The star-iron plate slipped from Ren Vale’s numb fingers and struck the gold-silver metal altar with a dull, ringing crash.
The sound barely registered against the sudden, roaring wall of white noise that erupted inside his skull. It wasn’t a noise born of sound. It was the sound scream of dissolved cold air boiling out of solution in the blood vessels of his inner ear.
Ren staggered backward, his heels catching on the rim of the dais. He dropped to his knees in the ancient grey ash, both hands flying to his throat.
“Ren!” Mira cried out.
She lunged forward, her soft wool skirt trailing through the dust. It caught his shoulders before his head could strike the flat stone slabs. Her left hand—warm, mortal flesh—pressed against his clammy cheek. Meanwhile, her right arm of smoky quartz flared with a panicked, rapid-fire staccato of violet pulses.
Ren couldn’t answer. He couldn’t form a syllable. He couldn’t draw breath.
The dry, unpressurized air of the Central Sanctum—one bar of desiccated cold air and oxygen, sealed four hundred years before the first diving bell was ever lowered into the Southern Pelagic Sea—had breached his breathing defenses.
For the past seventy hours, his lung biology had been sustained only by the Mastered Craft of the Abyssal Smuggler. Deep-Diver Ren’s Hadal Pressure Invariance had rewritten the clockwork thresholds of Ren’s lungs. His alveoli had adapted to absorbing dissolved gases only under huge water-pressure squeezing, suspended within the hyper-dense stone salt water that coated his…
