Chapter 9: Blood for Water
The world snapped back with a vicious, dry clarity. Elias’s cheek was pressed against cold, gritty stone. Every nerve felt scraped raw, his skull pulsing with a dull, universal ache. The last dregs of his power were gone, truly gone, leaving a vacuum behind his ribs that felt dangerously close to collapse.
He became aware of two things simultaneously: a brutal, hammering heat on his back, and a bone-deep chill everywhere else. He peeled his eyes open.
The sky was wrong. It was a pale, searing blue, bleached of all compassion, and at its zenith burned not one sun, but two. They hung like twin forge-coals, small and furious, their light a physical weight. It was midday in the Glass Flats.
A shadow fell over him, blocking the direct glare. Caius.
“Welcome back,” Caius said. His voice was tight, stripped of all its usual dark amusement. He was crouched beside Elias, one hand braced on the cracked ground. His red eyes scanned the horizon with a tactical flatness, but the line of his shoulders was rigid. “Can you stand?”
Elias tried to push himself up. His arms trembled, buckled. “Give me… a decade. Or a stretcher.” His voice was a dusty croak.
Caius didn’t argue. He simply hooked his hands under Elias’s arms and hauled him upright in one smooth, powerful motion. Elias’s legs folded; Caius took his full weight, pulling an arm across his broad shoulders. Elias’s head lolled against Caius’s neck. The skin there was shockingly cool.
“The air is thin. The cold is deceptive. The sun will cook you alive in an hour.” Caius listed the facts as he began to walk, half-carrying Elias over the uneven, rust-colored ground. “Your little excursion saved us weeks of travel. It also stranded us in the most exposed part of the basin.”
“You’re… welcome,” Elias gasped, each step a jolt of pain. The landscape was a nightmare of stark beauty. Before them, great spears of translucent quartz erupted from the earth, twisting towards the twin suns. They glittered with a vicious, mirrored intensity, refracting the light into razor-sharp rainbows that danced over the rocks. It was silent, a silence so profound it pressed on the eardrums. The only sound was the crunch of their footsteps and the distant, eerie whistle of wind through crystal teeth.
“I didn’t bring water,” Elias mumbled, the realization a douse of cold fear.
“I know.” Caius adjusted his grip, his hand firm around Elias’s waist. “Your spellwork was… impressively catastrophic. You left no room for logistics.”
They moved towards a cluster of smaller, broken spires that offered a sliver of jagged shade. The relief from the direct sunlight was instant and immense. Elias sagged. Caius lowered him to the ground, his back against a sun-warmed quartz slab.
Elias’s vision swam. The heat was inside him now, a fever burning through the depletion. He felt his control, the fragile mask of his humanity, begin to slip. His skin itched, a phantom sensation of shifting contours. A wisp of something like lavender-tinted smoke escaped his lips with his next exhale.
Caius saw it. His eyes locked onto it, then snapped back to Elias’s face. “You’re losing form.”
“It’s the… the backlash.” Elias shut his eyes, concentrating on the feel of solid stone at his back, on the pattern of his own breathing. Human breathing. “The fey part… it doesn’t like being empty. It tries to fill the space.”
“And what does it fill it with?” Caius’s voice was dangerously soft.
“Whatever’s nearby.” Elias opened his eyes, his green gaze shimmering with an unstable, silver light. “Light. Heat. Hunger.”
A gust of wind kicked up, scouring the basin with grit. It carried a new sound—a low, building moan, the sound of a thousand crystal mouths humming. Caius looked up, his profile sharp against the brightening sky. To the west, beyond the spiraling towers, the air was darkening. Not with clouds, but with a rising, ochre wall of solid grit.
“Sandstorm.” Caius said the word like a curse. He looked down at Elias, his expression carving itself into grim lines. “We need deeper shelter. Now.”
“Can’t…” Elias began, but Caius was already moving.
He scooped Elias up again, this time cradling him fully against his chest. The world tilted. Elias’s head spun with nausea and disorientation. Caius ran, not with the frantic panic of a prey animal, but with the powerful, ground-eating strides of a predator fleeing a forest fire. The humming grew to a roar. The light died, smothered by the advancing, stinging brown veil.
Caius spotted it—a darker shadow at the base of a massive, leaning spire. A fissure in the rock, just wide enough to admit them. He ducked inside, twisting his body to shield Elias from the lashing grit as he plunged into darkness.
The cave was shallow, barely more than a scooped-out hollow under ten feet deep. The roar of the storm became a deafening shriek at the mouth, but inside, the air was still and thick with the smell of ancient dust and cool stone.
Caius set Elias down gently against the far wall. The relative quiet was immediate, oppressive. Outside, the world had vanished into a tan nightmare.
Elias was shaking. Not from cold, but from the effort of holding himself together. The fever was spiking, his magic-scorched channels seeking any source of energy to repair themselves. They were pulling on the ambient heat, on the static charge in the air, on the latent life force in the very rock. He could feel his edges softening, his human shape becoming a suggestion rather than a fact. His hands, when he looked at them, seemed to flicker—solid one moment, then briefly translucent, swirling with that same lavender-and-smoke essence.
“Look at me.” Caius’s command cut through the haze. He knelt before Elias, his large hands framing Elias’s face. His touch was like an anchor. “Focus on my voice. You are Elias Thorne. You are in a cave. You are with me.”
“Caius…” Elias’s voice echoed, layered with something breathy and unnatural. A wisp of that colorful smoke escaped again, curling towards Caius’s mouth before dissipating.
Caius didn’t flinch. “I am here. You are not empty. You are here with me.” His thumbs stroked his temples, a rough, rhythmic counterpoint to the chaos unspooling inside him. “Your body is yours. Claim it.”
Elias tried. He clung to the cold strength of Caius’s hands, to the adamant focus in those red eyes. He pulled the scattered pieces of himself back inward, wrestling the alien awareness into a corner of his mind. The flickering subsided, his hands solidifying. The smoke faded. He drew in a ragged, human breath.
“Good,” Caius murmured, his own breath a puff of warmth in the chill air. “Good.”
A new sound tore through the relative quiet of the cave. Not the storm. This was closer. A dry, skittering rattle, like pebbles being shaken in a giant’s fist. It came from the wall.
Caius was moving before Elias could process it. He shoved Elias flat to the ground, his own body coming down over him as a shield. Not a second too late.
The rock face to their left exploded outward.
A segmented, chitinous leg, as thick as Elias’s thigh and glistening with oily iridescence, speared through the air where his head had been. A monstrous scorpion, the color of the rusty flats, hauled its bulk into the cramped space. It was too big, a nightmare squeezed into a tomb. Its pincers, each the size of a scythe, snapped with enough force to cleave stone. Its barbed tail, a poised arc of venom-dripping chitin, curled over its back, searching for a target.
The cave was now a cage.
Caius rolled off Elias, placing himself between the creature and its easier prey. The scorpion focused on him, its multitude of eyes glittering with mindless hunger. It lunged, a startling burst of speed for its size. Caius dove under the snapping pincer, the claw screeching as it gouged a channel in the stone where he’d stood.
Elias pushed himself up on his elbows, his mind screaming through the fog of his dissolution. He had no magic left. No strength. But the fey part, the starving, desperate part, was wide awake and howling at the proximity of such vibrant, violent life force.
Caius danced back from another pincer strike, his movements fluid but confined. There was no room for his preferred overwhelming force. He needed an opening.
The tail struck. A blur of lethal motion aimed straight for Caius’s chest. He caught it.
His hands, bare and human-seeming, closed around the barbed stinger just below the venom sac. The muscles in his arms corded, tendons standing out in sharp relief. The scorpion’s forward momentum halted, its body crushing against the cave wall with a sickening crunch of its own armor. It shrieked, a sound like grinding shale.
It was trying to wrench its tail free, to drive the stinger home. Caius held it, locked in a brutal tug-of-war, his boots sliding in the dust. One hand slipped lower, gripping the tail segment. With a roar that was more fury than effort, he began to bend it.
Elias felt it then—a surging, agonizing pull from deep within his own shattered core. The scorpion’s life force was a raging torrent right in front of him. His control shattered.
His body didn’t change. Instead, a beam of concentrated, amethyst light lanced from his chest. It wasn’t magic he commanded. It was magic that vomited out of him, a reflexive, desperate purge. It hit the scorpion’s underbelly, where the chitin was thinner.
There was no explosion. No flash of fire. The creature simply… ceased. Its shriek cut off into a wet gurgle. Its obsidian eyes filmed over, turning a milky, dead white. From within its armored shell came a sound like a hundred bones turning to ash all at once. It slumped, a hollow, desiccated shell, its internal structures utterly annihilated.
The beam winked out. The recoil slammed Elias back against the wall. A searing, white-hot pain bloomed in his chest, spreading through his veins like liquid iron. He couldn’t scream. His throat locked. He convulsed, his back arching off the ground.
Caius, now holding only a limp, disconnected tail segment, dropped it and was at his side in an instant. “Elias!”
Elias’s eyes were wide, unseeing, filled with the same dying lavender light that had just executed the creature. Smoke, thick and cloying, poured from his mouth and nostrils. He was burning up from the inside, the foreign magic consuming what little reserves he had left.
Caius did the only thing he could think of. He slapped a hand over Elias’s heart, not in violence, but in a desperate attempt to ground him. To pull him back. His own unique hunger, the vacuum that lived within him, yawned open. But he didn’t pull. He pushed.
A shock of cold, deep as a glacier’s heart, flooded from Caius’s hand into Elias’s chest. It was a burst of his own unnatural vitality, offered freely, a dam against the conflagration.
The searing pain met the deep freeze. Elias gasped, a raw, shuddering sound. The smoke cleared from his airways. His vision swam back, focusing on Caius’s face above him, etched with a stark, unguarded fear.
Outside, the sandstorm’s scream began to gradually diminish, fading to a weary sigh. Inside the cave, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the soft, settling patter of dust from the shattered wall.
Elias lay spent, every nerve screaming in the aftermath. The scorpion was a collapsed husk nearby. Caius still had his hand splayed over Elias’s heart, the cold slowly receding, leaving behind a strange, steadying thrum.
“You,” Elias whispered, his voice cracked and ruined, “are a terrible… distraction.”
Caius’s worried expression didn’t change. He leaned closer, his red eyes searching Elias’s. “What did you do?”
“I have no idea.” Elias swallowed against a dry throat. “But I think… I think it’s still hungry.”
The silence that followed was thick with the dust of the dead thing and the weight of what Elias had just done—or what had been done through him. Caius finally pulled his hand back from Elias’s chest, the ghost of that stabilizing chill lingering on his skin like a rumor. He looked at his own palm, then at the hollowed shell of the scorpion.
“It fed on it,” Caius said, his voice low. “Your… hunger. It acted on its own.”
“Told you,” Elias breathed, letting his head thud back against the stone. The feverish pull had subsided, replaced by a hollow, gnawing emptiness that was almost worse. “It’s not picky.”
Outside, the relentless shriek of the sandstorm was softening into a long, gritty exhale. The light bleeding back into the cave mouth was the deep, bruised purple of dusk. The twin suns were sinking, their murderous heat retreating.
“We stay here until you can walk without falling over,” Caius stated, his tone leaving no room for argument. He began brushing the finer dust from his clothes, a practical gesture that seemed at odds with the cave’s recent violence.
Elias pushed himself up onto his elbows. A wave of dizziness hit him, but he rode it out. “We move now. At night.”
“You’re delirious.”
“I’m pragmatic,” Elias countered, his voice gaining a shred of its old strength. “The heat’s gone. That’s the only reason I’m not currently melting. And every creature with a brain in this basin will be tracking the scent of that thing’s death.” He nodded toward the scorpion carcass. “Its friends will come. I’d rather not be here when they do.”
Caius watched him, his red eyes calculating. “You can barely sit up.”
“Then you’ll carry me again,” Elias said, meeting his gaze without flinching. “Or I’ll crawl. But we are leaving this tomb.”
A tense silence stretched between them, broken only by the final whispers of the retreating storm. Caius’s jaw tightened. He saw the stubborn set of Elias’s shoulders, the familiar, infuriating glint of recklessness in his green eyes. Arguing would waste time.
“Fine,” Caius bit out. He stood, offering a hand. “But if you pass out, I’m not doing the heroic rescue. I’m leaving you as a diversion.”
Elias grasped his forearm, his grip weaker than he wanted. “Noted.”
The flats under the moon were a different world. The brutal, chromic glare was gone, replaced by a soft silver luminescence that made the quartz spires glow with an internal, cold fire. The air, while still thin, carried a sharp, clean chill that helped clear the lingering fog from Elias’s mind. He walked, leaning heavily on Caius for the first hour, each step a negotiation with his own body.
“Slower,” Caius grunted, adjusting his support as Elias stumbled over a hidden ridge.
“Faster,” Elias gasped back, sweat cooling on his brow. “I hear clicking.”
It was a lie, but it worked. Caius’s head swiveled, scanning the jagged shadows. He kept them moving at a punishing, steady pace. Elias’s world narrowed to the next foothold, the next labored breath, the solid, unyielding presence beside him. The miles blurred under a sky dusted with unfamiliar, cold stars.
Then, a new sound threaded through the silence—a distant, liquid whisper. The scent on the air changed, from dry stone and dust to the mineral tang of water and wet clay.
They found the river in a deep, shadowed crack in the basin floor. It wasn’t wide, but it was swift and dark, cutting a serpentine path through the crystal. And there, pulled up on a narrow shelf of gravel, was a boat.
It was long and low, a shallow-draft river runner made of some dark, resinous wood. It looked abandoned, not derelict. A single, long pole lay across its gunwales.
Caius eyed it with deep suspicion. “A trap.”
“A miracle,” Elias corrected, his fatigue making him giddy. He limped toward it, running a hand along the smooth, cool hull. No cracks. No holes. “Someone’s lottery ticket. Now it’s ours.”
“It’s conspicuous.”
“So are we,” Elias said, already trying to calculate how to get in without tipping it over. “And it’s downriver. Which is the way we need to go.”
Getting Elias into the boat was an undignified process of lifting, shoving, and a bitten-off curse as he crumpled into the bottom. Caius followed, his weight making the craft settle into the water with a soft, confident sigh. He took up the pole, testing its strength against the riverbed. It held.
With a powerful shove, they left the gravel shelf. The current caught them immediately, pulling them into the gentle, central flow. The sound changed again—the quiet rush of water, the soft knock of the pole against the hull. The crystalline walls of the canyon slid by, monolithic and silent.
Elias lay propped against the stern, watching the stars smear past the high canyon edges. The motion was soothing. The emptiness inside him was still there, a quiet, yawning pit, but the immediate threat had passed. For now.
Caius stood amidships, a dark silhouette against the starry ribbon of sky, poling with an efficient, rhythmic grace. The river did most of the work.
“You know,” Elias said after a long while, his voice quiet in the liquid dark, “this reminds me of the Saffran Dunes. The river there was ochre red, from the clay. They had these flatbread boats… vendors would paddle them right up to yours. Sell you spiced lentils, or fried dough stuffed with honey and rosehip.”
Caius didn’t turn. “You’ve been there?”
“Before. A lifetime ago.” Elias closed his eyes, the memory vivid. “The bread was so thin it crisped in the sun. You had to eat it fast or it’d dissolve into the river. Everything tasted like dust and roses and cardamom.”
The pole dipped, pushed. Water gurgled. “Sounds messy.”
“It was.” A faint smile touched Elias’s cracked lips. “Everything there was. Beautiful, but messy. The heat there was different. A dry, baking heat that cooked the air until it shimmered. Not like this… this grilling-rack sunburn hell.”
Caius was silent for a few more pole strokes. “What were you doing there?”
“Trying not to die. Mostly failing.” Elias opened his eyes, looking at Caius’s broad back. “A story for another time. When we have wine. Or whatever passes for it here.”
The river bent, and a collective, faint shimmer became visible far ahead in the night—a hazy, geometric refraction of starlight. The Crystal Pyramid. Still distant, but now a destination, not an impossible dream.
Caius saw it too. His poling never faltered. The boat glided forward, carried by the water and his steady, silent effort. Elias watched him, the easy strength in his shoulders, the focused set of his profile against the night. He was free. He’d been released from his debt. And yet, here he was, poling a stolen boat through a cursed desert.
“You could go, you know,” Elias said, the words leaving him before he could stop them. “Now. You don’t owe me a damn thing.”
Caius’s pole plunged into the water, deep and sure. He didn’t look back. “The river only flows one way.”
The silence after his words wasn’t empty. It was filled with the river’s pull and the weight of the unmade choice. Elias let it hang, too tired to press. The star-reflecting pyramid grew from a shimmer to a distinct, angular silhouette against the deep violet sky. Dawn was a pale suggestion bleeding into the east, washing the stars away.
The river widened here, the current slowing to a oily, smooth glide. The water turned a peculiar, milky turquoise, so clear Elias could see strange, pale fronds weaving on the bottom ten feet down. The crystal banks gave way to rough, porous black rock.
“It’s quiet,” Caius murmured, his grip tightening on the pole.
“Too quiet,” Elias agreed, pushing himself up to a sitting position. His bones felt loose, his muscles water. The thrumming void inside him yawned wider, sensitive to the shift. The air smelled of wet stone and something else—a sharp, coppery ozone, like the moment before lightning strikes.
The water directly ahead of the boat simply erupted.
It wasn’t a leap. It was an uncoiling. A vast, sinewy body, the color of tarnished silver and thick as a mature oak, broke the surface in a cascading roar. A neck longer than their boat snaked upwards, culminating in a head that was all jaws and needle-teeth. Its eyes were flat black discs, reflecting the dying night with no intelligence, only hunger. A primary river guardian.Ancient.Territorial.
Their boat rocked violently, threatening to capsize. Caius drove the pole down, not to propel them, but to anchor them, bracing against the furious swirl.
From the disturbed water around the leviathan, a dozen smaller shapes boiled to the surface. These were the size of large dogs, their bodies streamlined and armored with bony plates, their mouths circular and lined with rotating teeth. They moved with terrifying, synchronized purpose, swarming toward the boat.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Elias breathed.
Caius was already in motion. He abandoned the pole, letting the boat drift. His hands, now sheathed in a flickering darkness that drank the dawn light, shot out. He grabbed the first creature that launched itself at the gunwale. There was a wet, crunching sound, and he flung its limp form into two others, disrupting their charge. He became a whirling axis of controlled violence, intercepting leaps, snapping armored spines with brutal efficiency, his movements economical and devastating. But for every one he disabled, two more took its place. They were trying to overwhelm the boat, to tip it, to get to the easier meal inside.
The great head swung down, jaws opening wide enough to swallow their vessel whole. The stink of its breath was of deep water and rotting fish.
Elias stood up.
The boat rocked. “Elias, sit down!” Caius snarled, backhanding a creature into the water.
Elias ignored him. He raised his hands, not in a complex casting gesture, but in a simple, desperate pushing motion, as if he could shove the monster away by will alone. He had nothing left. No carefully woven spells, no reservoirs of power. Just the raw, starving, reflexive hungers that had hollowed the scorpion.
He didn’t command it. He unleashed it.
A torrent of violent amethyst energy, chaotic and jagged, blasted from his palms. It wasn’t a beam this time; it was a crude, wide spray, a magical shriek. It slammed into the creature’s throat and chest.
The monster recoiled, not in pain, but in confusion. The energy wasn’t burning it—it was unmaking the water around its scales, dissolving the connective tissue in its hide, turning a patch of its silver skin into a bubbling, necrotic slurry. It bellowed, a sound that shook water from the canyon walls. It thrashed, its colossal tail whipping up a wave that swamped the boat.
Icy water hit Elias, shocking the last of his breath away. He staggered, his concentration shattered. The chaotic magic sputtered and died. The minor monsters, sensing a break, redoubled their efforts. One clamped onto Caius’s forearm, its teeth grinding against the preternatural toughness of his flesh. He tore it off, dark blood—his or its, it was impossible to tell—spattering the water.
The great beast, wounded and furious, dove. Not away.Under.
The boat lifted, violently, from beneath. Caius grabbed for Elias as the world tilted. They were thrown into the frigid, churning water.
The shock was absolute. The current seized Elias, dragging him down. He fought, but his limbs were leaden. The last of his air escaped in a silver bubble. Above him, the silhouette of the boat spun away. Shapes darted in the murk—the smaller hunters, coming to finish the job.
Something massive brushed past him in the dark.A scaled flank. The guardian, circling.
A hand locked in his hair, a brutal, yanking grip. Caius. He hauled Elias upward, kicking fiercely against the pull of the deep. They broke the surface into chaos. Elias choked, sucking in a lungful of spray and air. The great head surged from the water beside them, jaws gaping.
Elias did the only thing left. He reached out, not with his hands, but with that hollow, screaming core of himself, and he pulled.
He drew the life from the water itself, from the frantic energy of the circling minor beasts, from the very electric impulse driving the monster’s massive heart. It was a theft on a cellular level. Amethyst light crackled under the monster’s scales, from inside its body. Its black eyes filmed over, instantly. Its lunge became a spasmodic shudder. It sank, not with a thrash, but with a sudden, profound limpness, a continent sliding into the deep.
The smaller creatures, their binding will extinguished, scattered.
Elias had no triumph. The theft had filled him with a screaming, alien heat, a sickening rush of foreign vitality that his own shattered channels couldn’t hold. His body convulsed. He sank.
Caius dragged him. One arm locked across Elias’s chest, he swam with a furious, rolling stroke toward the black rock bank. The current fought them. Elias’s limp weight fought them. Caius’s boots finally found purchase on slick stone. He hauled them both, stumbling, coughing, out of the river and onto a narrow shelf.
He dumped Elias onto the gravel, dropping to his knees beside him. “Breathe. Just breathe.”
Elias was breathing, but it was all wrong. Ragged, wet inhalations that hitched with involuntary magic. Lavender smoke and tiny, crackling arcs of amethyst energy spilled from his mouth with every exhale. His skin flickered, translucent, revealing the frantic, turbulent lightstorm raging beneath. He was a cracked vessel, boiling over.
He rolled onto his side, away from Caius, and pushed at him weakly. “Get away.”
Caius didn’t move. “Stop it. Control it.”
“I can’t!” The words were a half-scream, distorted. The air around Elias began to hum, vibrating with the pressure of the unstable power leaking out of him. Small pebbles on the bank trembled. “It’s going to… it doesn’t know how to stop. Go. Now.”
He shoved at Caius again, with more force this time, a pulse of that wild energy lending strength to the movement. It wasn’t a request. It was an order, born of raw panic. “Leave, Caius! Get clear!”
Caius rocked back on his heels, but he didn’t stand. He didn’t flee. He watched as Elias curled in on himself, muscles rigid, back arching as the stolen energies warred inside him. The magical discharge intensified, scorching the damp gravel beneath him into glassy patches.
A bitter, mocking smile touched Caius’s bloody lips. He sat down, right there, just out of reach of the snapping energy, and leaned back against the black rock as if settling in for a show. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“Fine,” he said, his voice cutting through the din with absurd calm. “Do your worst. But I’m not fetching you a blanket when you’re done.”