The chill that grips me at Sar's realization locks up every part of my body that wasn't tense already. Too old to read? We can't have that happen. We brought Sar to Roshaska on the gamble that it would pay off. That we'd get what we needed, and not have to come back here again. If they become unable to read the records as far back in time as we need to go, we'll have wasted more than six days that we could have spent finding someone better equipped to come.

We should have gotten a Shalda scholar from the start.

"I can still read enough of it to make sense of it," signs Sar. I think they can see how distressed I am, because they're eyeing me sideways like they do when they're not sure how I'm going to respond. "And that will probably continue for a while. Some parts of the language do stay the same over time, and the changes don't tend to happen very quickly. I'll be able to keep reading. It just won't be as detailed."

We need that detail. Well, we need nuance—enough of it to determine if the last times Roshaska and Rapal were destroyed were the result of stopping a war, or failing to stop it. It feels like such a simple goal when I say it to myself like that, but if Sar's interpretation of these stories becomes fuzzier over time, nuance may be the first thing to go.

On the other hand, we have no way to know until we actually get there. There's no guarantee we'll even find the records we're looking for in here, and even if we do find them, there's a chance they won't be impacted by Sar's deteriorating comprehension. I tell myself that over and over, but there's a stubborn part of me that's angry at the ocean now, for wearing down those older stories on the sides of the pinnacle that supports Rapal. Those are the ones whose writing likely matches what we're looking for, and that writing has been unreadable for centuries. Nobody there can study what they can't read.

A hand on my back startles me back to reality. Yaz gives me a nudge forward, indicating that we need to keep moving. I take the lead again. Sar doesn't follow me directly this time. They move from wall to wall, scanning the writing there with a furrowed brow. They keep stopping altogether. At one point, Casin asks whether we should be moving any faster.

"I'm trying to pick up what I can," is Sar's reply. That relieves my anxieties a little. Sar's trying to catch the ways the words are changing as we move back in time, so that they have a better chance when we find the oldest writing. I begin to watch them with half an eye, matching my pace to theirs. We must be more than halfway to the city core by now. The maps keep pointing us further, and there's nothing I can do but follow.

I don't like feeling so useless. I want to pray again, but now that we're actually here, I'm not comfortable calling Andalua's name into being, nor translating Karu prayers. I scour my memory for Shalda ones that don't mention the ocean goddess, but there are almost none. It hurts to know we've put so much faith in Andalua. The consequences are all around me here, in a city she almost certainly destroyed.

Then we turn a corner and find the way ahead blocked once again.

That means we're getting close. I perk up as something to do presents itself, and tell the others to wait. Yaz comes with me as we locate the nearest upward shaft and wind our way up through the city. It's only a few hundred heartbeats before the brush of a current meets my skin. Somewhere above us is open water. By my own calculation, the top of the city should be nowhere near this close, which means we're under the great collapsed hall sunk into its center. We're almost at the core.

We return to the others. My body buzzes with nervous energy as I find a way around this collapsed section, wanting to move everywhere and nowhere all at once, wanting to be useful, wanting not to get in Sar's way. When we start out again, they move slower than ever. I can tell it's getting harder to read the words on the walls. I want to make my own prayers that Sar will be successful when we need it most, but I don't know who to pray to, and nothing feels right. In that moment, I'm actually jealous of Ande. Her people have their own island deity, and from what I've heard her say about him, he's never wreaked the kind of destruction Andalua has. I don't care if they made him up like the Karu believe. I envy the comfort Ande must get from her prayers.

Or maybe the Lix'i Karu were wrong. I don't even know if I believe that part of their beliefs anymore, or if it might have been one more thing other Karu invented to justify their hatred of the islanders. Maybe there really is a god above the sea.

The tunnels up until this point have been narrowing as they get progressively older. It's only a few more turns before the one we're in abruptly ends. Me and Yaz move out cautiously into the room beyond. The water here is still. Utterly still. I can't shake the feeling that we may be the first ones in centuries to swim here, too deep for most Nekta, too risky for any Kels who don't trust their direction sense or can't read the maps on the walls. There's a kind of peace to the stillness. There's sea-dust over everything, but not as much as in the upper layers of the city outside. The water is crystal clear.

There's something off about the walls of the room, but I don't realize what until Ande's eyes widen. "Taiki?" she signs. "This is a cave."

All our eyes jump up to the ceiling or around the walls. They're stone. Ande's right: there's no sign of coral-block or coral cement, and even the structure of the room differs from the ubiquitous domes of the city above. We're under Roshaska, and not just at the bottom of the core—this is the core, and the Kels who once inhabited this place didn't even build it. In fact, they more likely built around it. Anchored their city over this natural space, where they kept their most closely guarded secrets. This place must be almost unimaginably old.

It's also empty.

There's no writing. No stories, no notes, not even graffiti. There's no sign at all of what this room might have been back in the days of the eel-Kels. Yaz moves around the walls. The stone is smooth. Worn by the water, but there's not enough water movement to erase any writing here. Ande is frowning. I don't know what else to do, so I shoot her a glance that I hope asks my question. I want to know what she sees.

"It's too still," she signs. "This kind of cave happens when there's water flowing through it. We have... we had them on Telu. We'd hide in them when storms hit us. All the ones like this had connecting passageways for the water to flow through."

It takes me a moment to realize what she's implying. The walls here were worn out naturally by water flow, but there is no water flow. Nor is there any sign of where it could have come from, once upon a time. The tunnel we came in through is small, and it's the only one.

It can't be the only one.

"Yaz? Sar?" signs Ande. When both glance at her, she signs, "Look for secret passageways. There's at least one more way in or out of here that's been covered up."

"Let me finish trap-checking," replies Yaz, "and then we can split up and search."

Ande nods and falls back beside Casin. Yaz has a system going, tapping the walls and holding out a hand for drafts that might indicate peepholes, weapon-holes, or cracks where the stone might be designed to come free. She's less than halfway around the room when she finds the first one. I move to join her, but she shakes her head. Close to the wall now, she scopes out a broad patch of it, then edges to the middle and presses both hands against the wall.

A rumble shakes the cavern. Yaz moves lightning-fast, zipping clear as a slab of rock comes free from the wall and slams to the ground. Sea-dust billows outward. I shield my eyes, but it's filled the cave in heartbeats, clouding the once-clear water. Yaz, unharmed, gives the slab a distasteful look. The place it fell from is carefully carved into the stone, with no purpose other than to bait people into checking it for hidden entrances. I'm amazed the trap still works after so many millennia.

Yaz, rather than continue around the cavern, moves to the gap the stone left behind. My chest tightens as she pokes different parts of it. Another stone could fall at any moment and crush her flat, even though I know she's fast enough to escape it. The next moment, a sly smile crosses her face. She gives another prod, and a crack appears.

"Don't—" I begin, but it's too late. Yaz digs her fingers into the gap and pulls. Something else grinds. When I can see straight again, she's dusting her hands, unharmed in the water and floating beside a doorway with a perfectly calibrated stone door.

"How?" demands Ande.

Yaz points to the slab on the floor. "See how that's not broken? They curved it to take that impact again and again. Anyone trying to reach this doorway without knowing what they're doing gets squashed. Anyone who does know gets in."

I knew Yaz was smart, but this probably doubles my awe for her. She tells us to stay, then flares her hands to maximum brightness and ventures into the room beyond. Several hundred heartbeats pass in utmost anxiety before she calls back in Shalda,〈 It's clear! 〉

I'm first to the door. Sar and Ande hang back, and Casin still guards us from behind, spear ready and gaze locked on the tunnel we came in through. I still slow before following Yaz into the next room over.

I gasp. The space I emerge into sparkles. The water is clear again—so clear, it's basically not there at all—and the ground is near-devoid of sea-dust. A shell mosaic patterns the whole floor. This is shell mosaics as they must have looked in the days of the eel Kels, not the faded, half-crumbled ones that still lend a certain dignity to the central hall some ways above our heads. Shells in half a hundred different shades, cut or broken into fragments, wind in patterns across the floor. They reflect my light back up onto the walls and ceiling. These are unnaturally smooth. Coral-cement plasters the walls, rendering them near-white, even after so many centuries. And over all those surfaces is the writing we've been looking for.

The oldest eel-Kel writing is somehow even more beautiful than its later iterations. Those became choppier, likely as their lettering adapted to being carved into stone. On these softer surfaces, smooth shapes were possible. Loops and curls, rings and spirals. All are annotated with dots and dashes around their fringes, which no doubt add similar nuance to the under-letter scoring of the later eel-Kel alphabet. Everyone who enters after me moves around the room with an awe bordering on reverence. Sar floats motionless in the water before moving to a wall like they can't tell if they're dreaming. The whole scene is almost unimaginably beautiful.

Yaz alone does not seem phased by the admiration this place demands of us. She flits about the rooms, inspecting cracks and peeking around corners, like she's already gotten over the place, and only exploration will stave off the return of boredom. I know that's at least partly a front. Watching her, I see her pause for longer moments at particularly beautiful parts of the cavern: a black mosaic, a spiral story, or a patch of crystals on the ceiling. I check back with Sar. They've picked a wall now, and hover before it with tail swishing slowly and one hand lifted just shy of touch. I won't be any use to them. I can only read one language, and it's a whole ocean and several millennia from its roots here. I follow Yaz instead. She's vanished around a corner now, and I want to know what she's finding.

There's more than one cavern.

Starting with the one we entered, this is a string of caves strung like beads along a thread. The first is medium-sized. The next is no taller than I am from head to tail-fins. The third is the one I find Yaz in. It has a ceiling so high, it's lost in shadow overhead. From the depths of it, I see more mosaic-sparkle, and realize that here, lines of shells curl between the blocks of writing as well as on the floor. Yaz has set her lights to flicker lightly, their natural state that only enhances the dreamlike atmosphere. It's so silent, my ears ring.

It's hard to even imagine people in this place. It's so perfectly preserved, it's like the eel-Kels were here just yesterday—but also like nobody has ever been here at all. Like these writings sprang to existence on their own, and maintain themselves, or are maintained by the spirits of the city above. The spirits analogy feels right, somehow. It's a Karu belief, but the more I see inside this city, the more similar it looks to a Karu way of life. The maps. The dens. Even the writing is more similar to written Karu than... well, most Shalda don't even have a writing system. We pass down knowledge in our stories, and we never write those down.

Yaz makes her way up the wall towards the ceiling. I've dimmed my hands without meaning to, leaving hers alone in the cavern. In their flickering, the mosaics dance and come alive. Abstract patterns follow the curves and angles of Nekta: corals and sponges, anemones, urchins, sea-spiders, crabs. Many reef species again, even if they're from the deeper ocean, like the deep-sea reef where we first found Sar.

I wonder if any of those reefs used to grow around Roshaska. For a solid construction in the deep sea, it's remarkably free of corals, or any other anchoring Nekta. Normally, rocks are an oasis in an endless silt plain. Yet though the canyon above Roshaska is lined with sea-life, the city itself is abandoned in more ways than one. It's eerie. Cursed by its own destruction, most likely. It's amazing my people never guessed it might have been Andalua who sang that curse. She's the only one with the power to make magic last so long.

There are nine caves in all. Yaz and I explore to the final one, a dead-end almost certainly sealed off to be that way. There's no sign of another exit. The writing here is has changed from further up the caverns, but I don't know how to tell which one is older. I should tell Sar how far the records extend, but the caves are pure-black behind us, and though I grew up in the darkness, I don't want to swim back alone.

I didn't grow up in darkness. It's never purely dark in the mid-water Shalda-sana during the day, and at night, we move up the water to within view of the moon and stars. There are also creatures that sparkle in the water: tiny Nekta like those that swim through the night sky to make the stars. Nowhere is the darkness this absolute except some parts of the Shalda-Ki-Tu. I felt the same way there. And so I wait for Yaz to return from her inspection, hugging myself and hovering in the middle of the room because shadows all around are still more comforting than being so close to ancient writing and sparkling shells. When Yaz rejoins me, we return to the others together.

Sar has worked their way into the second cavern. They haven't given up, and they still look like they're reading. Both things lift my hope a little. As I watch, they skim a block of writing and skip to the next. They look up as I approach them.

"It goes on for nine caves," I sign. "How far along do you think we'll find the records?"

Sar pulls away from the wall. "Take me to the end. I'll see which way the timeline goes, and try to figure out from there."