The archway swallowed the last of the mural’s violet light behind them, and for a dozen steps the passage held nothing but darkness and the sound of their own boots in ankle-deep water. Then the ceiling lifted away.
Ember stopped so abruptly that Mia nearly walked into his back.
The passage had opened into a cavern too large for her staff-light to reach the far wall. Somewhere far above, the ceiling vanished into black, and below—spread out across the cavern floor like something poured rather than built—lay the drowned remains of an entire village.
Stone dwellings stood half-submerged in a slow-moving current, their arched doorways open to the water. Narrow paths between them had become canals, and what must once have been a plaza was now a shallow, ice-cold lake threaded with broken pillars. Moss furred every surface below the waterline. Vines, pale from lack of sun, hung from collapsed roof beams like unraveling rope.
Mia lifted her staff higher, spreading the light across the nearest rooftops. "This wasn’t just an outpost." Her voice had dropped without her seeming to notice. "It was a settlement. A real one."
"Look at the doorways." Ember waded closer to the nearest dwelling, close enough to touch the frame. Broad, low, rounded at the top—no threshold, no step up from the water. "No stairs anywhere. Built for something that moved low to the ground."
"Something that slithered."
"Or crawled." He glanced at her. "Either way, not us."
The quiet pressed in around them, broken only by water lapping against stone and the distant, muffled pull of the river beneath the settlement’s foundations. Ember found himself listening harder than he needed to, the same way he’d learned to in the Beginner Forest—except here there was nothing to hear at all, and that felt worse. A forest gone silent meant something was watching. A drowned city gone silent might just mean everyone who ever lived here was gone.
"You’re doing the thoughtful thing again," Mia said, watching him from a few feet away.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you go quiet and stare at architecture like it owes you an explanation."
"It might."
She huffed something close to a laugh, and they pushed on through the flooded main avenue, water climbing past their ankles as the current found its way between buildings never meant to hold it back. A skin of pale mist began to gather at the surface, thin at first, then thickening into something that clung.
Ember’s hand found an arrow before his mind had finished the thought.
"What is it?" Mia kept her voice to a whisper, staff lowering half an inch.
"The mist’s moving wrong." He tracked the surface with his eyes, not the fog itself but the water beneath it. "Current runs east. That’s drifting against it. And it’s not just one thing making it."
[Appraisal]
Mist Toad — Lv.6, Common
He’d have known it without the window. The bulbous shape rising out of the shallows twenty feet ahead matched the ones he and Mia had put down weeks ago near the reed banks—only this one wasn’t hunting alone. Past it, half-hidden in the thickening fog, three smaller ripples converged on the same stretch of water, drawn in by the disturbance the way scavengers followed a kill.
[Appraisal]
River Slime — Lv.3, Common
"Toad’s not the problem," Ember said quietly, already reaching for his pack instead of his bow. "It’s bait. Everything in this water’s about to come find out why it’s screaming."
Mia’s staff came up. "Then what’s the plan?"
"We don’t let all of it reach us at once." He’d carried treated snare wire since Azure Shore and never once needed it in the wetlands above. He needed it now. He worked fast, stringing a taut line low across the current between two half-submerged pillars flanking the only clear approach through the flooded street. "Freeze the water behind it. Not solid—just enough that anything swimming through slows down before it hits the wire."
Mia didn’t ask him to explain twice. She slammed her staff into the current, and a sheet of thin, brittle ice spread out behind the wire line, narrowing the open water into a single choked lane.
The fog swallowed him a moment later, cold and wet against his face, thick enough that his own boots vanished from sight. Somewhere ahead, the toad’s throat swelled for another blast.
He didn’t wait for it. He’d learned to hear a rabbit’s escape path through a snapped twig once, in a forest that had felt just as unforgiving as this cavern on his first day in it. He held still instead of firing blind, tracking the sound of displaced water arcing up through the narrowing ice lane—webbed feet driving off a submerged step, three smaller bodies scrabbling against the frozen shallows behind it, exactly as slow as Mia’s ice had promised.
The first slime hit the wire and went down hard, its gelatinous body snapping taut against the line before it could untangle itself. The second piled straight into the first. Ember didn’t spare either of them a glance. He drew to the sound of the toad’s approach alone and released half a breath before its throat would have opened for the landing croak.
The arrow found the vocal sac anyway.
[Monster Defeated]
Mist Toad defeated.
[Experience Gained]
+18 EXP
[Skill Proficiency Increased]
Trapcraft +2.4% Proficiency
The fog thinned enough to show him the rest of it—two slimes still thrashing against the wire, the third circling wide to flank around Mia’s shrinking ice. She caught it with a close-range gust that sent it tumbling back into the frozen lane, and Ember finished the tangled pair with two efficient shots through their cores before either could work itself free.
[Monster Defeated]
River Slime defeated ×3.
[Experience Gained]
+9 EXP
Mia lowered her staff, breathing hard, staring at the wire still glinting under the settling frost. "You’ve had that this whole time?"
"Since the wetlands. Never needed it until now." He crouched to recover the snare, coiling it carefully rather than yanking it free—wire like this wasn’t cheap, and Garrick would have skinned him for wasting good gear out of impatience. "Trap doesn’t win the fight. It just decides which fight you’re actually in."
"That’s very hunter of you."
"I had a good teacher."
He crouched over the toad’s body before the current could carry it off, working his knife carefully around the gland at its throat, then moved to the tangled remains of the slimes for their cores.
[Gathering Successful]
Collected: Mist Gland ×1, Toad Hide ×1, Slime Core ×3
Gathering EXP: +12
Basic Gathering +1.1% Proficiency
Beyond the toad’s crossing, the avenue climbed toward a series of shallow stone terraces cut into the cavern wall—planting beds, Ember realized, once tended and now given over entirely to whatever could survive without sun. Mia was already crouched at the edge of the nearest terrace, staring at something delicate and faintly luminous growing along the lip of a stone channel.
[Appraisal]
Plant
Name: Gloom Lily
Rank: Uncommon
Type: Alchemy Material
Description: A subterranean flower that draws ambient mana from damp stone. Essential to brewing high-tier MP Restoration Potions.
"Fully matured, too." Mia reached for the nearest stem.
"Wait." Ember was already crouching beside her, eyes on the soil rather than the flower. "Garrick used to say rare plants in dark places usually share roots with something that isn’t rare, or friendly."
He worked the tip of his knife into the damp silt at the base of the cluster. A thin, thorned root twitched under the blade—not a root at all, he realized, watching it curl reflexively toward the disturbance. A dormant snare vine, coiled and waiting for a careless hand.
He pinned it flat with the back of his blade. "Now."
Mia sliced the lily’s stem clean above the trap without hesitating, tucking the glowing bloom into her satchel before the vine could react a second time.
[Gathering Successful]
Collected: Gloom Lily ×2
Gathering EXP: +11
Basic Gathering +1.0% Proficiency
[Insight Gained]
Careful observation revealed a hidden hazard before it could strike.
Basic Observation
+0.9% Proficiency
"Good catch," Mia said, sealing the satchel. "That would’ve taken a chunk out of my wrist."
"That’s the job." Ember rose, checking his quiver and his remaining wire out of habit more than need. Two lengths left. He’d need to ration them carefully from here. "Tell me when you see something else worth the risk."
She smiled faintly, already moving toward the next terrace, and past it—half-hidden behind a mound of collapsed roofing—Ember caught the first outline of something larger. A dome, or what was left of one, rising out of the water like the back of something enormous and still.
He noted something else, too, though he didn’t say it right away. Since the toad, they hadn’t seen so much as a ripple that wasn’t theirs. Whatever usually claimed a flooded ruin like this had gone quiet the closer they got to that shape ahead, and predators didn’t usually go quiet around something smaller than themselves.
"There’s more ahead," he said quietly. "Bigger than the houses."
Mia followed his gaze, her smile fading into something more careful. "Then let’s go find out what it was for."
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