The respite on the basalt island worked wonders. Kael's deep, cellular exhaustion receded, replaced by a steady strength. When he re-established his symbiotic link with the Diver, the connection felt cleaner, more stable. The ship's silver-glowing heart beat in time with his own, a familiar and now comforting rhythm. He had not just rested his body; he had recharged his ship's soul.
They set off again into the fiery sea, making good time. The Healer's Tablet, which Kael now kept secured on a console near him, provided the map. He no longer needed to unroll it. Through his bond with the ship, he could feel the tablet's ancient, resonant song, and it manifested in his mind's eye as a glowing, silver-blue line stretching across the sea's surface—a path of least resistance, a current in the chaos. For the first time since leaving Lumina, his path felt clear.
The calm lasted for another few hours. They were traversing a wide, seemingly stable plain of black crust when it happened.
It began not as a sound, but as a feeling. A low, deep shudder that ran through the entire sea, a vibration so powerful that Kael felt it both through the ship's hull and in his own bones. It was a bass note that shook the world.
"Crust-quake!" Ria yelled, her voice sharp with alarm as she grabbed onto a console for support. "A big one! The whole shelf is unstable!"
Her words were an understatement. The solid-looking black crust all around them, which had seemed as permanent as a continent, began to crack and break apart like a pane of shattered glass. Massive fissures, kilometers long, tore open in the surface, venting enormous, violent plumes of white-hot magma that roared into the sulfurous air. The path ahead of them, the clear, stable route they had been following, disintegrated into a chaotic, impassable maze of shifting tectonic plates and erupting lava flows.
"We're cut off!" Kael shouted, his hands gripping the arms of the pilot's chair as the ship pitched violently. He could feel the crust beneath them groaning, threatening to give way. A huge section of the shelf behind them, the path they had just crossed, collapsed into the sea with a deafening hiss, cutting off their retreat. Ahead, the way was blocked by a new, rapidly forming wall of cooling magma and floating debris, a mountain range being born before their very eyes.
They were trapped. Caught in a shrinking pocket of relative stability, a tiny, temporary island in a sea that was tearing itself apart.
"The crust won't hold!" Ria yelled over the growing roar. She was already working at her console, her fingers flying across the controls, analyzing the chaos. "The stress fractures are everywhere. This whole plate is going to founder. We have to go under! It's our only chance. Take us down, Kael! Now!"
To dive in the middle of a crust-quake, into the violent, unpredictable currents of a sea in upheaval, was an act of profound desperation. But she was right. It was their only move.
Kael didn't hesitate. He closed his eyes, shutting out the terrifying view of the disintegrating world around them, and focused his will. Down.
The Diver responded instantly, its nose tilting as it slid silently off the fracturing crust and into the glowing, liquid fire. The pressure on the hull was immediate and immense. Kael felt it as a giant, squeezing fist clenching around his own body. The ship groaned, a deep, resonant sound of protest, and he felt the strain on its metallic shell as if it were stress on his own bones. The view from the forward viewport changed from black rock and grey sky to a swirling, incandescent world of orange and white.
As they descended deeper into the churning chaos, a new problem became terrifyingly clear. Ria's short-range scanners painted a grim picture on her screen. "Kael, we've got a wall! A submerged magma wall, directly ahead! It's a fresh upwelling, still solidifying!"
Kael could feel it too, a massive, dense presence in the currents ahead. They couldn't go over it; the surface was a death trap. They couldn't go around it; the quake had them boxed in.
"How deep is it?" Kael asked, his voice tight.
Ria's fingers flew across her console. The news was bad. "Too deep. The base is another five hundred meters down. The pressure at that depth would crush us. The hull won't take it."
They were trapped again, this time in the fiery depths. Their only hope of escape had led them into another cage. There was only one way forward. Through.
Kael knew what he had to do. It was an idea born of the same instinct that had healed the ship's core, a synthesis of his power and his symbiotic bond with the vessel. He couldn't just shatter the wall ahead; the explosion and the resulting debris would cripple them at this depth. He needed to do something more elegant, more powerful, and far more dangerous. He needed to create a tunnel.
"Ria, hold on to something," he said, his voice quiet and strained.
He focused all of his energy, all of his will, drawing on the deepest reserves of his own life force. He extended his Dissonance beyond the confines of his own body, beyond the hull of the ship, using the entire vessel as a massive, resonant tuning fork. The ship's silver-glowing heart began to beat faster, its rhythm matching Kael's own frantic pulse.
He projected his song out into the magma wall ahead. It was not the sharp, percussive song of shattering he had used on rock. This was a new melody, a sustained, powerful, and incredibly complex frequency designed not to break the molten rock, but to part it. It was a song that resonated with the liquid state of the crystal, pushing it aside, creating a temporary, self-sealing tunnel of clear passage just long enough for the Diver to pass through.
The power drain was immense, far greater than anything he had ever experienced before. It was not just fatigue; it felt like his very life force was being siphoned out of him, a river of energy flowing from his heart into the ship's engine. The edges of his vision began to go dark. The thrum of his own heart in his chest started to slow, becoming heavy and labored as the ship's engine drank greedily from his vitality.
Through his fading senses, he felt the ship surge forward, plunging into the fiery wall. He heard Ria's voice, distant and distorted, yelling his name. Then the world, both inside and out, dissolved into a roaring torrent of silver and orange light, and he knew nothing more.