seams—planks splitting, beams cracking, and the last remaining mast had just folded over itself in weary resignation.

  The strike of that whipping tentacle had almost split the deck clean through, and another one was winding back, preparing to finish what it’d started.

  “What the fuck is this bullshit…” Came Alana’s groan from above. Alek weakly chuckled something else from below, another one-liner that probably sounded good in his head. Gami paid attention to neither.

  Her eyes were locked at that massive tentacle in quiet defiance, fingers curling tighter within the cargo-net that felt more like congealed tar than cord.

  If she could just—

  She blinked, eyes snapping upward.

  There, as her vision flickered past Alana’s scrambling boot and the straining net, she saw them—tarred barrels, barely contained and a single incident away from ripping loose.

  Another heartbeat, the taste of blood, salt, and seafoam thick on her tongue as something slammed into the deck besides them, turning the air into a storm of sharp splinters.

  But Gami’s eyes had already darted to the shore.

  There, near the edge of the dock, stood Yenna—rain-drenched, smoke-smeared, and screaming something desperate into the wind.

  Gami couldn’t hear the words. But she didn’t need to.

  “Yenna!” Gami roared back, into the chaos, and with every ounce of strength she had left—every aching, furious scrap—she drove her heels into what remained of the deck and yanked.

  The cargo—having been inching toward freedom ever since the Gullywag first started listing—gave way in an instant, and so did their last claims to anything solid to hold onto.

  Barrels, dozens of them, tumbled past, cracking open mid-air to spill their dark, sticky contents in glistening arcs.

  Gami, Alek, and Alana followed close behind, not so much diving into the sea as being politely hurled. A sea where the waves crashed and split against writhing tentacles, whipping it into a foamy frenzy.

  Just before the water claimed her, Gami saw it: a spark on the dock, born from desperation and fury. It screamed across the storm like a line drawn under a very final sentence.

  Yenna had understood.

  Even as the ocean swallowed her whole and the bolt tore through the air in answer, Gami managed a smile. Small, tired, a little sad.

  She should have been content with the boredom.

  The boredom had been nice.

  ***

  “Row, row, row your dinghy,

  gently across the sea,

  merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

  This night is but a—”

  —BOOM.

  The aimless lullaby was interrupted by a sudden explosion that split the night. It bloomed on the horizon like a fiery flower, momentarily turning the restless sea into a tableau of startled reflections. Ripples rolled across the waves, shaking the dinghy.

  And then, as if on cue, came the third toll of a distant church bell.

  “The Depths seems eager tonight,” the Oarsman murmured, dipping the oars again with mechanical grace.

  “Indeed,” he added, almost like an afterthought, “she’ll soon need replacements.”

  Narrative Alignment: Complete.