I scrambled to my feet, hair lifting, static snapping faintly at my fingertips.
“They had power,” I whispered. “They studied hydrology. They knew how to move energy.”
I looked at Arthur.
“Punch the wall,” I yelled. “Anywhere. Now.”
He hesitated for half a second, confusion flashing across his dragon’s face, then he turned and drove his hind leg through the stone.
Saltwater exploded into the chamber.
I felt it instantly. The change in conductivity. The waythe air shifted.
“Keep fighting,” I thought into his mind, already climbing the nearest pillar, hands slipping on wet stone as I hauled myself up. “Don’t let him near the turbines.”
Arthur moved like he was tethered to my thoughts, trading blow for blow with Hadrian as I climbed higher, watching the water rise, calculating angles and timing with terrifying clarity, thanks to my AuDHD brain.
The turbine sparked.
“Arthur,fly to the ceiling. Now.”
He launched upward without hesitation.
Hadrian lunged, claws catching Arthur’s leg for a split second.
Arthur kicked hard.
Hadrian fell, hitting the water just as the flow reached the turbine.
Lightning tore through the chamber.
Hadrian convulsed, body arching, the electricity dancing across his scales in a brutal, blinding web. For one terrible second, he looked like a living storm.
Then he went still.
The water calmed, and silence crashed down around us.
I sagged against the pillar, lungs burning, heart hammering so hard I thought it might split me open.
Arthur landed hard on the dais, eyes flying to me.
I slid down the stone and stumbled toward him, shaking all over.
He shifted.
“It’s not over,” I gasped. “The water’s still rising. We need to stop it.”
The entity loomed behind him. The form it wore rose taller than the dais, elongated and wrong, as if someone had taken the idea of a body and stretched it past usefulness. Its surface looked like liquid stone shot through with light, veins of slow-moving luminescence pulsing beneath something that was neither skin nor scale. Where a face should have been, there were only impressions. Hollows suggesting eyes. A mouth suggested by a fissure that never quite closed. It was restraint made visible, power compressed into a shape that could be bound.
The chains were everywhere now. Coiled around its torso, looped through its limbs, anchoring it to the stone in half a dozen places. They glowed faintly, runes biting deep, holding it in place not by strength alone but by agreement. By rules older than either of us could comprehend.
The entity did not strain against them; it simply watched patiently, as if it knew time would finish the work for it.
“We have to trade again,” I said, fear clawing up my throat. “The water won’t stop without another exchange.”
Arthur stepped closer to me, placing himself between me and the thing without even thinking.
The water lapped at the edge of the dais.
