The Wellspring did not release them gently.
One heartbeat, Elena's fingers were still locked tight around Jaime's. The next, the world turned violent. The water surged with the brute certainty of a predator striking prey, wrenching their hands apart. Her shoulder nearly tore from its socket, her wrist twisting as she was flung backward into the dark.
The currents were not water as she knew it. They were hungry. They wound around her hair and yanked, twisted into her bandages, wormed into the tender cracks of her healing skin where lightning scars still ached. They pulled with a desperate insistence, not to drown her, but to claim.
She tried to kick upward, but the surface only seemed to retreat. Pressure built around her ribs until every breath she'd ever taken felt stolen. The Wellspring pressed down with the weight of an entire ocean, as if some ancient hand had decided she was not yet worthy of air.
Then came the visions. Not gentle, not fleeting forced into her skull, one after another like iron nails hammered into wood.
Guabancex, her goddess, thrashing beneath a sky choked by foreign banners, the rain around her turning to ash.
El León Negro tearing the sun in half and swallowing it whole, his silver mane dripping with molten gold.
And Coatriskie, serpent of old, leaning close enough for her to feel the wet heat of its tongue against her ear, whispering:
Say yes… and it will all drown the way you want it to drown.
Above, the world still existed, faint, distorted through the crushing water. Alejandro's voice cut through, hoarse and ragged with fear, calling her name as though it might tether her back. The metallic shriek of a blade being unsheathed. And over it all, Señora Behike's voice, her chants deep, steady, but edged with strain as if each syllable cost her blood.
Jaime's muffled cry reached her, blurred and warped. She could feel him thrashing somewhere close, feel the wrongness in him, his vessel-body jerking in movements that weren't entirely his own, as Coatriskie's coils slid tighter around his spirit.
And then- light.
Lightning cracked inside the Wellspring itself. Not above, not in the sky.
Here, in the black water. The sudden flare stabbed her vision white and revealed something vast lurking below.
It was not a god.
It was not a mortal.
It was both.
Its limbs bent in ways the eye rejected, its head crowned with fronds of stormcloud and bone, its mouth a curve of impossible teeth. It was smiling. Waiting.
Her chest convulsed. Her lungs were no longer merely aching. They were screaming, tearing themselves apart for air.
The Wellspring shifted. The deep tilted toward her like a face moving in close, and she felt its voice more than she heard it.
Choose, storm-child.
Her body rebelled, trying to breathe where there was only water. Her mouth opened to answer, and the Wellspring poured in, cold and suffocating, flooding her throat. She choked, her voice shredded raw as she forced it through the drowning.
"I-" The word was swallowed. She tried again, harder, the words bubbling from her chest in a surge of panic and rage.
"I SAID-"
She swallowed another mouthful of water, her vision burning, her mind splitting between life and death.
"I ACCEPT!"
And the deep answered.
The Wellspring convulsed as if struck by an unseen quake. The surface above shattered in rings of silver light, lashing out in jagged streams that clawed toward the cavern walls.
A sound rose from below.
Not thunder, not wind, but the low, bone-sick growl of something ancient uncoiling.
Alejandro staggered backward, arm flung up against the glare. "¡Madre de dioses- !" His voice cracked, half in awe, half in terror. The water was no longer water- It churned with a blinding storm of violet and gold, as if lightning had been trapped and was now breaking free in the shape of a whirlpool.
Jaime's body broke the surface first, but not the way a drowning man should. He erupted like a harpooned beast, arched backward, his mouth open in a silent scream. Veins lit up silver beneath his skin. His eyes, when they snapped open, were nothing human. Coils of an endless serpent flickered in their depths, shifting like scales catching light.
The Behike didn't flinch. She planted her cane in the rock and kept chanting, the cadence faster now, driving hard like a drumbeat in a war camp. Sweat slicked her brow, her voice trembling but unbroken. "¡Resiste! ¡No le dejes tomar todo!"
"He's- he's not breathing right!" Alejandro's voice pitched sharp. He took a step forward, then stopped when the Behike's cane snapped up between them like a drawn blade.
"You go near him now, and you'll drown standing on dry stone," she warned, eyes never leaving the roiling Wellspring. Her gaze darted once toward Jaime, toward the god inside him, and tightened. "The serpent claims him, but it is not finished binding."
Below, a second shape was rising-
Elena.
But the water around her was wrong. It didn't fight her as before. It carried her, almost in adoration, her hair streaming like a banner behind her. Lightning bled from her skin in threads, and when her face broke the surface, she wasn't gasping.
She was still.
Alejandro's gut twisted. She looked both more alive and less mortal than he had ever seen her.
The Behike's voice dipped low, but the tremor in it betrayed her fear. "She said yes."
The Wellspring surged again, sending a spray that stung their skin like sleet.
Jaime's head snapped toward Elena, his expression a thing caught between longing and hunger, his body straining toward her even as the serpent god inside him pulled him back.
Alejandro felt the hairs along his arms rise. The cavern smelled of ozone and salt and something older, sharper. Like the breath of the deep before a storm swallows a coast.
And deep below, where the light couldn't touch, something smiled.