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for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
- e. e. cummings
Nothing is ever dark like deep water.Maybe humans are more used to it – maybe this is what any ordinary night looked like to Vandren, looks like to Caleb and to Beau. But if it is, Fjord is frankly amazed that anyone sets foot outside their door after the sun goes down.It's a foolish fear. Everything about himself that Fjord is proud to carry, it's something he learned at sea. (Beau's robes wave in the current at the corner of his eye; Jester is bobbing her head to a song no one else can hear as she kicks her way through the deep water. He glances away from both of them and his gaze catches on the falchion, on its new delicate Summer's Dance curve.)Well. Fjord kicks his way deeper, his friends a V to either side. However these last few months have claimed him, he grew up at sea. Truly grew up; came of age. The untamed ocean is his home, far more than any port. It should be home.It's just that the back of his neck doesn't think so, and that his skin prickles. But on the other hand, he grew up on the surface. As changeable as the surface can be, the depths are still a stranger country.He kicks his way deeper and tries not to imagine a golden eye behind him.He expects – they all expect – a struggle, a temple and a trap or two and something dangerous and toothy that wants to see them dead. Instead they only find smooth sand and white stone, laid out in slow and careful knee-high curves. It wouldn't even be a barrier on land, let alone under the water.“It is a labyrinth,” Caleb announces, eyeing the near stone swirls. The blue glow fades from his eyes; Frumpkin must be making his way back.“Who puts a maze underwater?” Jester wants to know, wrinkling her nose. “We can just swim over it.”“Maybe it sank?” Nott asks.“It is not exactly the same as a maze,” Caleb says. “There is only one path, it's just... a big spiral, really, and you wander in circles until you get to the middle and there you are.”“Oh yeah,” Caduceus says, one ear twitching in the swirl of the water. “Yeah, you walk them. It's for meditating.”“Is anyone going to point out,” Beau says, “that a labyrinth kind of looks like a curled-up snake?”“Well, I mean –” Nott starts, at the same time as Jester says, “Mmmmm –” The inevitable bickering crashes over them. Fjord lets it flow over and around him, voices piling on each other. His fingers are getting cold.“I'll go,” he says. The entrance to the labyrinth is six feet to his right; a few quick kicks. “I'm going to walk it.”There is a silence. Beau is biting her lip. Nott looks like she might throw up, but then, they're underwater, where she always looks a bit like that. There's no smile in Jester's face.“Walk it, or swim it?” Caleb asks, into the silence. Fjord considers.“Walk it,” he says, and settles into the seabed, sand pooling in slow clouds around him. “Anything dangerous happens, just... swim right to me, okay? Forget the labyrinth.”None of them answer; they just look at each other and back to him. There's a whole bunch of stupid things he wants to say and an old accent waiting to take control of his tongue. “I'll be right back,” he says instead, and steps forward, leaving a trail of clouding sand behind him.Beau was right; Beau is right about a lot of things. Walking the labyrinth under the sea is a lot like walking the curves of a snake. It could be a nautilus, or a coil of rope, or the spiral of a tiefling's massive horn; but it's a snake's coils he's caught in, delivering himself up into the teeth.The center is plain: a five-foot circle of smooth white stone, grown over with algae, blown over with sand. If there are joins in the rock, the sand and the algae hide them. Fjord pushes himself through the water, floats the last few feet and lets his feet settle slow on the stone. His friends are a pinprick of rosy enchanted light in the murk of the water, nothing more.There is a divot at his feet, and the falchion warm under his hand. And there are no eyes in the depths, not yet. None except the one he carries.Fjord kneels. The eye in the blade stares up at him. He closes his own eyes, flinching away from the blank gold gaze.It's too easy to remember Avantika's hands reaching out for the stone; too easy to remember her hands on his. She guided his fingers to her hair and her breasts and the cleft of her thighs and the stone in her chest; and when she crooked her long sure fingers the water leaped at her command. And she had her hands clenched into fists at her sides when the Plank-King snapped her neck on the Mighty Nein's word.She touched him gently, for all her air of command, and she was patient with the flashes of inexperienced uncertainty that he couldn't, in the end, hide. And she would have killed him too, for Uk'otoa's power; of that, he has no doubt. Fjord would like, someday, to share his bed with somebody he cares about. Somebody special. Instead he came into her bed and set her up to die, and he meant to do it.These are not good thoughts to think, at the verge of a decision that he'd thought he'd made already. He opens his eyes, and the first thing he sees is the rose-pink flicker of Caduceus's light, deep in the water.Caduceus is a good man; Fjord's noticed that. Not always bright, but good. And generous. Vandren would have liked him; or at least, the Vandren who Fjord knew would have liked him. Fjord's not so sure Caduceus will like Vandren, anymore. And he knows Caduceus will be frowning, looking out over the labyrinth and the dark, ears twitching towards the slightest sound. He will not be liking this.Beau must be frowning too, out at the edge of the labyrinth. She has a conscience-frown she uses: eyebrows drawn close together, teeth worrying her lower lip. She wears it every time she looks at the crew, these days. (Vandren said to him, once: a little responsibility can be the making of someone. It was a story about his father giving him a puppy as a child. Fjord had eaten up the details, embarrassingly starved.) Beau has been wearing that frown at Fjord, lately.Yasha will be next to Beau, most likely; or rather, Beau keeps herself next to Yasha. Yasha will – will have her arms folded, most likely, as she often does. She hasn't said much about this wild-fish-chase, impassive soul she always is, but – she had a journey she was making too, back at the start of all of this. She'd set it aside, quiet as the sunrise, to follow him.Jester was next to Yasha when he left, and Fjord can't for the life of him say what Jester will be doing. She might be bouncing around, happy as a clam, finding sparkly narwhal unicorns in the dark where Fjord only sees eyes. Fjord has an awful feeling, though, that she's standing with her skirt in a drifting cloud around her and one hand on her holy symbol, her hair swaying like kelp over her fathomless lost eyes. She's stronger than he's ever been, and that means he can't begin to guess her breaking points. But by all the gods, he doesn't want to be one of them.(That's something Vandren said to him, too, said to Fjord and a circle of a deckhands passing a bottle of rum around: that just because you think someone is stronger than you, it doesn't mean they can carry all your weight. That the stronger someone is, the bigger the gulf there is between you, the harder it is to see their breaking points. Maybe, looking back, he meant Avantika; or maybe, looking back, it was something Avantika should have seen in him. Maybe, only now, it occurs to Fjord that Vandren might have been warning them all about himself.)(Fjord doesn't know if he regrets loving his captain as much as he did, but he's damn sure he couldn't help it.)Fjord shakes his head, tries to shake off the thought, tries to ignore the glint of something golden in the distant deep. It might be Caleb's lights, fire-gold, circling next to Caduceus's rosier glow; hell, Nott's eyes are golden too. It could be only that. Nott must be flitting all over the place, drink-muddled and stubborn; she spent the whole journey down kicking her way from Jester to Caleb and back again. Even with a full bottle of mead in her, he could see her knuckles going white on the stock of her crossbow. But she swam down anyway, to keep Jester feeling safe. Maybe, too, to keep Fjord himself safe, and it would be easier to buy up all the buttons he could find and seed them at the bottom of the sea than to accept that white-knuckled concerned courage.Caleb is the only damn one, out of the lot of them, who thinks what Fjord is doing might make any sense at all, and that isn't exactly what Fjord would call a reassuring fact. It's hard not to think about their blood clouding in the water, and the clouds gathering over the Squall-Eater above; it's hard not to think about Caleb's hand on the High Richter's scroll case, and the bob of his Adam's apple with Fjord's falchion pointed at his throat. Hard, too, not to think of the paleness in Caleb's face as they made their way home from the Diver's Grave, or the way he'd swayed as they got on deck. His heart had stopped already that day, and he poured his blood out onto that table for Fjord's curiosity anyhow, and that's – that's a lot. Not all of it is good.Fjord bites his lip, glancing down at the falchion again, at the eye staring expectantly up at him. At the curve of the falchion, the golden Summer's-Edge sheen at the tip. Missing Molly hits him like a muscle cramp, painful and shocking and knotted tight somewhere under the breastbone. Molly would be here, Fjord is sure, here on the ocean bed with the rest, helping him chase locked-away nightmares. And Molly wouldn't have liked it one bit.Whoever that was came to that end, and I want nothing to do with that. It's a clearer memory than Fjord would like: the sharp set of Molly's shoulders, his stubborn jaw, the emphatic flick of his hands as he weighed out the price of power. No way in hell would Molly have gone leviathan-hunting, in Fjord's place. He would have run the opposite direction and kept running till he hit desert. And yet, if he hadn't died trying to chase Fjord down – if Fjord hadn't been stupid enough to wander away from camp in the dark – Molly would be here, now, rolling his eyes at the edge of the labyrinth, making sure Fjord knew what a bad idea this was. But here.Instead Fjord has a sword with a curve to the edge and gold at the tip, and six other people waiting at the edge of the labyrinth.The divot in the seabed waits for him, a lock waiting for the key he carries. More and more it sounds like Vandren would have opened it. Avantika did. Molly never would have.The others are waiting for him.“Maybe,” Fjord says out loud, and lets Vandren's accent bleed out of the words. “Maybe there's more than one kind of power.” Maybe there's more than one way for a green-skinned sailor with tusks in his jaw to make good.Fjord lets the falchion vanish back to wherever it goes and kicks his way up from the ocean floor.It's a lot faster on the way back, swimming over the walls of the labyrinth. Caleb is letting Jester play with one of Frumpkin's tentacles, both of them fretful and frowning; Nott is saying something quiet to Beau. Caduceus and Yasha are staring into the different distances; Yasha scowling, Caduceus with an absent smile. None of them are quite how he'd pictured them waiting, and yet they all exactly are.Caduceus, of course, is the first to see them. He lifts one shaggy arm, fur drifting on the water as he points. Jester drops Frumpkin's tentacle-tip, waving.“Fjord! Fjord!”“How did it go?” Caleb asks more quietly, his eyes fixed on Caleb's face. Fjord shrugs, fighting the urge to pick at his lip, or his tusks.“I didn't do it.”Widened eyes, raised eyebrows around the circle. Nott's ears flair out indignantly. “Well, what the fuck did we come down here for then?” she demands.“Maybe we came down here so he could make that decision,” Beau suggests, raising her eyebrows. Fjord coughs, his ears burning.“Something... something like that, yeah. Sorry to put you all out. I'll, uh, I'll buy you a drink when we get to shore, Nott. Something nice.” Heat crawls up the back of his neck. “To show my thanks.”Jester flashes him a quick, approving smile at that. “As long as you're happy, Fjord,” she says, more solemn than she usually is. Nott nods slowly, posture unpuffing.“You're welcome,” she says, and Fjord thinks maybe he's forgiven.“I think that was probably a good decision,” Beau says. “Just, you know, throwing that out there. Probably better not to go around unlocking ancient nightmare shit.”“Maybe not this one,” Caduceus says, with another unsettled glance out at the labyrinth. “Too many undead.” Yasha gives a faint nod at that one too, quiet in the background.“What changed your mind?” Caleb asks, loud and abrupt. He has Frumpkin back on his shoulder, trying to crawl under his hair. “What did you –” He breaks off.“Well...” Fjord isn't sure how to explain it. The accent he used most of his life is still unsteady on his tongue; he's landed somewhere between the two, his own vowel sounds poking through Vandren's slow-paced words. He'll work it out. “I thought – I guess I thought a little bit about what's been most important, in the last few months. And what it came down to was... I figured maybe I didn't need it.”Caleb closes his eyes for a long, slow moment; Nott rests her hand on his arm. Beau nods, one hand drifting down to touch the pocket where she's been keeping Molly's cards. Fjord's not surprised she understands.“You look better,” Caduceus says, with his out-of-nowhere air. “Than you did when you went in, I mean.”“Thank you,” Fjord says. “I feel better too.”Jester drifts a little closer. “You're sounding more like you used to again,” she says, low enough that the others can at least pretend not to hear. “Are you doing it on purpose?”“I – sort of, yeah,” he says, and clears his throat. “I am. Now...” He looks around the group: his little circle of people, his crew, his friends. The Mighty Nein, not trying to do the right thing, but maybe trying to steer themselves away from the wrong one. Maybe that will be enough.“Let's get back to the ship,” he says to them all. “Let's get on home.”