Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [57]
And yet, there he was—climbing down to an elvish shrine with a sphere of black dragonscale.
He crested the last of the foothills at dusk, and the valley spread out before him. The Relic of Progenitus was down there—he could just make out the torchlight of the shrine. It was time to do what he always did: deepen his sin, and hope his soul survived. He held up the dragon-scale sphere to his eye, wondering what the magic inside of it would do to the elves in the valley.
ESPER
The lighthouse keeper sank very fast. The vest pulled his head down, and his body began swimming downward into the cold depths. He could see nothing ahead of him, but the reflectors on the vest twirled rapidly in the darkness, making him relatively obvious to anything that might be looking.
You went to a lot of effort just to drown me, he thought at the mentalist.
She said nothing to him. He was alone. The pressure began to build rapidly. The water pressed against his lungs, making it hard to keep his single breath inside. It was painful. He wanted desperately to blow out the air, but his body kept his diaphragm unnaturally rigid and his mouth shut tight. Down, down, down he swam, unable to save his own life.
Something moved in the darkness. There were lights.
A broad, gently curving surface, like the hull of a ship, slipped silently past him in the darkness. The fibers that made up his vest began to glow, catching the reflectors and immersing him in a corona of blue light.
What was that thing? What’s going on? Am I bait? I’m bait. You’re fishing.
Still downward he swam. His head tilted once to look behind him. His mind recoiled at what he saw, but his eyes didn’t: the hulking sea creature was behind him. Twin rows of small, round eyes had locked directly onto him. The beast’s mouth was like the hatch of an enormous cargo ship, the jaw opening downward to wash him into its deepest holds.
His limbs pumped frantically, sinking him deeper and deeper. He had never swum so fast before, or so far into the cold blackness. His head turned back down to the depths and he saw something else: the spire of an underwater mountain. His body was swimming straight for it. It was encrusted with blue coral and razor-sharp barnacles. He was getting close enough that he could almost see the millions of tiny barnacle mouths and their wispy tentacle-tongues.
His breath was about to give out—or maybe it had already gone out, and some magic conjured by the mentalist was forcing a trickle of air into his lungs. His eyes stayed locked open, but he was losing his consciousness of what he saw. His head felt like it was being crushed; he could feel the delicate bones in his ears bending painfully. Would his body keep swimming after he passed out from lack of oxygen, he wondered? Would he slam into the reef mountain below, or be swallowed by the sea creature above?
Stay conscious, the voice in his head commanded.
So she was still watching, he thought dimly. What kind of mad game was it? His thoughts swam with weird imagery—the blue glow of his vest, the coral mountain, the lenses in the optics room. He saw his lighthouse broadcasting a beam of cool light around and around—out to sea, across the land, out to sea again. How many ships had seen that light over the years? How many ships had he protected from that very reef? He saw the light sweeping past