Pain. Xarl hate pain. Xarl scream as the black arm hurts him. Sucker mouths. Pain, pain, pain. Dimly, distantly—a thought: is this what it was like for those in the cells? Is this what Xarl has done to others?

  Yes, of course it is. You have always known. You enjoyed it!

  Dragged screaming across the decking. The master—the brave master who stabbed it with a spear—cries out his name.

  “Xarl!”

  Pity, in the master’s voice? Love, even? Oh, to be loved! Xarl has never known love. No mother, no father. Theronts, always, ripped from the womb, from the family.

  His memory not so good of those early years. Darkness and death. Pain and suffering. Always, he healed. Some quirk of his birth, some accident of the magic that made him. Nothing could kill Xarl. Nothing…

  But this hurts. It hurts so damn much. Here, even the water betrays him—his beloved water that keeps his flesh cool and his mind clear. This waters burns him with horrid salt. It stings. He screams, screams, screams.

  The suckers bite and bite. He feels his blood draining. The monster—Daimon—is eager for him. He is some new morsel, some new delight it has not tasted. Neither mortal nor god, but something in-between.

  Below the surface, air cut off. He can breathe, here, through his gills but the salt is agony. The water is poison. Curse it!

  Dragged down, down. The pressure rising. The sea is blood-coloured. The monster below him is unimaginably vast. All chitin and mouth and eyes and tendrils. It looks like a thing wrought from nightmares.

  Oh, Xarl’s nightmares are the worst of all: deeper and darker than any black pit.

  He fights. His hands are strong, freakishly so. He has nails like talons. He digs them into the rubbery flesh of his enemy. Normally, his blows would do nothing. But the master weakened it. The spear did something. Made the Daimon rot and burn. Its armour is sloughing away. Xarl tears. He bites. You eat me; I eat you! He has no teeth, of course, but his tongue is like the coarsest sandpaper, scouring the Daimon’s flesh away. He drinks the sloughed skin.

  The water fouls with real blood—blacker than sin. His vision blurs as the swirling darkness enshrouds him. He tastes bile and effluence and death and iron. He bites again, tears. Claws with his mighty hands. The thing spasms, twists.

  Xarl fought to be born! Xarl fights! Xarl always fights!

  He feels its grip weakening, the suckers detaching—peeling great chunks of flesh from his bare torso. But even as the wounds gape and bleed, they begin to close.

  Xarl! Immortal! Unique!

  His master seeks immortality, but Xarl is already that. Xarl wishes he could give the gift to his master, for all he has done, for shepherding Xarl, for teaching Xarl his strength.

  Before the master, Xarl knew only how to receive pain.

  The master had told him how to give it, that he could be the one with the power.

  Bites. Claws. Roars.

  The Daimon releases him with a shudder. Though the water is malign, he can still move through it at shocking speed. He kicks with his crooked legs and jets through the ocean. Up, he flies. Up to the surface—and there finds he is alone. The Black Heart is gone.

  “My lord!” he cries to the wind. “My lord!”

  Only resounding emptiness answers him.

  He dives below again. He swims through the blackness. Miles he swims. Hours. Still, there is no sign of the ship. Was it taken under? Or did they simply flee? Which way were they going, north? He does not know. He does not know which direction he swims, only that he must keep swimming. Fish flee from him. Sharks circling in the deep consider him but then move on. He dares not dive too deep for fear of encountering another one of those Daimons.

  His limbs begin to tire. Exhaustion settles upon him like the lid of a sarcophagus. He kicks, pulls himself on. The dark waters surround and engulf him. He may have healed from his wounds, but his energies are not limitless. In fact, it is draining to heal so much damage. He flaps. The salt is acid down his throat and in his lungs. His skin feels as though it is burning in lit Daimonsblood.

  Must… stop… find… Black… Heart…

  Now he is hardly moving. His limbs hardly move him through the waters. The tides have him now. He feels their dreadful embrace, their sureness. They drag him, and he has no choice but to go with them now. He is limp, boneless in the water. His eyes blink against the horrid stinging. Each time they close, he feels a darkness encroaching.

  And then it takes him.

  ***

  He awakens upon some nameless shore. There is sand beneath his fingers and stomach and face. The sea playfully caresses his legs. He is so cold. A mortal man would have died long ago, but he is not entirely man, nor entirely the amphibian he resembles.

  He blinks his eyes open. He knows not the coastline. Certainly, it is not Virgoda. The trees here are strange, too spaced out to form a forest, their trunks furry and without many branches, crowned with broad, tooth-shaped leaves that flap in a gentle breeze. There are strange blue objects clustered beneath their canopies. Fruit, of some kind?

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The sun beats down mercilessly. Were he not still half in the sea, he would have withered already.

  Slowly, he stands. He is on some tiny island, dominated by a mountain jagged as men’s hearts. There are other islands clustered around this one. An archipelago. The sea here is gorgeous. Winking and flashing in the sun.

  Where is he? Xarl knows little of maps. He knows little of the world beyond the little kingdom of Governor Lucan. Xarl was content to live in his cell, with his pool, his prisoners…

  But fear is alien to Xarl. Fear died the day the master awakened him to the reality of his power.

  There are black streaks in the sky. They look like the smoke of Daimonsblood, but he sees no Engines here, no cities, in fact, of any kind. No people. He smells the air. His sense of smell is not as acute as some theronts, but still he tries.

  Nothing.

  Knowing not what else to do, he stumbles toward the mountain. It is the only landmark. Perhaps from its summit, he might learn more about where he is, or else descry a pool in which he can wash off the wretched, burning salt.

  Xarl tramps over the coarse sand. Through the trees. Strange birdsong greets his ears. He despises it. Colourful plumage flits about his head and he yowls and jabbers and swats at them until they leave him alone.

  They think Xarl dead! But Xarl is not dead! Never dead!

  He walks for many miles. Exhaustion is taking its toll once again. He is hungry, so, so hungry.

  But there are flies here. He lets his tongue fly and captures some of them. They are larger than those from home, crunchier. There is some pus in them that fizzles on his tongue. Poisonous, perhaps, though not enough to topple his constitution.

  Eventually, he reaches the foot of the mountain, and to his surprise, finds a cave mouth. He frowns. The entrance is black—and wet.

  He smells water. Clean water, not this filthy salt-poison.

  Stepping within the cave, he hears a dripping sound. The walls of the cave are damp to touch. Excitedly, he continues. It is dark, here, but Xarl’s eyesight is good. He is able to descry the slopes, the hanging stalactites, the walls. A few insects glow, their tales like bright gemstones. He snatches them up in his maw with a flick of his monstrous tongue.

  Deeper and deeper he descends. The tunnels narrow and narrow until he is having to squeeze his huge frame through crevices. But the smell and song of the water draw him on. Somewhere deep and dark and quiet. Then my mind can work again.

  He could not think out of the water. He had tried reading those books his master bought him, but he could only concentrate when he was in the pool.

  Xarl weeps as the grief overwhelmed him. My pit, my master, where are you?

  A dim part of him hopes his master was looking for him, but another part knows there is no hope. His master is gone. They have been separated by some ineluctable act of Fate, and now he is on a different path. An unknown path.

  Down into the dark.

  A light blooms. He pauses. It shines just beyond a final narrowing of the tunnel. Greenish. Strobing. Winking. Beautiful. He hungers for that light, knowing somehow that it is connected with the water.

  He rushes to the crevice, crushing his body between the mouth of the rock. He heaves, pushes.

  His flesh is slimy, slippery. He slithers through and comes into a large chamber. The ceiling is high and domed and covered in glittering teeth of rock. At his feet lies the most gorgeous pool he has ever seen. He kneels by it, dipping his hand to feel its cold touch. Wondrous! Wondrous! The waters are emerald. Tall strands of algae undulate beneath the surface, as though swaying to some forbidden, secret music.

  There is music here. A woman’s voice. The sound is not pleasant, not in truth. It has a sing-song quality, and the words rhyme, but the voice from which they flow is sourer than bile. A harridan’s voice, the voice of one on the verge of death, gargling on blood and scum and foam. A woman’s voice, but only barely. More like a cadaver’s.

  As he turns his head to find the sound, he spots something else—something that should have been impossible to miss.

  A great stone effigy looms over the pool. It is also of a woman, though a hideous one. Many armed. With eyes like a frog, the tail of a rat. Six breasts. Her hands clasp sickles and scythes and sacrificial knives. He remembers the torturer’s implements he has so long used and shuddered.

  The stone glimmers with that greenish light.

  “Xaarrrllll…”

  His blood, already cold as a reptile’s, turns to pure ice. The stone called his name, spoke to him in that dread sing-song voice.

  “W-what are you?” He rises, clenching his fists. “Show yourself!”

  A figure steps out from behind the effigy. The woman is slender, moving with impossible grace as she treads lightly by the poolside toward him. She wears a black dress, a veil over her face.

  She is eight foot tall. For all his brawn, he feels a gnat beneath her.

  “What a curious creature you are...” the woman murmurs. Xarl stares, transfixed. Fear is alien to him but terror is not. This is animal-terror, some blood-deep instinct that he is in the presence of a predator greater by far even than the Daimon hunting the deep. He wants to flee.

  And yet, he is drawn to her also. He feels some horrid connection. It is not allurement, not quite. More… belonging. He knows her, from somewhere too deep to name.

  She approaches and he is powerless to stop it.

  “So broken, so lost, so fallen from your prior state,” she continues, in that nauseating voice. “An accident, surely? The transbreeding process… And yet, for all your monstrosity, for all the pain you have wrought, there is some strange purity in you… And power, too.”

  Xarl hardy understands the fair words of the goddess, save for a strange feeling in the depths of his being, as though a cavemouth, covered over by vines and poisonous thorns, has suddenly been uncovered. Light falls down into the blackness of his soul.

  “My lady,” he croaks, kneeling. “I shall do whatever you ask. Forgive me, forgive me the horrors I have done. The horrors…” He weeps and prostrates himself. He is not sure why. Everything is confusion. This is a dream, surely? One of his strange and dark dreams.

  “There are more horrors yet to come,” she says, and her voice is the music of bones, the drum of death. “But in the bed of horror is birthed the truth. Such is the nature of science, and of physicks…”

  He understands nothing of her words, but looks up. Her face is veiled, but he so longs to look. She senses this, for her hand rises to the veil.

  “I shall offer you a glimpse of the truth. And then, dear Xarl, I shall remake you. A god has perished, my brother has perished, and so the Godseed protocol must once again be enacted.”

  She pulls aside the veil.

  And the horror of the truth ruptures his mind to its core.