The Sunken City

"Rowan!" Elara screamed, plunging forward through the heavy, freezing water.

She reached him, throwing her arms around his frail shoulders, trying to rip the grimoire from his grasp. But Rowan possessed a terrifying, unnatural strength. His hands were locked onto the hide binding like iron clamps.

When Elara touched him, the entity within the book noticed her.

The attack was not physical. It was a psychic shockwave that slammed into Elara’s mind with the weight of an ocean trench.

Her vision of the flooded archives shattered. In its place, her mind was violently flooded with a panoramic vision of a cyclopean city. It was a metropolis of impossible geometry, built of slimy green stone blocks so massive they defied human comprehension. She saw towering monoliths covered in horrific hieroglyphs, and winding, jagged streets that descended into an endless, suffocating black void. Above it all, a massive, gelatinous entity with a visage of writhing tentacles slept, dreaming a madness that infected the stars.

Elara dropped to her knees in the freezing water, clutching her head as a scream tore from her throat. The sheer scale of the horror threatened to snap her sanity in half. She felt her sense of self dissolving, ready to be swept away by the crushing tide of the entity's will.

* Let go,* a voice echoed in her mind, sounding like the grinding of tectonic plates. *The vessel is chosen.*

Through the blinding, agonizing vision, Elara felt the fragile, freezing weight of her brother's arm against hers. The sensation anchored her. She remembered the long nights nursing him through the fever, the extra rations she had stolen so he could eat, the fierce, unyielding vow she had made to keep him safe.

Her care for him was a smaller, more human thing than the cosmic vastness of the sunken city, but it was forged of iron.

Elara forced her eyes open, shattering the vision. She was back in the vault, kneeling in the black water. The tentacles etched in the shadows were reaching out, preparing to drag Rowan under.

She needed to break the connection.

Elara lunged for a heavy, wrought-iron brazier standing on a stone dais near the edge of the water. It contained the smoldering embers of a charcoal fire, left behind by the abbots to keep the dampness at bay. With a feral cry, she threw her entire body weight against the heavy iron stand.

The brazier tipped over.

Red-hot coals hissed and exploded as they hit the black water, sending up a blinding cloud of toxic, ozone-scented steam. Elara snatched a heavy, iron-stoppered flask of concentrated gall ink from a nearby archivist's desk—highly acidic, caustic material.

She smashed the flask against the stone dais. The concentrated acid splattered across the pages of the grey-hide grimoire in Rowan’s hands.

The book shrieked. It was a high, piercing sound of tearing flesh. The acidic ink ate through the vile parchment, burning away the impossible geometry of the summoning circle drawn upon it. The green bioluminescence flared violently, then died.

The shadows snapped back to normal. The boiling water stilled.

Rowan collapsed, the ruined book falling from his hands into the dark water. Elara caught him before he went under, wrapping her arms around his chest and dragging his limp, weeping body out of the freezing pool and toward the stone stairs.