Her eyes are wild.
"I'm an old betta-mer who paid for her blindness with the currency of years. But I am still Mira. And I know what real alchemy looks like."
Her hand clamps around a large, opaque container, its surface etched with faded symbols of elemental opposition. With one last, desperate surge, she hurls it down. This time, no light blooms. An impenetrable, oily darkness bleeds from the shattered vessel, snuffing out the witch's baubles, one by one. The world holds its breath.
Then, silence.
But I see what Mira sees. There is a subtle ripple in the black void where two opposing compounds meet, where oxygen-depleted brine meets the phosphorus-rich fluid from the shattered blue vials. Mira had orchestrated this perfectly, combining Oona's careless storage of her ingredients against her.
Then, a spark.
The precise chain reaction Mira calculated.
A tiny ember ignites in the black void, where the chemicals meet. It grows, a hungry orange flower that consumes the darkness with furious intensity.
A concussiveBOOMrocks the cavern, far louder than the others—a thunderous chemical cascade that Oona could never comprehend.
The water itself seems to recoil, shimmering with a toxic, corrosive heat as incompatible elements violently bond.
I look up. A jagged crack spiders its way across the ceiling. Mira's alchemical knowledge has become a weapon of devastating precision.
"The whole place is coming down!" I roar, grabbing Mira and pulling her toward the fissure, our only escape.
From the darkness behind us, we hear a sound that is not a shriek, but a gurgle.
Oona, the witch, choking on the very air she polluted, a victim of the volatile alchemy she prized above all else.
"Wait!" Mira's voice scrapes against my grip, sharp enough to cut through the thunder of collapsing stone. Her eyes burn, fixed on a high shelf near the fissure. "I need this. This is what I need!"
She twists in my grasp, a flicker of desperate energy in her failing frame. Her withered fingers stretch, clawing at the rock. She snatches a human-made syringe from its perch—a cruel instrument of clouded glass and rusted metal, filled with a swirling, viscous purple that seems to absorb the dying green light of the cavern.
She clutches it to her chest like a sacred relic, her knuckles white against the glass.
"Got it," she wheezes, the words barely audible over the groaning rock.
No time for questions. I wrap a powerful arm around her waist. My tail drives us forward, a single, explosive thrust ofpure force. We shoot through the narrow fissure, the rough rock scraping against our skin, right as a slab of stone tears free from the cavern ceiling with a sound like the world ending.
We clear the gap by the length of a hand.
A deafeningCRASHshakes the very water behind us. A cloud of dust and pulverized rock, a churning vortex of grey, erupts from the fissure. The force of it hurls us tumbling into the perpetual dark smog of the Silt District.
The rocks settle with a final, grinding groan. The entrance to the glowing green tomb is gone, buried under tons of solid stone, a tomb sealed from the outside.
The Trench Witch is entombed in her own ruined museum.
I check on Mira. Her breathing is a ragged, desperate rasp against my chest, but she is whole.
I lift her frail body into my arms, her weight light, and carry her through the dark, murky water toward our waiting shell.
A strange vibration starts against my chest. A faint, high-pitched sound.
Mira is giggling.
I look down. In the gloom, her face is a pale oval, but her shoulders shake with a quiet, breathless laughter. She clutches the human syringe like a dagger.
"You have completely lost your mind, old mer," I grumble, the sound deep in my chest. "Though I am not entirely sure you ever had it to begin with."
Mira wipes a tear of mirth from her milky eye, the gesture surprisingly delicate.
