“... then the final strap goes under here,” Warinot demonstrated, grabbing the rune-carved strip of leather from under his arm and snapping it to the rivet on the chest. He patted the hemisphere of bronze-banded glass hanging off his hip. “Then all that’s left is to strap the helmet onto the connectors around your neck. Don’t do that until we’re actually in the water or you’ll put extra strain on the enchantment.”

  The members of the soon-to-be-renamed Group One lowered their helmets back to their sides. They’d been following along as their leader donned the diving suit, so the instruction not to put the last piece on caught them by surprise. Instead, the big man motioned for them all to follow him, then started picking his way through the field of scattered tents.

  The group trailed him to the edge of the island and exchanged glances as they all came to the realization of what he was going to do at the same time.

  Warinot turned around again when the water came up around his knee. “We have today to get used to moving in these things. Then we go deep. Don’t head all the way off the edge yet – you’ll see what I mean when you get there – but get yourselves comfortable. And most importantly, don’t lose your heads down there. Especially you, healer,” he said, pointing to the willowy Kimalam.

  The giant man shoved his helmet into place and walked backwards into the water. A wave almost bowled him over at about waist-deep, leading to a few chuckles among the group. None of them had even put their helmets on by the time the waves closed over his head. Everyone was waiting for someone else if the awkward looks were anything to go on.

  Jay raised the lump of ovaloid bronze-and-glass and slid it over his head, feeling more than hearing as it snapped into place, and started forward. He thought about trying to yell something back to the rest of the group through the transparent front plate but wasn’t sure if he could be heard or what he’d say if he could.

  He fought his way over sandbars and through breaking waves until he was fully underwater. Warinot was treading water a little further out, just deep enough that he was fully underwater. He waved. Jay waved back and kept moving, doing what would have been a wonderful imitation of an astronaut walking on the moon.

  He’d never been scuba diving on Earth. He’d wanted to, sure, but hadn’t ever had the right combination of money and free time to make the trip. If this was what that would have been like, he regretted not forcing himself to go. Something could have been sacrificed to make it happen, he could have made it work. If the underwater views were half as good in one of Earth’s oceans as these were, it would have been worth anything he’d have passed up to save for it.

  As the water began to get darker, Jay began to see fish flit around him. Some of them came right up to his glass faceport before darting away in blurs of mostly silver and yellow. The water got darker quicker than he expected it to, as if moving fifty feet forward had put him in a different timezone. At least the slope was gradual, so there wasn’t much of a threat of him accidentally stumbling off whatever the drop-off was that Warinot had referenced earlier.

  It wasn’t long before the lights of the enchantments running up the back side of the helmet were the only things letting him see. It was a pool of soft blue light, barely larger than his arm’s length. At least his normal arm’s length; he couldn’t get either of them fully level in the diving suit.

  Jay felt like he had a good handle on the basics of how to move underwater. Just getting down here, his movement had been smoother with nearly every step. Now he just had to figure out how to move with more complexity. Could he do a backflip? Could he –

  Something whipped past him, long and thin with a glowing white line running down it. It was there at the corner of his vision for barely a second and then vanished, twining down further into the water. Then another one flashed past him on the left side of his vision, this one glowing red and just as quick as the first.

  Maybe he could learn to move in more complicated ways in an area where there weren’t glowing whips from the hellish depths flinging themselves around. He turned, intending to leave and a pane of blue light rolled into visibility in front of him, a short line of gold text scrawled across it.

  Huh. So that was what [Gilt]’s active effect looked like. But why would just turning around and leaving cause any sort of change? For that matter, he wasn’t even sure what the consequences of leaving anyway would be. Or the magnitude of that decision. Or even what his personal fate should be, so he couldn’t judge beforehand if anything would change it.

  Jay missed the internet. The only thing related to fate that he’d found while looking in the library had been about divination classes and the nearly inevitable madness that came from having one. Nothing about personal fates; nothing about deviations.

  Unless it was as simple as the source of the ability giving the answer. He pulled up the description.

  The Overgoddess. The faceless divinity, the one responsible for the whole change in the first place, for the responsibility to fix the Curse. For the mind control, too; anger sparked in him at the reminder of it and the flood of memories filled with forced optimism, dulled responses, and slow thinking. It almost made him want to turn around and leave anyway.

  It wasn’t like this was the only path to his survival. If he did absolutely nothing necromantic forever, he could probably live most of his life without the shielding effect of health. It wouldn’t be a good life, but it would mean he didn’t have to go down wherever those things were coming from.

  But there was still some part of him that wanted to live a more full life than that. Maybe it was what the controlling effect’s optimism had rooted in him. Maybe it was the other way around.

  Either way, Jay didn’t head back to the surface. He kept walking deeper, not paying any attention to the extra whip-like things that appeared at the corners of his vision. He walked until he came to the edge of a giant trench.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Far, far below, he could see a writhing nest of whatever the thin moving things had been, squirming back and forth across each other. There was a tableau of crumbling buildings below even that, each backlit by whatever red light source ran between them.

  It was a good place to take a rest.

  *

  Warinot’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Jay, where in the Six Hells are you? Squeeze your left finger and thumb together to respond, since you missed me explaining that to everyone else.”

  Jay made the motion. “Thinking, mostly.”

  “I said where,” the big man said, “not what. You didn’t jump off the cliff, did you?”

  He looked down at the toe of his boot stretching into unsupported blackness. “No. I’m still up here.”

  “You’re staring off the edge of it, aren’t you?” Warinot asked.

  “Maybe.”

  The group leader sighed. “Just don’t go taking that drop quite yet. You feeling comfortable in your suit at least?”

  “I’m getting there. Feels like the deeper I go, the more the boots want me to stay put on the ground, so at least things aren’t getting harder,” Jay replied.

  “Good. That’s how it should feel. Look, I’m going to give you a little bit of leeway here. Be back at camp in an hour so we can make sure there’s not any abnormal degradation on your enchantments,” the guardian ordered. “And if you think it might have been an hour, odds are good it was, so head back then.”

  Jay had no way to keep track of what time it was or how much time had passed at any given moment. He agreed anyway, not paying much attention to what he was even agreeing to, and just kept gazing out over the dropoff. The nest of writhing whatever-they-weres had squirmed down into a crevice he couldn’t see. It was part of the same wall that formed the cliff he was floating at the top of, so it was more of an assumption that they’d gone into a cave than anything else. For all he knew, they were bunched up around the bottom of the trench.

  He was waiting to see something very specific. It had happened for the first time shortly after he settled in to take in the scenery. If Jay wanted to be really honest with himself, he’d admit that he was hoping it didn’t happen again. He wanted an excuse to dismiss it as anything other than what he had initially thought it had been.

  He really didn’t want it to be the eye it had looked like; the idea of something that large with a bright green eye wasn’t a welcome one. Sure, he could cast [Venom Shot] now, but that had been a very reptilian-looking eye. There was a decent chance anything venom- or poison-related wouldn’t do anything to it.

  Even if it did turn out to be an eye, he was hoping at least that it was anything other than another snake. Snakes were cool and all, he couldn’t deny that, and pretending he could tame any snake ever was even cooler, but sometimes there was a line to cross known as “too much.” Plus, depending on how physically large something being Tier Six meant, there was a chance that the bright green of the eye meant it was the same kind of serpent whose venom had forced him to leave Kinicier’s Haven.

  That was a terrifying thought after having seen what it did to the Duke.

  The shudder the memory of the Duke’s murder scene brought to mind swayed Jay out of his original position. He didn’t have time to just watch it and wait, did he? He couldn’t just push it off until whenever the rest of the group got comfortable enough to come down this deep. He had a way to check, something he had chosen initially to make any more research-intensive periods easier, a use that was shamelessly inspired by a wizard movie.

  Wake me when it’s been an hour, Jay thought to Alister, who returned only feelings of discomfort and acceptance from the chafing of the suit’s material around him. Bite me if you have to.

  [Astral Projection] was a new ability to him, so he didn’t know what to expect. Jay triggered the ability and felt the magic surge, a tearing, burning sensation racing up his limbs to coalesce in his chest. His vision dimmed like the water was surging into his helmet, then winked out entirely. His proprioception went with it.

  Then he was outside of his body, looking down from just above where he had been holding position. The water wasn’t dark anymore; tiny motes of light like ethereal fireflies drifted around him. Some of them sparked gold, others silver, and more every other color he could name plus several he couldn’t.

  If Jay had thought the water was beautiful before, it was nothing compared to now. Likewise, if he had thought the crumbling sunken city at the edge of the fallen continent had been bleak before, it was positively depressing now. A miasma of black and purple clung to the buildings, moving against the currents of the fireflies, and all of it underlit by fading necromantic green.

  He thought about being closer and then he was. There was no discernable sense of movement, no steps to take, no distance to cross. One place to another and done.

  Jay was on the outskirts of the city now, tattered strands of green flowing beneath his feet and the clouds of purple-stained black above. It was an intimidating sight and he almost let go of the ability, but he figured he had already jumped in off the deep end. If something was going to bite him in half for it – physically, metaphorically, or both – it had already had its chance.

  He kept the chain of little jumps of not-movement going, heading deeper into the city and further under the umbrella of the darkness. One of his jumps took him close enough to a building that he could see a mirror inside; he caught a glimpse of what he looked like while using the ability and flinched. He looked mostly the same as he did normally, sans clothes, except bright gold with geometric cracks of green running across his skin.

  He tried to touch one and hissed in pain. Clearly that was a representation of the [Soulshred] effect. That definitely tracked with what little he knew about the idea of astral projection, even if the ability definition hadn’t referenced anything like that. Still, he’d had at least a decent understanding of what it did, so it wasn’t like it needed to have gone into much detail.

  Was it choosing how much information to include on purpose?

  Jay shook the thought away. That wasn’t what he was here to think about; he could put time into figuring out whether the System was actually aware of his knowledge or not later.

  He jumped away from the surprisingly intact mirror and into a large open area between buildings. Jay didn’t know if it had been the city square, a market, or just an area where the buildings opened up a little bit more, but it was there all the same. In what looked to be the center of the open space, there was a pillar of some bleached coral-like material, with natural patterns running up the side.

  He got closer to it, moving close enough his ghostly golden chest was barely an inch from touching it. It definitely looked like dead coral, as if a bunch of mite-sized creatures had crawled up into a giant pillar, died, and calcified. Some of the patterns were lines of hollow tubular things, others were starfish-like and latched onto one another, and still more looked like various forms of tiny shellfish.

  They were all dead. And that gave him an idea.

  Jay had no idea if he could cast spells while projecting, but he reached out to the pillar and tried using [Lesser Resurrection] on it. Energy flooded out and his astral form became translucently gold instead of relatively looking solid. The pillar pulsed with the energy, as if it were drawing the magic into itself through all the open spaces. The stretch of green energy beneath the coral-thing flared into brightness and with it, the lights ringing the open space burst to a yellow-orange life that looked extremely strange in the cool blues and blacks of the watery depths.

  Oddly enough, he could feel the revitalization. It was like a weight lifting off of his shoulders. A noise like the rumble of thunder reached him, incredibly out of place this far underwater, and Jay’s head darted upwards. The vaguely shifting cloud of black and purple had begun to roil and flow more concretely, the tendrils converging on each light source and snuffing it.

  They began to creep towards the pillar – and by extension, him – and Jay reflexively pressed himself as close to the coral structure as possible. Just as he began to consider moving to the top of the thing to save his astral form, a splitting pain tore through his leg and he lost his grip on the spell.