“Water remembers everything it touches,” Kira said, coral spheres pulsing in the crushing dark. “That’s what they taught us in Maralyd.”
“They were wrong,” Lira replied, feeling the ocean’s weight press against her earth-sense. “Water doesn’t just remember. It keeps.”
Their shared magic sphere – a creation born of necessity and desperation – held back the crushing pressure around them. Within its boundaries, Kira’s water magic maintained their bubble of breathable liquid, thin enough to draw oxygen from but dense enough to protect them from the deep’s killing weight. Lira’s earth-sense reinforced it, reading the pressure patterns to strengthen their defenses where needed.
Not like Maralyd’s elegant domes. This was older magic. Rawer. Born of water’s first dances with stone.
Around them, the deep sang ancient songs. Not the gentle harmonies of Maralyd’s shallows, but older music. The kind that pressure made when it turned water solid and stone liquid. The kind that spoke of what lived in the space between elements, back when earth and water were still learning their names.
Their magic lit the darkness in different ways – Kira’s spheres casting blue-white radiance that caught on things that might be ruins, might be creatures, might be memories the deep hadn’t decided to release yet. Lira’s earth-mark blazed green-gold, reading stories in sediment layers that had never seen sun.
“There,” Lira said, touching the sphere’s wall. Where her fingers met the barrier, earth-sense translated pressure into images: “The water’s flowing wrong here. Moving against currents that haven’t shifted in ten thousand years.”
Kira nodded, her coral spheres resonating with something hidden in the dark. Through the liquid they breathed, her voice came clear but strange: “The sediment layers… they’re not just rock anymore, are they?”
“No.” Lira felt it through her connection to stone – patterns in the seabed that hadn’t been made by natural forces. Foundations of something vast. Something that had stood when the world was young. “They’re remembering what they used to be.”
Something moved in the dark beyond their light. Something big.
Their sphere’s wall rippled as pressure patterns shifted. All around them, the deep was changing. Water grew thick with more than just weight – thick with memory, with time, with the remnants of magics that existed before separation.
Kira’s hands moved through forms that felt older than training, guiding their sphere through spaces that tried to remember too much at once. “Look at the currents,” she breathed. “They’re writing…”
She was right. The water itself formed scripts in pressure and flow, the same patterns that had been spreading across their skin since they began their descent. Stories written in the language of first rain, of ancient tides, of when ocean and earth still shared the same dance.
Through their liquid air, Lira tasted salt that hadn’t existed since the first sea fell from heaven. Her earth-sense reached deeper, reading layers of stone that held memories older than rock:
Great cities where water and earth moved as one force.
Temples raised by tide and tectonics together.
Beings that lived in the space between solid and fluid.
Songs that taught the elements their first names.
“The temple has to be close,” Kira said, her spheres humming louder, trying to harmonize with songs that existed before coral learned to grow. “The water’s getting… strange.”
Strange was one word for it. Lira felt it through her earth-magic – the way pressure and depth were folding here, creating spaces that shouldn’t exist. Places where water remembered being something else, something older.
Something vast rose from the darkness below.
Not a void-hunter.
Not a sea creature.
Not anything that had a name in their tongues.
But in its presence, both their magics blazed brighter, recognizing something that existed when earth and water first learned to dance.
Their sphere pulsed with shared power as the ancient thing drew closer. Within their bubble of liquid air, pressure sang harmonies that hadn’t been heard since the first rain fell.
Time to remember older songs.
Time to learn what the deep kept.
Time to wake up what slept in darkness.
And hope they were ready for what answered.