Unbound

The water thundered around them like a windless hurricane, a growl so immediate that it shook Felix's guts while the fall simultaneously sent them fleeing into his chest cavity. White waters surged all around them as the descended at an insane speed, the ice barge ill-suited to such exploits and smashing into every outcropping and fallen masonry that littered the spiraling river. A river that bore a clear resemblance to a expansive set of stairs.

Men and women screamed as the barge slammed and bucked down the sluiceway, a gauntlet of shattered stone and severed, upthrust statuary. Hands half the size of their ship rose before them, splitting the white, rushing water and Felix bellowed.

Adamant Discord!

The entire ship lurched to the left, slamming into a metal railing along the edge and missing the ramrod columns of stone by mere inches. Yet the lightning had barely faded when the barge hit a water-smoothed outcropping, lifting the left-most third of the ship into the air.

No!

People flew from the barge, armored bodies careening into one another like pinballs and Felix felt his stomach drop. His feet were still iced to the craft, so he plummeted with it as Legionnaires, Dawnguard, and several Risi were thrown free.

Shadow Whip!

"Bindings of the White Waste!"

"Pillars of the Domineering Sentinel!"

Powers sped outward, chains of ice and pillars of force and spears of solidified air and metal. All of them snagged or dragged falling folk from the air or waters, hauling them back aboard while Vess' Spears formed a shifting wall to keep more from falling out. Even Pit flew up, snagging falling soldiers by their cloaks and armor. Felix's Shadow Whip itself snagged eight people in every direction, and a simple flex of his arm brought them all crashing back to the barge's icy deck.

"On your feet! I'm locking you all in!" Felix shouted as they navigated a swirl of stones. "Now!"

Rime Shaping!

As he had done to himself, Felix sent ice Mana surging up from beneath everyone's feet, locking them to the deck from their knees downward. He hoped it wouldn't hurt them too much, but Felix had no desire to pluck his company out of the water after every jostling wave...because there were plenty more to come.

Water and stone, foam and spray, the careening tide was chaos incarnate. The Frost Giants used their ice oars to shove them away from some of the rocks and statues, though more than a few oars splintered or shattered completely under the strain. Even the Dawnguard had their hooked polearms out, eager to prevent the barge's capsizing. Felix sent lightning skittering across the waters more than once, pushing and pulling at the forces around them in a desperate bid for control. The stone was too enchanted for him to shape, and the water too bountiful to freeze; anything he managed would have been flooded by the deluge coming from above. In fact, Felix caught several glimpses of glyphs deep beneath the water, though it was too fast and too hectic to tell their meaning. He tried to sunder them, but something about the array protected itself and they were moving too quickly for him to hit the same spot repeatedly.

All they could do was hold on.

"Hold low!" Harn shouted, followed by Darius' voice.

"Brace!"

They hit another statue, this one on its side and serving as a ramp that sent their craft sailing for thirty feet. Zara sang a dark melody, and Felix could almost hear the crash of cymbals above the roaring waters. A wave of aquamarine Mana surged up from below, catching their barge in its confines and lowering them back into the rapids. The Mana wrapped around the hull, tinging the purple-white ice Mana with its touch but cushioning every rock and wave that tried to flip or crush them to smithereens.

"Thanks," Felix said over the noise. Zara's ochre skin had paled to a startling degree, but her nod was loose and easy, as if she felt none of the strain holding their entire ship. He doubted that. "That can't be easy. You okay?"

"Fine, Felix," she nodded ahead, sharply. "But that will prove a problem."

They were nearly to the bottom now, but where the path had before been zig-zagged with fallen debris, now it was positively choked. It looked like an entire wall had been dropped onto this former stairwell, and only a few, relatively small cracks broke its bulk. Felix's eyes caught the flash of deep green scales as their Naga helpers slipped through the obstruction with ease. He growled, deep in his chest.

"That's gonna be a problem!" Evie shouted.

"We won't fit! We're too wide by half!" Atar's blonde curls were flat against his forehead, as waterlogged as his battlerobes. "We need to abandon ship!"

"No!" Felix shouted back at them. "I got this!"

With a flex of his Will and Mana, the ice around his legs vanished, and Felix leaped forward off the barge's railing, shattering it and sending the entire craft skidding backward a whole foot.

Adamant Discord!

Lightning cracked the air, and Felix pulled himself along a line toward those disappeared Nagafolk. The obstruction, of course, was in his way and he hit that instead, quickly slamming his fists straight through its surface. Felix had a brief, insane urge to try and smash their way through, but a better plan was to hand.

Chthonic Tribute!

The slab resisted for the briefest of moments, as if the Tier of stone was enough to anchor it, but it could not fight Felix's Willpower and Intent. With a hissing implosion, the entire contiguous surface of the obstruction turned to blackened smoke filled with dusty-brown glimmers of light. Still crackling with lightning, Felix hovered for a brief moment, buoyed by Adamant Discord but also the influx of Essence before he dropped—

Right back into the barge as it sped beneath him.

Felix straightened to find dozens of eyes on him, nearly all of them some variation of awed, impressed, or relieved. All except one. Zara was an unreadable statue, Spirit and face both harder stone than the one he'd just eaten.

What's going on with you?

The barge cleared the final span of rushing water, now flowing in far greater quantities than before. The stone wall had acted as a dam of sorts, keeping the water within the staircase and circulating with those glyphs he'd spotted, but now all of it dumped out into the next chamber. They splashed down into a swirling pool at the base of the stair-rapids. The barge bobbed once, sloshing dark, foul water onto the deck, before righting itself into a lazy, sideways drift. A metal hand clanged into Felix's back, patting him firmly.

"Well done, kid," Harn grunted. He grinned. "Snakes'll be right confused about their little slide bein' ruined, though. Spoilin' for a fight about it, maybe."

Felix glanced back and snorted. The staircase had all but dried up, with only a few weak streams still pouring down the algae-slicked steps.

"Let's go find this Deepking," he said, his anger on a low simmer. "I'm in a bad mood. I could use a fight."

"Loquis, did you see that?" Pava said, nudging the Half-Orc man in the ribs. "Can your lightning do that?"

"I don't think that was the lightning, Pava," the Half-Orc said, somewhat sourly as he rubbed his ribs. The woman had notoriously sharp elbows. "That was something else."

Like everyone around him, Loquis watched as the Fiend—Lord Autarch, he reminded himself—talked with members of his team. The others pretended not to, feigning interest in the ice barge the Lord and giants had made, or in the dark waters around them, but Loquis saw no need to hide it. He was fascinated by them all.

The fierce and beautiful Lady Dayne, whose spears had saved many of his friends' lives, just now on the rapids and previously in Haarwatch. The stoic Onslaught, whose reputation among the Guilders was enough for even the most grizzled veteran to give him nods of respect. The mages V'as and Knacht, scorching flame and shattering force, mighty and far more clever than Loquis could ever hope to claim. It was they, he was told, that enchanted the weapons they all bore and the powerful armors that was provided to them. The mysterious Lady Cyrene, a Master Tier and personal mentor to the Lord Autarch.

But what kept his eye was the beautiful and deadly Evie Aren. She was laughing at something Lady Dayne told her, showing perfect teeth in a wicked grin. A grin that reminded him of their fight a day ago, of the...respect in her eyes.

"She moved like quicksilver to catch us," Pava said, clearly following his gaze. "Well, me and Nell. Didn't Lord Knacht get you?"

Loquis' grimaced, thoughts flashing back to the crunching impact of a pillar of blue force arresting his fall—before tossing him back onto the ice barge. "He did. Dented my battlerobes too."

"Tch. Just a side panel. You can have the Forgemaster there fix it, no?" Pava said with a shrug. The sword belted at her waist bobbed with the movement.

Loquis laughed, low and mirthlessly. "You suggest I go to Onslaught himself and asking him to repair my equipment?"

"Yeah. Isn't that, like, his thing now? Mervin says he's nice enough."

The Half-Orc stared at Pava, her skin so similar to his own for all that she was brown to his green. Skin and bone, just as me, but more different than I can imagine. "No. I'll not be doing that. The Autarch's team has better things to worry about than me."

Pava shrugged again, as if dismissing the matter entirely, and went back to inspecting her sword. The Blades made it a point to keep their weapons in perfect condition at all times, and sometimes it seemed to border on the edge of obsession. Surely a piece of metal was meaningless in the greater scheme of things. It wasn't like it was magic, after all.

Magic had been Loquis' ticket out of the Dust, just as it had for many others in the Arclight Legion. After the Battle of Haarwatch and the fall of the Eyrie, he'd lost almost everything. Then he saw it; lightning, coursing across the sky, shattering rank after rank of hideous monsters. And in the center of it, him.

The Fiend.

He was an enigma to all of them, having swept into their lives without warning just as the world turned to shit. Saved them, one and all. Everyone in the Legion had a similar story, of the Fiend dropping from the sky to kill Prismatic Wretches only seconds before they were devoured, or of him leading his team against wave after wave of Revenants, or pulling folks from the wreckage of their homes. Time and again, the Fiend was at the center of it all, a powerful figure that...helped. From what Loquis could tell, the man never even expected anything in return. How could he? What could a skinny Half-Orc offer a man even a third as strong as the Fiend?

Then the Legion was announced, in whispers at first. But it had no place for the magic that stirred in his core, the lightning that had so inspired him, not until the First of Arclight had begun recruiting. Loquis joined up immediately. And now he was here, in the midst of an adventure with his heroes.

He hoped he wouldn't screw it all up.

Exploration is level 63!

After the wild ride on the stairs, the grand hall they entered seemed almost pedestrian despite the ninety foot ceilings studded with pale purple Belais Crystals. Or the massive, stone reliefs carved into the curving walls. The chamber was bigger than the one they had faced Jadorak within, enough so that Felix couldn't make out the far end. A mist rose from the black water, something he mistook for fog before realizes it was most definitely steam.

When had the water gotten so warm?

After a while, it actually took a fair bit of concentration to keep the ice barge from melting, though he had the good idea to ask the Frost Giants for aid. Their Mantles of the Long Night were more than enough to combat the water's rising temperature and maintain the ship's general shape.

The walls grew closer, the stone reliefs revealing a detailed story, though it was infested with hanging moss and lichen. The carvings depicted ancient peoples of various Races with their hands upraised and long tables of food between them. A celebration, he had to assume, right next to the image of those same peoples raising tall, thin towers around the shores of various lakes. On top of lakes, even. And among them all, Felix spotted the robed-and-armored form of the Nym. Stars in hand, they were casting some sort of benediction on all of the workers and celebrants, depicted as beams of light.

It told a far different story than the last Temple he'd been within, but much of this was hidden by fog, moss, or damage. This Temple had not fared well with the passing of the Ages.

As they drifted forward, pushed by ice oar and the occasional Shadow Whip tether onto protruding columns, Felix also searched the waters and steam-fog for the Nagafolk. He couldn't sense them, not like he could in the colder waters up above, but he sensed something shifting in the water. Far, far below. Something enormous.

And below that, was something else. Something he'd seen once before.

"You have arrived," Garox said in his sharp accent, as if he were biting off the words as he said them. "The First Challenge has been overcome."

"Challenge?" Evie asked, before Vess could stop her. "You're sayin' you normally throw guests down a gauntlet before smashin' em into a rock?"

"It is as it was decreed," Garox said, his voice as emotionless as his snake-face. "I am pleased that you have succeeded."

"You said First Challenge," Felix pointed out. "There are more?"

"That remains to be seen," rumbled another voice, this one so deep it sent waves trembling across the waters. Following it came slithering foam and spray as a gargantuan Naga emerged from the black waters. It was at least sixty feet in diameter, and the portion that rose above the waves was a hundred feel long if it was an inch. Moreover, the Naga's immense head was bigger than both of Zara's Manaships put together. It was covered in smooth scales the colored a deep, waterlogged green, with eyes the size of their entire barge and just as icy in their burnished regard. They burned with light, a hum of power Felix could feel without trying, and the copper in them flashed as it regarded them all.

"Fiend, you are blessed by the Stone and Wave, for before you is the Deepking, Kar'casitrix of the Abyssal Shores," Garox intoned, his calm voice once again infused with that zealous fervor. "My Lord, might I introduce the Fiend and his companions."

Voracious Eye.

Name: Kar'casitrix, the Deepking

Type: Abyssal Serpent

Level: 845

HP: 42399/42399

SP: 28487/30233

MP: 9735/9735

Lore: Abyssal Serpents are an evolved form of Naga, though their exact nature is not well known. What is known, however, is that an Abyssal Serpent is a catastrophe when roused.

Strength: More Data Required

Weakness: More Data Required

Holy shit. His Voracious Eye could easily feel the strength of the huge serpent, and it was beyond any creature he'd encountered outside of Primordials and gods. It shook him, more than a little. Felix had grown used to the idea, if only a bit, that he was stronger than anything he'd encounter. Zara was a poor example, weak as she had been feeling, but it had bolstered his confidence in a way he hadn't truly noticed. Now, faced with the Deepking's power, Felix could only clench his jaw and nod to it, attempting to still his wild beating heart.

The Deepking returned the nod with narrowed eyes, in almost the exact same manner. The slightest of tilts, eyes never leaving the other; the greeting of two equals, as Karys had coached him. It was a bit of rebellion on Felix's part, and the Abyssal Serpent knew it.

"Why have you come to my realm, Fiend?" the Deepking asked in a voice like rasping boulders. It was not the voice of a human throat, or anything approaching it. Felix sensed several of the Legion sway on their feet. "Why do you trespass here?"

"We are passing through, and only stopped here on our way south," Felix said.

"Passing through," the king rumbled. "Beneath the Haestus Lake? So deep that creatures greater that Garox would have long since hunted you for their dinner?"

"We got lost."

The Deepking blinked once before his copper eyes flashed again. "What chamber did they enter from, Garox?"

"From the sealed one, off the Chapel of the Eye, my Lord."

"Sealed. But no longer," the Deepking rumbled thoughtfully. "Fiend, what lies within that chamber? How did you reach my Temple?"

"That is Nym business," he said. Beside him Zara and Vess tensed, but that was peanuts compared to the Deepking's reaction.

"Nym!" The shout sent eight foot waves out from its huge body. "What claim do you have on the business of gods, little Fiend?"

Felix felt a flutter of nerves in his stomach, but forged ahead. "I am Nymean."

Silence met his words, one populated by a palpable, murderous Intent. "You lie, Fiend."

"Why would I bother?" Felix asked, shoving aside his fears and worries. The Abyssal Serpent loomed over them, lower than before, and it would only take a single snap of his jaws to consume them entirely. "I am Nymean, and I plan to claim this Temple."

"Oh shit," Evie said from behind.

"Felix," Zara warned.

The silence stretched only a moment longer before a cataclysmic, earth-shaking tsunami burst into life around them. The air quivered, screamed with vibrations so loud they weren't sounds anymore, just a buzzing against flesh. His people screamed in pain, and Felix winced as he held tight to the railing, riding through the immense waves.

The Deepking was laughing.

"Brave! You are brave, little Fiend! I wish my warriors were half so bold." The Deepking pulled it's head back, lifting it from their barge and damn near touching the ceiling. "I shall discard the standard Challenges for this. If you wish to claim Divinity, very well. Prove yourself, little Fiend."

"What do you propose?" Felix asked.

The Deepking smiled, an expression Felix didn't realize snakes could manage. "There is a great danger below us. One that even I cannot face. If you are truly a Nym, a god given flesh, then prove it. Destroy that which lies beneath, or else perish by its jaws...or ours."

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