I braced myself for the symptoms of poison.

I only knew the common ones, and there they arrived. The shallow breathing, a twisting sensation in my guts. I was sure that if I wanted to spit, I would have spat blood.

But in hindsight that wouldn't have been a very gentlemanly thing to do.

Roman studied my expression. "You knew what it was," he guessed.

"Wrong. I suspected it."

"Then why did you drink it all down? In one gulp?"

"Reply to my own question, first," I challenged him. My legs were feeling weak and I tried lookig around at the place under the trapdoor when I noticed my vision was getting blurry. "You know I'm not an idiot. Why did you think I would drink down whatever Jason gave me?"

"Because I thought it could be anything else. A tonic, as I told you... why did you drink it if you knew it could be poison?"

"Because it's never killed me before," I tried to stand on my legs, but they buckled down. Roman caught me. We shouldn't really make it become a habit, I thought. "And if I didn't drink it, he would have insisted. In those cases it's better to down it all in one go and then never think about it again."

"Stop talking," Roman said. "The poison is making you delirious. And stop trying to walk... we can't go anywhere with you in this state."

"Don't worry," I tried to give him a comforting look. "It never lasts long, the effect. The other times, at the very least, it didn't."

"When were you poisoned before? And how often?" Roman asked. I should have known destiny would have paired me up with the only other person in Solima who was as curious as I was.

"You just don't know when to let things slide, do you?" I asked, and my whole body jerked. It was good --- it always meant the poison's effect was vanishing.

I trashed around in Roman's arms, and I completely stopped paying attention to what he was telling me. But when I woke up again, I felt better than ever and we were in what looked like a dark tunnel.

"I don't think the portal to the other world will be visible, so it's safe to say we're already in the Other Side," Roman told me warily. "I can feel it. My power feels different here."

I was still feeling weak, but I would never let Jason's plans hinder our quest.

Since I could see that Roman was still waiting for an explanation, and there wasn't exactly one, I decided to tell him, "Let's just say that Athanasios is a true believer of that quote that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger."

Roman did not seem happy to accept it as an explanation but I just let it go. There was an another issue. "Am I the only one who hears the sound of water?"

The sound seemed to be coming from the end of the dark tunnel. It was the thundering sound of waves crashing against rocks. I had to remind myself that we were in another dimension, and so things were going to be different --- there could be very well be a large body of water at the end of a tunnel, under a Temple.

Roman looked a little worse for wear. The signs of exhaustion were clear on his face, and the sound in the distance seemed to worry him. Since I'd just been poisoned, I wondered how I looked. I didn't feel well, just well enough to put a foot in front of the other.

"Well," Roman finally commented. "We have no choice but to keep moving."

"Just out of curiosity," I asked. "Can you swim? I can."

"A little," Roman replied. He didn't like to sell himself short, but I gathered, with his upbringing, that a little probably meant that he wasn't sure he could swim enough to save his life if the waters were deep.

I understood, really. Who could have taught him? Atticus, maybe, but I imagined swimming lessons were not the biggest priority of the Sibian brothers. As for me, I learnt a little on my own and a little imitating Athanasios and Jason when we spent the summers in Ichor. Swimming, getting a suntan and eating fish was basically all there was to do on the island.

The pavement was getting slippery under the soles of my boots, which was not a good sign. Roman started propping himself up against a wall, to keep his balance. I did the same, and then the tunnel stopped abruptly.

And in front of us there was a vision that would have been majestic if it wasn't exactly what I'd been afraid to see. Where the tunnel ended there was a huge expansion of water, and no sign of land in sight.

"Maybe the Other Side is completely under the water," Roman tried to guess. "What do we know about the seal, again?"

"It's called the Ark, so maybe it's something we have to build. Or something we should find here... somewhere...."

"I'm sorry to rain on your parade but I don't see how there could be a boat anywhere."

"Don't worry," I commented. "There's enough water for a lifetime supply of rain."

Roman frowned. "Well, we have to go in, don't we? I don't see any other way."

For a brief moment, I wondered how warm the water was going to be. I didn't know if I could survive a plunge in frigid water --- if it was hot, I could have sweat out the poison, at least.

"This reminds me of the myth that says the Endless One created water first, and even though there were waters upon waters, he still poured more waters into them," Roman said. If he was bothered by the thought that we'd have to swim, he didn't show it. "Maybe it's what the Other Side looks like."

I took off my boots, silently, and dipped my feet in the water. Sulking wasn't going to help us.

Thankfully, the water was warm. It looked deep, and when I took off my jacket and submerged, I couldn't sense where it ended.

"Come on," I chided him. "I still believe this water will take us somewhere, admitting we can swim through it. But we have to at least try."

Roman didn't look comfortable in water. He made a sour face when it engulfed his body and he looked fastidious. I wanted to help him out, in case he really couldn't swim well, but I barely had strength to look after myself.

After the first waves washed over us, salty and warm, I noticed something. "I don't know how to explain it," I said. "But we can breathe underwater."

I was sure Roman could do it too. It must have been an effect of the Other Side.

"It doesn't require an explanation," Roman said, as we both dived in and were protected by what looked like a blob of water forming around our bodies. "It's another world. But I don't trust things to go this easy."

"Oh you of little faith," I teased him, as something was appearing in front of us. I, too, couldn't make sense of the differences on the Other Side but not because I was cynical. I simply found it too hard to wrap my head around, that the laws of science didn't work quite the same way. I loved studying science when Athanasios got me my first set of tutors. I sketched, quite well, both anatomical drawings and mock-ups for inventions that I would never got to create --- I got tired of projects before they were done.

Still, this was the only subject I could say I truly studied. And being on the Other Side meant that I had to think over again everything I knew, and come up with different and new ideas.

When the thing that Roman had spotted swam next to us, it looked like a Leviathan. But it was impossible. Not only there were no Creatures on the other side --- the Leviathan was small, the size of a little fish, though it looked like a serpent.

"I... I don't understand," I offered weakly.

"How many times do I have to tell you you don't have to understand?" Roman looked a little annoyed now. "Remember. That is not a Creature. We're just passing through, you don't have to fulfill your duties."

I decided not to pay any attention to the Leviathan, and truth be told, it didn't pay any attention to me. We swam a little more, until the waters seemed to dissipate and we found ourselves on dry land again.

But this time, there was something else that wasn't exactly adding up. There was nothing in our line of sight except for a well. It was very hard to see, as there was almost no light at all. I reasoned that this made sense --- there was no way the sun could be seen in the cave. If there even was a sun, on the Other Side.

Roman put his hands in the well, and passed them through the water.

"What in the world are you doing?" I asked.

"Being a Prophet has downsides too," Roman replied. "Bearing the unbearable weight of our talent is the first, and having to always put my hands everywhere and touching everything is the second."

"Many jokes come to mind," I offered. "I could lighten up the atmosphere."

Roman simply scowled. "I can feel the magic in this well," he said. "If only I could find a way to store the water... it's magical. It would exstinguish any kind of light just by coming in contact with it, and it never pours out. If anything, it calls to every other kind of liquid so that it can always grow. I imagine the water we just swam through was more of the same."

Roman looked a little wistful, but we didn't have anything that could help us carry the water. We barely had the clothes on our back. As soon as I thought about that, I noticed how see-through and wet Roman's clothes had become. I wondered, with a little unease that was totally unfamiliar to me, how my white shirt and tight breeches would look.

Roman looked lost in thought, so I decided to ask him something else. "Do you see visions in this dimension?"

"Faintly," he replied. "And they are not the way they usually are. I think they're trying to tell me something about this place. The water in the well, and the one in the tunnel... they are known by many names, and one of those is the Weeping Waters. If we walk in the direction we're going, instead, we'll reach a place called the Abyss."

The place sounded like the place some of the foreigners called hell. Not everyone believed in the same legends and myths, where it concerned the Endless One. Still, the eighteen thousand worlds were the truth. Hell was a made-up legend, and there was no telling if the people who first come up with it had journeyed to the Other Side.

"Do you know anything of this Abyss?" I asked Roman.

"Do I look like a tourist guide to you?" he bit back.

No, with his hair darkened by the water, his icy blue eyes and his black clothes clinging tightly to his body he didn't look like one. The truth was that, after the poison, I felt too weak to unleash my Skill or my wings, and without them I was just a revolutionary journalist with a moderate passion for inventions who died once and then never done anything else of value. He was the one with the powers.

"Let's go," Roman told me. "I don't like the idea of the Abyss any more than you do but it makes no sense to stay here if we have to move forward. This other dimension is taking a toll on you. You almost never talk anymore."

"Maybe it's the poison," I replied. Even though Roman was right. I didn't like to be confronted with things I didn't know, situations I hadn't studied beforehand. Traps I couldn't escape just with wit and my sword.

I was not nothing, though. I still had my sword. I just needed something to battle and then things would feel right again.

Roman and I resumed our walk. The place resembled still the inside of a tunnel, or a cave, as I now thought of it, but the truth was that it was neither. I had to adjust my mind to think that this place was naturally barren and dark. A world with scorched black walls and stalagtites, a handful of water, oxygen and air but no sun. It was neither warm nor cold, but the air felt frigid upon my wet skin and clothes.

Walking we got to a place where the water divided into little rivers and met the land. Then it all poured in into the same geyser.

"The Place of Swallowing," Roman said. "If we had to bring water back, this would be the perfect place. It's where it's at its most magical."

"If only there were people here to tell us if what we're doing is wrong or right," I sat on the ground. I was exhausted. "Roman... Do you think on the Other Side there are people at all?"

Roman frowned. He didn't want to tell me a lie, I understood. But I must have looked worse than I felt, because he didn't tell me the truth either, and giving each other the honest reply was what we did with each other.

Then, we felt a sound behind our backs. I really didn't want to get my hopes down, but it sounded like slithering.

As we turned around, the sight in front of us was eery. It looked like a Leviathan at first, but it was obvious from a few differences it was not one. What it was, instead, was the little serpent that had been swimming placidly in the water before. Somehow, it had followed us. Maybe it was its way of telling us we were not welcome.

While the Leviathan was serpentine, its body resembled that of a whale. Now that the serpent was in full size, one could see it had a slimmer body and it was covered in lucid scales, as dark and inky as everything on the Other Side was.

I unsheathed my sword. I hadn't counted on the way the poison had a serious effect on my muscles --- I was very slow in my movements. The sword felt like it weighted a ton, and it brought me back to the first times Athanasios had taught me how to wield it and I was still clumsy with it.

I hadn't felt that way in eight years. I hadn't felt that way since I turned into a Watcher.

Roman looked ready to strike, a knife in his hand. But I understood he believed me capable to make the first move. And so I did. I wielded my sword, but I found myself too weak to strike at the creature's neck, so I settled for impaling it into its body. The serpent trashed around while I still had grip on my sword. I was bounced back, and then fell down with a thud. Then, the animal spat something that looked like ink on me.

My vision blurred, as if the poison was back in full effect. I heard Roman yell at the snake. When I lifted my head, I could see how the fight proceeded. Roman had used his knife to slash at the animal's throat with much more swiftness than I had. Then he started making cuts on the body of the animal, until it let out a groan and crouched on the ground, apparently dead.

When Roman ran towards me, I grinned at him. I wanted to tell him that he'd done good, and that this display of his skills made it so that it was very unfortunate that he wasn't a Watcher. He was the fighting partner many of us would have wished for, in patrol.

For a moment I thought I'd said all of that, but perhaps I didn't. My eyes closed against my willpower and I started dreaming.

I did not dream, per se. I had nightmares. It was mostly the same one, over and over.

I woke up, in the nightmare, to find Roman staring at me. And I wanted to tell him things about myself I'd never told anyone. I must have been delirious, because the things I wanted to confide where my weaknesses, my worst flaws, the horrors of my past, the ones I tried so very hard to escape, my dreams for a better world.

And then I noticed he was not listening to me. I looked down at my body and I saw that it was void inside. I was see-through, and what was on the interior amounted to nothing. I wanted to give him something, to tell him something about me, but I always looked at myself and found myself lacking and empty and fake.

When I woke up for real, it was hard to understand the nightmare was over. I looked at Roman, then at my own body, and I started crying with relief.

"This is another secret between you and I," I told him between sobs. "You are not to tell anyone you've seen me crying."

Roman looked paralyzed in fear. Then, he gingerly put his hand on my shoulder. 

"You know that I wouldn't," he said, and with his other hand he reluctantly pat my back. "You can make your jokes about Prophets and their hands now."

"For some reason," I told him. "I don't really think like joking now. What was in the ink of the animal? Some other kind of poison?"

"I'm not sure," Roman replied. "But when I slayed it, I could see it had two words written upon its body. In the old language. Tohu, for chaos, and vohu, for void. So, whatever you've dreamt, it must have been just an illusion."

For some reason, this hardly made me feel any better. Perhaps the serpent just brought out the way in which any of its victims were hollow inside, and when it tested me, it found nothing of value. But I kept all of this to myself. I had no intention of ever mentioning the nightmare.

"Just out of curiosity, how did you kill the snake?" I told Roman as he helped me up to my feet. "It wasn't an easy prey."

"I bled him out. But not only that," he pointed with his knife at the body of the animal. I could see the blood flowing out of every wound. The bleeding never stopped.

I noticed that it was because the blood was pouring into the geyser, the place where the liquid felt compelled to go and where it would always call for more. Thus, it was calling for all the blood inside of the animal.

"Do you think it ruthless?" Roman asked. "I thought it had killed you."

"I don't," I replied. "Ruthless is fine if it's what it gets the job done. Where to, now?"

Roman looked ahead, in the distance. I could see it too --- lights, artificial lights in the distance.

"Is it only me," he asked. "Or is that a town?"