Crushing Depths

Marci screamed as her friends were sent crashing down into the churning ocean depths amidst the coiling and seething mass of the giant lake monster's dark scaled body. Old Snaggletooth, unless this stupid lake had a second terrible, monstrous serpent.

"Olaf!" she screamed as she lost sight of his pink hair. "Olaf!"

Fear, real fear gripped at her heart. She might not be able to perish, barring interventions like the one Gillian attempted, but her friends were not similarly deathless. She had been in plenty of dangerous situations with them before, but for some reason this felt different: less fight or flight; more deep, soul-crushing worry for others.

Was it that she didn't share their peril? That she knew, barring some kind of permanent bewitchment or unusual, exotic harm that befell her, that she would survive this journey? Was it that she had so much more power available now that suddenly everyone else seemed so incredibly fragile? Or was it that she was, more or less, responsible for this mission? Before, when she'd just been the party's mage, she'd more or less just tagged along with whatever jobs Olaf had thought were good. But this time, it was her who had devised this mission. That meant that this was her fault.

It was her fault that Olaf might well drown in this lake. In an instant, that cozy, warm, unlikely-but-possible future she had fantasised about became as brittle as sugar-glass, one tap away from shattering.

"No!" she roared in rage and fear, power flooding in through her unbreakable connection to the Shard as she swiped her hand upward and cast a third level spell, Florence's Icy Lance, the matrix so overpowered that the entire spell almost destabilised.

A lance of ice erupted from the lake's surface, flash freezing into a blade of razor-sharp ice that surged upward and caught the lake-monster in the neck, biting deep into the heavy, dark green scales.

Old Snaggletooth roared in pain as bright red blood poured from the wound, splashing down into the churning, roiling water. It immediately turned towards her, recognising her as the primary threat, and lunged at her a moment later. The immense lake-serpent's maw opened wide enough to swallow Tissa, let alone Marci, and snapped down on top of her with terrible swiftness.

Marci, however, felt no fear for herself. Instead it was with anger that she conjured a spherical shield around herself.

Sparks flew as the monster's massive fangs raked over the shimmering surface, but while the monster was large, there was no magical component to his teeth, and with the reserves of a Shardkeeper the monster would grow exhausted long before Marci did. Her shield held, solid and unyielding, and then, as Marci bared her teeth, it began to expand as she poured even more energy into it and modified the matrix on the fly.

The shield expanded, forcing the monster's jaws open with a shuddering, grinding motion, wider and wider until, with huge click the serpent's jaw locked open. The monster, realising something was wrong, shook its head back and fro, but the shield was stuck fast, and although the movement made her a little queasy, it didn't stop her pulling a dagger from its sheath at her waist.

The rough, cold-iron blade burned white as she imbued it with energy, runes swirling around her as she cast a deceptively simple-looking spell, but which was actually a rank four: Spirit Slash, a weird spell that Marci had never actually used in combat since, well, usually she didn't carry bladed weapons. She was a wizard, after all: sharp sticks were for people who couldn't use mathematics, logic, and science to reshape reality to their will.

Spirit Slash, however, was useful in this particular context thanks to the specific nature of the weapon that was being used as its focus, and the weakness that all fey creatures shared: cold iron.

Apparently, as recently as a thousand years ago, her own people had suffered from a weakness to the metal, and that anything more than brief contact would cause burns. Thankfully, that was no longer the case, although Marci had never liked objects made of the substance—ugly, that was how they'd always seemed.

Now, however, she was glad for the weapon, and the arc of ghostly white light that followed and expanded outward from the arc of a slash, the magic carrying the magical and thaumic properties of the dagger and dragging a mystic simulacrum ten times as long across the roof of the monster's mouth.

Blood erupted from the wound, briefly obscuring everything as the torrent rolled over her virtually friction-less shield and the monster jerked and spasmed, screaming loud enough to make her ears ache and trying and failing to dislodge her from where her spherical shield was wedged in its mouth..

Marci, however, didn't relent, she cast the spell again, this time lowering the dagger and then driving it straight upwards as she poured as much power as she thought she could get away with before the spell collapsed.

The blade erupted into a pillar of white light that cut straight through the roof of the monster's mouth and into the grey matter above, abruptly cutting off the great serpent's screams as it began to fall ponderously sideways.

Marci released the shield, lowering the blade as she watched the immense monster smashed down into the water, its great, once malevolent eyes now glassy and empty.

For a moment she was shocked and surprised by just how lethal that spell had been, and more than a little chuffed that she had obliterated a great and terrible monster in a matter of moments.

But then she remembered what was happening.

Olaf!

She swivelled in the air back to where the boat had vanished amidst now still, now limply floating coils to see Saoirse pulling the heavily armoured Tissa back to the surface, the Arana woman's armour glowing with a lightening spell that Marci should have cast and maintained on all of them but, in her infinite stupidity, hadn't.

Anke, too, was on the surface, clinging to a piece of the boat and looking like a drowned rat, next to Comrade Hugo. Which made sense, she'd only been in light armour, and was a bit over half her usual size.

But Olaf? He'd been in armour that, while not as heavy as Tissa's, was still heavy. And of fucking course Anke hadn't gone after him—she probably couldn't even cast Lighten or Breath Unending, the useless git.

Magic swirled around Marci as she dove, casting the second level spell, Detect Life. Her vision shifted, colour vanishing and the world becoming an expanse of blacks and greys, the only bright points the white life-force of her blazing friends, the green-gold of Comrade Hugo, and beneath her…

There! Small and rapidly retreating, but distinct and clear against the handful of fish that flickered like dull candles next to the blazing, surging star that was Olaf.

Marci dove, folding her wings against her back a moment before she hit the surface, unfurling them a moment later and using them in concert with her legs and arms to propel herself downwards towards where Olaf was slowly sinking.

Down and down she went, long enough that the short lived Detect Life spell expired, and replaced the world with pitch blackness, differentiated only by the thin trail of blurry bubbles that led to Olaf.

For several long moments saw nothing, and she began to panic, worrying that he might have sunk even further than she'd thought—it was easy to misjudge distance with Detect Life—but then she saw a hint of a shape in the gloom. She couldn't lose Olaf, she just couldn't.

She kicked and flapped harder, and it resolved into the pale-faced, terrified looking Olaf struggling to try and make his way back up to the retreating surface: arms and legs and tail thrashing, cheeks bulging and face pale.

Then his eyes saw her, and she saw him relax in an instant, releasing his pent up breath as he fell into a warm smile, the kind he had used to look at her with, back when they'd been younger—when they'd been together.

He reached for her, and she took his hand, a moment later sending a pulse of magic down his arm that coalesced into a bubble of air that formed around his head, allowing him to take a deep breath.

The terror that had been churning like a storm within her subsided, leaving behind all the roots of her extreme emotional reaction bare for her to see, like flotsam hurled far beyond the tide-line after a hurricane. She'd tried to deny it, tried to pretend that she wasn't really still in love with him, but she was.

Fear was the reason that when they'd talked about how things had ended back on the Dreadfort, before coming to the Feywilde, she hadn't really told him how she felt now. That, and self-loathing and the brittle and fractured self-esteem that she tried so very hard to hide with irreverence and arrogance and snarkiness ever since she'd been a little girl.

But after nearly losing Olaf, after seeing him vanish beneath the surface in heavy plate armour that she stupidly hadn't spelled to float, those reasons didn't seem very good, and she knew that she would have regretted it for the rest of her days if he'd perished and she'd never gotten to tell him how she really felt.

Which was why when the nervous, shy part of her heart tried to tell her that 'it's useless, you blew it, he's with Anke,' she paid it not the slightest mind. Come what may, he deserved to know how she felt, and she deserved better than never-ending, self-repressed longing. She'd put the cards on the table, and whatever would happen, would happen.

She leaned in and pressed her lips to his cheek, wrapping her arms around him and pulling him close. She whispered in his pink, cat-like ear and told him just how much he meant to her.

He hesitated for a moment, before putting his arms around her and holding her just as warmly and forcefully as if no time had passed, and the past few years were nothing but a bad dream.

When she ran the event back over in her mind, Marci wasn't sure which of them had started it, but suddenly they'd been kissing, lips locked together like vices, hands running through wet hair, and the whole world beyond falling away as they hung together in the inky depths of the lake.

Then Olaf jerked back and away, as if suddenly realising what he was doing. Although, the optimist in her pointed out, he didn't let her go.

"That- uh- sorry, um," he said. "I shouldn't- we shouldn't-"

Marci's heart, which had been soaring, fell a little. "Why?"

"I'm… I shouldn't have done that," he said. "I'm- I'm with Anke."

Marci's heart fell further. "But- but you kissed me back!" she said. "And our fantasy- I know you love me-"

"Marci, this- this isn't the time to talk about this," he said, gesturing around at the murky black water. "Look where we are."

She supposed that, if one looked at things rationally, that was a decent point. Except, she didn't feel like being rational. Rationality was overrated anyway, you could rationalise anything—Marci was a master at it, even—but the heart didn't lie. It wanted what it wanted, and she'd been a fool for ignoring it for so long.

"I love you, you love me - I don't see what's so complicated," she said.

"I'm in a relationship with Anke," he said. "I care about her. I don't… this would hurt her." He shook his head. "I shouldn't have done that. I'm sorry, it wasn't fair to you."

"But- but Anke wasn't in your fantasy," said Marci. "I was!"

"We don't know if that's how that worked-" he began, before stopping himself. "We really need to get back to the surface. But we'll… we'll discuss this, after we get out of the Feywilde, Okay? I'm not brushing you off, but… I need to think about this. Do this the right way. You deserve that, so does Anke."

Marci's heart fluttered again. Not brushing her off? Then she had a chance? He wasn't just dismissing her out of hand? Well, it wasn't as good as a prolonged snogging session with the person of her dreams, but if that was all that was on offer at the moment, then she'd take it.