Chapter 171: Sea-Shaped
Hardly a moment after I'd collected new schemas had my attention been pulled down, burrowing deep within my halls. A heartbeat of hesitation, making sure the merrow had left—but they had, and Abarossa had followed them, returning to Arroyo. What was left of it, anyway. Seros' memories were of a false city, empty and broken, the rubble and ruin left after a devastation. The single pillar of bloodline kelp up the center, hiding the entrance to the rooms underneath.
Hiding after they were destroyed. By what, I didn't know, but Seros had seemed certain.
A pitch-shark.
I should have asked Abarossa about it, asked why it was so important for the merrow of Arroyo to hear her voice again instead of all her other followers in the wider world; but part of me wondered if she would even answer. I still remembered how it felt to take that schema, to feel the creeping, shuddering wrongness of the abyss carved into a shark's shape—and the power above, trying to keep it from me. The gods, squashing its mention.
A pitch-shark had destroyed Arroyo, and it wasn't recent. Old enough they should have recovered, but instead stayed hidden beneath the stone.
I shook my mana, coiling back in over the pale glow of the Scorchplains. A fear that I could do nothing about for the moment, slotted back into my core for when I had time to hiss concerns to Seros. For now, my focus went else, far below the surface world—where, n a land of smoke and soot, a new creature opened her eyes.
All four of them. The orthrus.
Her ears perked up, the leftmost head lifting off the ground with a rumbled whine. She'd grown to some five feet tall, burnt sienna fur spilling over her bulky shoulders and the muscle coiled tight as stone. Black streaked over her spine and face, surrounding ember-bright eyes, four of them; two heads, conjoined at neck, staring over her surroundings.
What an odd creature. Powerful, yes, and already she'd thrown off the sluggish consciousness of evolution to start thinking in these brisk, pointed thoughts, but two heads was certainly not something I would have come up with myself. She could bite prey from multiple sides, at least.