Chapter 7

  POV: Gagan, the Drowned Man

  The Drowned Man lay sprawled across the black stones of the Valhadryan shore. His skin, usually a tanned bronze, was muted—its color washed away by the passage of time. Fingertips wrinkled and swollen, were tipped pale fingernails, dirtied by seabed soil. Seaweed was caught in his curly, dark beard and strands of long wet hair stuck to his face—a youthful one by most standards. The Drowned Man’s blue lips were slightly parted, as though he were just about to speak. I was going to speak her name…

  The first thing he remembered was water.

  It wasn’t just a memory—it was a sensation that lived in his body. The weightlessness of being submerged. Of the cold, all-encompassing pressure that seeped into every pore as he lay there beneath the dancing waves above. He remembered the way sound dulled beneath the surface, reduced to muffled whispers and distant vibrations. He was sinking, deeper and deeper, drawn inexorably down into the unyielding embrace of the sea.

  Above him, the sun shimmered, fractured into a thousand brilliant shards, scattered across the trembling surface. It seemed so far away, unreachable. He stretched toward it—or perhaps he imagined doing so—but it was futile. The light grew dimmer as the water grew darker. First, it was gray. Then charcoal. Then black—thick and oppressive, pressing in from all sides like the inside of a coffin. Water was the first thing he remembered, and it was the last.

  And in that utter blackness, the world ceased to exist. No sight. No motion. Only the dull roar of water in his ears, a muted symphony of nothingness. Then, faint and distant, came a new sound. Rhythmic and steady, it pulled at his consciousness like a lifeline. The crash of waves against a shore. Louder and louder it grew until. . .

  The Drowned Man’s eyes shot open, and the world greeted him with a blinding, white-hot light.

  He gasped for air, his chest spasming as it tried to expel the water lodged in his lungs. His throat burned as brine surged upward, spilling from his mouth in violent, choking coughs. He twisted to his side, retching, spitting out the saltwater that pooled onto the ground beside him. For several moments, all he could do was breathe, ragged and shallow, his body trembling from exertion and cold.

  The surface beneath him was rough and unyielding, a bed of pebbles pressing into his skin. The tide lapped gently at his bare feet, the water icy and sharp against his flesh before retreating with a soft hiss into the ocean.

  He blinked against the glare of the sun, squinting as he tried to orient himself. The sky was a pale, washed-out gray, and the air was sharp and cold, biting against his damp clothes. Slowly, his head tilted to the side, his gaze following the receding tide to the ocean beyond.

  It stretched out before him, vast and black, a featureless void beneath the flat, ashen sky. The waves moved with a lazy, rhythmic persistence, indifferent to the man lying broken on the shore. He shivered, not from the cold, but from the sheer enormity of it all. There was no end to that ocean. No beginning. Just an endless, churning nothingness. To be alone before such a nothingness was paralyzing.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  He swallowed, the motion painful against his raw throat, and forced himself to move. His muscles protested as he pushed himself upright, pebbles shifting beneath his hands. He sat there for a moment, hunched over, head hanging as he sucked in great gulps of air. Each breath sent fire through his chest, but it was better than the alternative.

  Finally, he glanced back at the shore, half expecting to see others—or something. Wreckage, bodies, anything. But there was nothing. Only the black sea at his back and the jagged cliffs that framed the desolate beach before him.

  A sadness tore at his chest, a sadness for something lost. Then, he noticed an unfamiliar and foreign weight against the left side of his chest. His trembling fingers slipped into the inside pocket of his jacket and emerged with a small, leather-bound journal. The cover was worn and warped, its edges frayed from age or use, and water clung to its surface in glistening beads.

  He opened it with cautious fingers. Some pages stuck together, their edges swollen and puckered, but most of it was intact and surprisingly dry. His eyes fell to the inside cover, where a name had been written in deliberate, careful script:

  Gagan Bostock

  It hit him like a jolt. Gagan. Yes. That was him. That name belonged to him. I am Gagan. The thought bubbled to the surface of his mind.

  The realization brought little relief. The name was a sliver of identity, but it didn’t answer the how or why. How had he ended up here? Why couldn’t he remember anything else?

  Then it struck him—a face he couldn’t quite see. A name he couldn’t quite grasp. His sister. He had a sister. He was looking for her, or maybe chasing after her. But the harder he tried to summon the image, the faster it slipped from his grasp, like water through his fingers. What had happened to her? Gagan racked his brain. He closed his eyes, screwing his face with concentrated effort, tearing at his wet, dark locks of hair.

  She was taken. Taken somewhere far away… Yes, that was it.

  Tears blurred his vision, hot and stinging as they rolled down his salt-crusted cheeks. He stifled a sob with the back of his hand, his chest heaving as grief clawed at his insides. Had it been that long? So long that her face—her name—was gone?

  No. He couldn’t think like that. He wouldn’t think like that.

  With renewed determination, Gagan wiped at his face and turned his attention back to the journal. He flipped through its damp pages, his fingers pausing on one marked with a ribbon. He pulled the ribbon free, and the sight that greeted him was chaotic: lines of black ink, overlapping and jagged, filling the page with a dark, imposing shape.

  A tower.

  Scrawled in hurried, uneven letters at the bottom corner of the right-hand page were two words: Hecate’s Tower.

  The name rang faintly in his mind, a ghost of a memory he couldn’t pin down. He stared at the drawing, at the harsh black lines that seemed to vibrate with a strange intensity. It wasn’t much, but it was all he had.

  Carefully, he tucked the journal back into his pocket and rose to his feet. His legs trembled beneath him, and every joint in his body protested the movement. But he stood, turning his gaze toward the horizon.

  The pebbled beach stretched into a rugged, gray expanse, broken only by patches of emerald moss clinging stubbornly to cracks in the stone. The wind carried the sharp tang of salt and the low, rhythmic crash of the waves.

  With one last glance at the endless ocean behind him, Gagan set his sights on the gray landscape ahead. The name Hecate’s Tower burned in his mind, a faint beacon in a sea of uncertainty.

  And so, he began to walk.