Drift of The Drown
The air thickened with salt and silence.
Mireya sat crouched on a narrow spit of rock at the edge of a flooded mangrove trail. The red roots tangled like veins above the brackish water. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, blood still drying on her palms. She hadn’t slept. Not really. Since their flight from the Mouthless Trench, her mind had been locked in a cycle of dread and memory—Amaru’s eyes vanishing into the black tide, the song of the drowned echoing even now in the back of her skull.
Bastian emerged from the water, gasping. His shirt clung to his chest like a second skin. “There’s something down there,” he said, panting. “A structure. Old. Coral-eaten.”
“Another ruin?” Mireya asked without lifting her eyes.
“No.” He looked around, then dropped his voice. “It’s shaped like a throne.”
That made her look up.
Behind them, the jungle trembled with insect buzz and distant gull cries, but beneath that was another rhythm—wet breathing, soft and slow, like lungs
