“Bring me proof of her demise, Korinthal, and the Leviathan’s Tear is yours.”
The words tasted of sulfur in Korinthal’s mouth. He swallowed, the movement stiff. “Understood, Prefect.” He met Croy’s gaze, projecting an icy resolve he didn’t feel. “Where can this ‘Tear’ be found?”
Croy’s smile widened, a thin, cruel slash. “A persistent rumor points to the Sunken Canyons, within the abandoned research station, ‘Azure Bloom’. Now, off you go. Time, after all, is a luxury Savia Rask no longer possesses.”
Korinthal turned, the stone floor cold beneath his boots, and walked away from the Prefect’s Spire, leaving behind not just Croy, but the last vestiges of his former life. His expedition locker was sealed, his accounts frozen. Even his personal skiff, the *Vindicator*, now bore the Croy sigil. He was a ghost in Morvayn, a predator stripped of its fangs, hunting a ghost of his own making.
He descended into the Sunken Slums, Morvayn’s true underbelly. The air tasted of brine, rotting bladderwrack, and copper runoff. Bioluminescent shelf-fungi seeped dull violet along cracked masonry, projecting jagged outlines over the stagnant scum of the gutters. Makeshift shanties, cobbled from salvage and barnacle-encrusted metal plates, leaned precariously against ancient, forgotten abutments. The thrumming of distant deep-glass generators faded, replaced by the guttural shouts of dock-workers and the rhythmic clang of scavengers plying their trade.
Korinthal moved through the throng, his senses heightened, his meager purse clutched tight. He wore only a stained, heavy canvas coat and a pair of worn breeches. His deep-glass amplifier, a sleek coil of polished void-steel, sat hidden beneath his sleeve, pressing against his forearm. He needed information, a trace of Savia, and the lower gutters were where whispers coalesced into truth.
A hand seized his shoulder. Before he could react, another clamped over his mouth, pulling him into a narrow, reeking alley between two leaning warehouses. The air here was colder, heavier. Three figures emerged from the gloom, silhouettes against the dim, glowing fungi.
“Well, well,” a rough voice grated. “Look what the tide dragged in. Korinthal Voss.”
Korinthal struggled, but the grip on him was like iron. He recognized the accents—dockhands, laborers, men who had likely worked for the Rask family. Their faces, now closer, were grim, etched with a raw anger that chilled him more than the cold air.
“The snake that bit the hand that fed him,” another spat. “Savia Rask gave you everything. And you repaid her with chains.”
“She tried to save you, didn’t she, boss?” The first man, a hulking laborer with a split cheek, stepped closer. “Walked right into your trap. And you let the bailiffs take her. Coward.”
A fist slammed into Korinthal’s gut, wind-knocking the air from his lungs. He doubled over, gasping, only for the hand on his mouth to tighten. Another blow landed on his jaw, a dull, aching thud. He tasted blood, metallic and hot.
“We heard your name was stripped,” the man growled, kicking him in the ribs. “Good. Now we’ll finish the job that Prefect couldn’t.”
They dragged him further into the shadows, boots and knuckles crashing into his ribs and brow. He crumpled, trying to protect his vital organs, the deep-glass amplifier a useless weight beneath his coat. He was weak, outmatched, facing men fueled by loyalty and righteous fury. And he deserved every strike.
But then, a memory flashed: Savia, her face resolute, stepping in front of the marrow-hound’s lunge. Savia, whispering of a wedding gift. Savia, framed and dragged away, looking at him for a single, final defense. This was not how he would end. Not here. Not like this. He still had a task. He still had to save her.
A surge of cold fury, sharp as broken glass, ignited within him. His hand twitched, finding the amplifier. He pressed the activation rune. A low hum vibrated up his arm, resonating with the deep-glass shard embedded in his chest. His veins pulsed with faint, azure light beneath his skin. He didn’t have his usual combat deep-glass, but he had something.
With a raw grunt, Korinthal twisted free from the man pinning his shoulders and drove his knuckles into the split cheek of his attacker. The brute reeled, surprised by the sudden ferocity. Korinthal didn’t stop. He channeled the unrefined current, driving it into his marrow—not for a disciplined duel, but to tear the foundations loose.
The ground beneath them shuddered. A fine tremor. Then, with a groan of ancient stone, the surrounding canal water began to churn. The resonance shook the rotting timber and pilings beneath the canal floor, rattling the foundations.
The thugs faltered, looking around in confusion. “What in the—?”
Korinthal lunged at the brute, seizing his collar to slam a knee into his midriff, then drove the discharge directly into the masonry beside them. The ancient mortar groaned, then *cracked* with a sound like thunder. A section of the wall crumbled inwards, sending a cascade of debris and a torrent of foul canal water into the alley. The cold, black water surged, knocking the loyalists off their feet, carrying them down the narrow passage in a confused, sputtering mess.
He gasped, leaning against the now-breaching wall, his chest aching, but his mind sharp. The discharge left his limbs hollow and shaking. He wiped blood from his lip, his eyes scanning the chaos. He had to move.
“Korinthal Voss!”
The voice was sharp, authoritative, cutting through the din of sloshing water and distant shouts. Korinthal froze. Warden Beran stood at the alley entrance, his heavy void-steel plate dull with grime, two patrolmen flanking him. His expression was a thundercloud.
“I knew you’d slink down here,” Beran stated, his hand resting on the hilt of his short-sword. “After what you pulled in the Exchange, fleeing the Prefect’s grasp… You’re a dead man walking, Voss. Unless you tell me where Savia Rask is. Now.”
Korinthal pushed off the wall, staggering slightly. “I’m trying to find her, Warden. Just like you should be.”
Beran’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t play games. You framed her, you planted the Void-laced deep-glass. We found the evidence. Now she’s vanished, and Croy has locked down half the lower rifts. You were working with him, weren’t you? Part of his scheme to seize the Rask assets.”
“I was,” Korinthal admitted, the truth burning on his tongue. “But not anymore. Croy betrayed me too. He has Savia’s death sentence, and he’ll give me the cure if I deliver her corpse.”
Beran scoffed. “A likely story.”
“Look at me,” Korinthal challenged, gesturing to his tattered coat. “Croy stripped my house. And Savia… she has thirty days. Less now. The contraband rot is devouring her from within.”
Beran studied him, his gaze piercing. The fury on his face slowly gave way to a grudging suspicion. He knew Korinthal, knew the cunning. But the raw desperation in his eyes was something new.
“You expect me to believe you’ve had a sudden change of heart?” Beran finally said. “After everything? After what you did to her?”
“Believe what you want,” Korinthal snapped, frustration lacing his tone. “But if you want Savia Rask brought in alive, you work with me. She wouldn’t have gone far with the poison taking hold. She’d seek help. A healer. Someone off the books.”
Beran hesitated, then glanced at the still-spluttering thugs in the water. He knew how fast bodies vanished down here. “Fine,” he gritted out. “We find her, Voss. But if this is another one of your traps, I’ll personally throw you to the leviathans.”
They began to search, moving through the labyrinthine alleys, following the hushed rumors of back-alley healers and illicit clinics. The trail was faint, but Korinthal’s desperation lent him a sharpened focus. After hours of fruitless searching, they stumbled upon a dilapidated storefront, its windows boarded up, a faint, flickering bioluminescent globe hanging above a grimy door. The air here, though still stale, held a subtle antiseptic tang.
Beran kicked the door open. Inside, a makeshift triage clinic, crudely organized, lay abandoned. Bloodied bandages, empty vials, and a half-eaten bowl of nutrient paste littered a rickety table. A healer, a gaunt woman with weary eyes, looked up, startled.
“We’re looking for a woman, mid-twenties, dark hair, pale, likely very ill,” Beran began. “Was she here?”
The healer’s eyes darted to Korinthal, then back to Beran. “I don’t ask names. People come, I patch them up, they go.”
Korinthal’s gaze swept the room, landing on a crumpled, stained bandage on the floor near a cot. A faint, sickening purple glow pulsed from within the bloodied gauze. Void-radiation. His throat dried. He knelt, picking it up, the light illuminating his hand with an eerie, lethal luminescence.
“She was here,” Korinthal whispered, his voice hoarse. “She was here.”
A shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom behind the cot, a figure tall and broad, moving with a silent, practiced grace. The low hum of a harpoon gun charging filled the small space, and a familiar, grim voice cut through the air, cold as the abyss itself.
“I knew you’d come for her, Voss.”
Korinthal looked up. Standing there, a loaded harpoon aimed precisely at his throat, was Valen Karr, Savia Rask’s most loyal bodyguard. His face was a mask of cold fury, his eyes burning with a promise of retribution.