The mirror didn’t release ash. It released cold, hyper-saline salt water that smelled of rusted iron and forty deep-water lengths of lightless silt.
From the silver frame sunk in the roaring intake, an arm reached out.
It wasn’t the slender, ink-stained arm of a nineteen-year-old clerk. It was broad, thick with sinew. Then it covered in thick, pale skin that looked as though it had spent thirty years pickled in sea-salt. Around the wrist was clamped a heavy iron shackle, its four-inch lock-hasp hanging open, trailing three links of broken, rusted chain.
The hand closed over the rim of the master water gate wheel right beside young Ren’s fingers.
With a violent, bone-shaking surge of displaced water, Ren-of-the-Trench tore his way through the ontological membrane of the mirror.
He stood six feet tall on the underwater flat stone slabs, his massive boots weighted with slabs of scrap iron that pinned him to the floor against the full fury of the high-pressure clouded eye. He wore a huge, knee-length oilcloth trench coat, its canvas stiff with salt crust and patched with strips of cured sharkskin. From his neck hung a heavy iron collar, and at his belt swung a foot-long iron key—the Hadal Shackle-Key—etched with deep, counter-pressure wards.
