A merfolk temple was never truly bright, even when you brought your own light. The place drank illumination the way deep water drank sound.
Rhine stared at the System’s note and felt his pulse jump.
Five scrolls had appeared in his pack.
The prompt called them “common,” but he didn’t care. In Windrest, any Hunter legacy was gold. And one of the five made him sit up straighter.
Hazard Warning.
If he could master that, he could stop getting played by mermaid illusions.
“The Huntress really is looking out for me,” he muttered.
The thought snagged.
His Talent wasn’t a blessing from the Huntress. It was a gift from something older—the Creator depicted in the mural, a star-swathed figure beyond the constellations. The System. The thing that had plucked him out of his world and dropped him into the Endless Sea.
So what did the Seven Gods have to do with it?
Were they allies? Rivals? Prisoners?
Rhine brushed the star-painted wall with his fingertips. Paint flaked. He came away with dust and dried plant dye.
Just a mural. No answers.
He exhaled through his nose. “Fine. We do it the hard way.”
They’d already taken what the temple meant to offer. It was time to leave, return to Windrest, and start pulling threads.
Except Skye—currently in her “young lady” disguise—stopped him with a look and a tilt of the chin.
“Before we go,” she said, “I want to see what the rabbits fell into.”
In the corner of the temple hall, cracked stone revealed a dark hole. The maddened magic rabbits had vanished down there while they fought the illusions.
Rhine had heard Delanna mention it before: the temple had once sealed a dormant cocoon. Unawakened. Not active. But if it ever woke…
They climbed down.
Below, a stairwell descended into cold stone. Skye’s floating light-orb drifted ahead, casting gentle glow over slick steps and damp walls.
“A cocoon?” Skye repeated, thoughtful. “If it’s what Delanna thinks it is, it won’t be small.”
They rounded the last turn and reached a stone chamber.
In the center sat a coffin of carved rock—roughly human-sized, about two meters long. Its lid had been torn off and toppled aside.
Rhine leaned in. Empty.
“So someone didn’t just take the offerings,” Skye said flatly. “They took the thing that was locked up.”
Rhine’s mind flicked to a rumor he’d heard at the Sea Market: the Black-White Court had launched an ocean-going ship. Officially, it was “routine.” In practice, a ship like that didn’t sail for nothing.
If the cocoon really could become a horror, then only big players would risk moving it. Big players… or someone desperate enough to gamble the world.
Skye stepped back, eyes narrowing. “If this is connected to Panglos Fell…”
A scrape of stone drew Rhine’s attention.
In a corner where the floor had collapsed, rubble had been shifted aside—just enough to reveal a body half-crushed beneath broken tiles. Skye had moved the debris like it weighed nothing.
Rhine crouched. The corpse was male, already rotting, clothes soaked with old seawater. No obvious blade wounds. Not poisoned, either.
Skye searched him without ceremony. “Herbs. Two cheap tonics. A coin pouch.”
She upended the pouch, pocketed the gold with a practiced motion, then handed the empty deerhide to Rhine.
“Look at the mark,” she said.
A small antler emblem had been stamped into the leather—clean, deliberate, not a random scratch.
“That’s from a tannery in Windrest’s Inner City,” Skye said. “Not factory work. Not something shipped to every island. If he had this, he lived in Windrest—or someone in Windrest gave it to him.”
Rhine’s gaze sharpened. The cocoon, the dead courier, Windrest… and the governor who ruled from Stormkeep.
But something didn’t add up.
Panglos Fell was careful. If he moved a forbidden cocoon, he wouldn’t leave a corpse behind like a breadcrumb trail.
Rhine lifted the man’s lower eyelid.
Even with decay, a thin black line was visible—like ink drawn under the skin.
Rhine’s expression eased into a grim smile.
Skye saw it too. “The Soul-Eater’s dark curse.”
He’d seen the same mark before—on the three men who’d tried to kill him outside Gadd’s cabin in Woodshire.
“The cocoon wasn’t taken by Fell’s knights,” Rhine said. “It was taken by the Soul-Eater.”
Skye stared at him, tension rising in her shoulders.
Rhine filled her in quickly: a Soul-Eater who’d touched forbidden rites, who’d sent apprentices to hunt him for Faraniel’s notes, and who—based on divination—was likely working with Panglos Fell.
Skye’s eyes hardened. “So Fell has a monster at his side… and maybe the cocoon too.”
“Very likely.”
“Does Delanna know how to seal it again?” Skye asked at once. “The cocoon was trapped by merfolk. They won’t want it back in the world.”
Skye’s mind moved fast, cold and royal. “If our goals match, we can trade. Cooperate, if we must.”
Rhine glanced back at the coffin.
Its surface was carved with strange patterns—curving, layered symbols that reminded him uncomfortably of the coral card deck he couldn’t store in his System inventory. The designs were too similar to be decoration.
Binding-work, maybe.
But the coffin had been damaged; parts of the sigils were shattered. He couldn’t copy them even if he tried.
He could still fish them.
Rhine set one hand on the cold stone. The surface felt slick, faintly clammy, like a corpse that refused to cool.
He cast his line.
The backlash hit like a storm.
Thunder erupted in his ears. For three heartbeats he was drowning in lightning, the world tipping and twisting. He braced on the coffin, teeth clenched, body screaming—
—and then it stopped.
A prompt floated before his eyes.
[SYSTEM]
New Knowledge Acquired:
Ancient Angelic Sigil—A long-forgotten angelic mark used to bind and banish ominous entities.
Rhine swallowed, letting the knowledge settle into his skull like a key clicking into place.
“Of course,” he murmured. “Of course it would be something like that.”
Hands grabbed his arms.
Skye was right in front of him, face pale. “What was that? Are you hurt? Rhine—what just happened?”
Rhine steadied his breathing. The last thing he needed was a lecture from a black dragon in a borrowed skin.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Probably leftover effects from the mermaid illusion. I’m fine.”
Skye’s look said she didn’t buy it for a second.
So Rhine changed the subject before she could dig in.
“Let’s go,” he said. “I remembered something. James might know why the Black-White Court sent an ocean ship out. Their Morningstar once hunted a Soul-Eater. If the Court is moving now, it’s not random.”
Skye’s cheeks puffed in irritation, but she nodded.
They left the temple behind and climbed back toward the surface.
…
Stormkeep’s underground cells were dark enough to feel wet.
Marsas’s apprentices dragged away the corpse they’d finished bleeding for the day, their footsteps fading along stone corridors.
Only when they were gone did the dried mouth of Marsas’s borrowed body open—and a deep, authoritative voice came out.
“Marsas,” Panglos Fell said through that dead throat, “your apprentices must dispose of the bodies properly. If anything leaks, everything collapses.”
The governor’s soul loosened its grip. The voice shifted, becoming sand-dry and rasping.
“Relax, Governor,” Marsas answered. “They’ll rot in the reef caverns. The tide will swallow what’s left.”
“If a body is found—”
“So what?” Marsas snapped. “At worst they blame my apprentices. What does that have to do with you and your Stormkeep?”
Panglos’s voice returned, edged with restrained disgust. “The Black-White Court has launched an ocean ship. They’re hunting you.”
Marsas gave a short, humorless laugh. “They won’t find me. No one would ever imagine we fused our souls—and succeeded.”
Silence stretched, thick as mold.
Marsas spoke again, almost tender in his arrogance.
“And we have the cocoon. Follow the plan. When we strike at the right moment, who in the Endless Sea will be able to stop us? The Court’s director. The king. They’ll all kneel.”
Panglos’s patience thinned. He wanted to warn. To threaten. To pull back.
But Marsas kept talking, pushing control back toward him like a blade offered handle-first.
“You called your favorite bastard son home, didn’t you?” Marsas said. “Let him do one more thing that makes you proud.”
Marsas went quiet, surrendering the body.
Panglos Fell stared into the dark for a long moment.
Finally, he said, low and certain, “Jory will not disappoint me.”