Shadow Slave

1015 The Fall of Falcon Scott (33)

The deeper Bloodwave descended into the vast, boundless, dark abyss of the ocean, the more disturbed Sunny felt — and he had already been deeply uncomfortable before taking the plunge into the shallows. There was nothing but emptiness and oppressive darkness both above and below them, stretching endlessly into the unknown.

Even though Sunny could see through the water, unlike how it had been in the impenetrable darkness of the cursed sea of the Forgotten Shore, he was still distressed. The depths of the ocean were not a place meant for humans... they were its opposite. Coming here voluntarily was nothing but pure madness.

'I might have misunderstood the Nightwalkers. They are all lunatics...'

He shifted slightly and glanced at Naeve, who was holding tightly to the fin of the monstrous killer whale. The currents battered them, and the pressure was slowly growing unbearable. The scion of the House of Night was not exactly calm, but his unease was caused by the prospect of fighting a Corrupted Terror, not the watery abyss itself.

Strangely, Sunny's feelings were reversed. The Terror of LO49 was a harrowing foe, indeed, but he had faced plenty of those. The ocean, on the other hand, was an alien, unfamiliar, and fundamentally hostile space. It was abysmal in the purest sense of the word.

Grimacing, Sunny pulled himself closer to Bloodwave's fin and waited.

He did not know what exact means the Saint was using to track the hidden Terror. There was some pattern to his movements, but Sunny wasn't sure what it was. Sometimes, it felt as though the great predator was choosing the direction at random, but one thing remained constant — they were always moving deeper into the darkness.

Naeve had not spoken to him again, but there was also no reason to. Sunny briefly considered summoning the Extraordinary Rock to relay his thoughts, but then discarded that idea. He had nothing useful to say, and making too much noise could attract unwanted attention.

knew what horrors hid in the

of the residual trauma caused by brushing against a Nightmare Gate. He gritted his teeth and concentrated on suppressing the cough, forgetting even his fear of the ocean

almost missed the moment when the Terror finally revealed

the lightless abyss, an eerily beautiful

run through the enormous body of the giant killer whale and hearing its booming heartbeat change

strange, ghostly flower... a lily, perhaps, or a white lotus. Its pallid petals flowed and danced slowly in the darkness, some stretching for hundreds of meters into the empty

the petals

thought that he was looking at long stretches

was preoccupied with at

and things he could not name. They floated silently around the Terror, unmoving, their empty eyes staring blindly into the darkness. Some

eerie scene made him shudder. The otherworldly beauty of it all only made the visage more appalling. There

it impossible to look away from the Terror, but also unbearable to witness it. He felt mesmerized, frozen,

another presence, though. Suddenly, the darkness around them seemed to become tinted red, and he felt a deep

Bloodwave.

incensed, and whatever fear they might have felt was washed away by the

though the cloth petals