Page 17 of In Rising Tides

The gold of his armor seemed to swallow the remaining murky light. With powerful strokes of his emerald tail, he propelled himself in front of her.

“Atlantis has changed. You said you didn’t think there was anything worse than me on the throne—” Lyra nodded her agreement, clamping down on her tongue to keep from interrupting his gift of information. “You will thank me for what I have done for you—forus.”

He was so close to her that she could glimpse the true color of his eyes.

They were gold, as bright as the sun, with a ring of onyx surrounding them.

They were familiar to her somehow, but she couldn’t place where.

“We’ve lingered long enough. Let’s move,” Drystan’s voice thundered with command, and they set off.

The guard on her left bore scars down the left side of his face that puckered his lips into a grimace. When he caught her staring, he tightened his grip, and Lyra winced at the pressure.

“Easy, Fang,” Drystan growled, and the guard complied.

Drystan turned before she could say anything else and led them through the inky depths.

The guards at her sides pulled her along, and she didn’t stop fighting against their hold.

Lyra couldn’t fathom the cruel calculation that had been required for what he had just achieved, both sacrificing the original guards and usurping her father. He must have had an unimaginable amount of help.

King Auris had been the epitome of power, commanding loyalty from each territory not just in might but by blood.

He had married off all of her sisters to each ruling prince.

Lyra had surmised that his influence had been limitless.

They passed a vast sea cave. The shadowed entrance stretched open like the maw of an ancient beast.

Ithicais was carved from such caverns—an underground city of chiseled stone, polished by centuries of passage.

Only one other territory rivaled such abundant history—Zeal—with its archaic temples.

“How much longer?” Lyra asked Fang.

He didn’t reply, but the scar beside his mouth twitched.

The guard on her right cleared his throat. He was similar in age and size to Fang, but there was a menacing quality to the hard lines of his face. He reminded her of a shark.

“It depends on the path we take.”

Lyra grimaced as burning rippled down her sides from so much use of her tail.

There were muscles there she hadn’t used since her time on land, and they were screaming their protest now.

She cataloged the rest of her aches and pains.

They hadn’t traveled very far, but her fatigue was heavy, and she slumped against the grip of the guards, allowing them to pull her more than she swam.

Her fingertips ached from the eruption of her talons, like the soreness of flesh after a removed splinter.

The flesh around the root of her scales was sensitive from their regrowth as well.

But something tugged at the back of her mind like an incessant nagging that something was wrong, but she couldn’t place it.

It felt like a ghost or a shadow, or maybe more like an absence of self.

Fang halted their advance, his hand leaving her arm as he approached a sea cave.