It lay on a raised plinth in a glass coffin box. He imagined his body around him, pulled his arms in, and spun himself to look down. He needed to move, but swimming around in the air as an amorphous cloud was new and deeply disconcerting. Mossy weeds furred the gaps between the stones, light crept in from somewhere behind him. He pulled all his focus in until the black sea yielded and resolved into dark stone walls, a large circular chamber, water running down from the upper shadows. Something had cut them off from the outside world. He could hear the suppressed fear as she added, I can’t find Tahren, she doesn’t answer. I’m breathing, but I can’t feel … I can’t feel my chest move. Wherever I am, I can’t see, I can’t move.
Her mental voice astringent, Ziede said, Take your time, Kai. He pulled in the parts of himself that drifted in the dark water that perhaps wasn’t water, to concentrate his being back into his own body. Some terrible revelation loomed but he kept it at bay better to just focus on finding her. I’m not sure where I am, either, he told Ziede. He made his inner voice sound calm, though a sinking sensation told him he wouldn’t like the answers to any of his questions. He reached out as far as he could stretch, searching for something, anything solid. Her languid voice turned alert and urgent. He should know where she was, he always knew where she was, she had a drop of his blood hardened into a red pearl buried in her heart. You’re not sleeping, you’re talking to me. She was slow to answer, her voice low and strange. He stretched out a thought and called, Ziede? Something was wrong with his body, everything was impossibly distant. Reaching out in that darkness, he found a cold, black sea ebbing and flowing, dropping away like a tide rolling out. Waking was floating to the surface of a soft world of water, not what Kai had expected.
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