For a moment it’s like I’m not falling at all. Like the river separating into sparkling beads around me and I have learned to fly.

  Then the wind grabs my robes, and the cliff side plummets past and the ocean rushes up. It’s all I can do to get my feet downward in Seagull’s Beak. I don’t know if I will go insane from immersion, but I’m going to do my best not to die on impact. My last thought before hitting is wishing I’d had time to go through the training, to spend the days in isolation, to take this test like a true seer.

  I hit.

  Momentum shoots me straight down, sea-green light fading as I descend, until I can’t see the surface anymore, and I finally slow to a stop, the water seeming to gel around me. I should be floating up, but it seems like I’ve—paused, somehow.

  The ocean isn’t cold, like I’d expect, and it doesn’t move either—I’ve always been in water with a current. I try to swim, but it doesn’t work, like running in a dream where I’m being chased. I get nowhere.

  Is this death? Is this what happens to students who never come back up? We just—die down here? Funny, how my thoughts haven’t ended.

  They’re not supposed to, Aletheia.

  I gasp, somehow, in water, and turn to see Urte, floating a few feet away from me, wizened face peaceful despite the bloody wound in his chest. “Am I dead?”

  Death, life. Water carries both.

  “But you—you’re dead. I saw you die!” Even now, blood seeps from his chest, fogging in the murky water.

  But my water continues, as it did in life. There is something so natural about his tone, about him lecturing me on Uje principles, that I almost forget where we are, what’s happening. Or have you forgotten your fifth-year theology?

  It’s natural enough I feel the usual spike of annoyance. “That the body doesn’t keep water for more than two days,” I recite. “That we are like another stream, a slowed one, in current with the rivers around us. That yesterday my blood was water and tomorrow will be again.”

  Good. And where do they all end?

  “Here. In the ocean.” I get a spike of fear in my chest. I’m in the ocean. Too deep to see light. Immersed.

  The deathplace, and also the birthplace, of all water, all life.

  Knowing Urte, this is as straight an answer as I will get from him about whether I’m alive or not, so I ice the fear. I’m conscious, at least. And there are bigger things to talk about. “I am sorry, Urte. I never meant to cause your death.”

  He smiles. I have already told you I did not die. But if I did, it was not defending just you. It was defending Uje and the temple.

  He looks troubled as he says this last part. “Even though I’m a heretic? Though I caused so much trouble in the temple?”

  You are no heretic. It is we who should have been labelled heretics. Do you remember the last time we talked? Our discussion of water, steam and ice?

  In the training room the day I had to flee. “I remember.”

  Then it is my turn to be sorry. Somehow in the city you learned this lesson, while we in the temple failed to follow it. We remained ice, confident in our traditions, and allowed Nerimes to break us. But you, my dear, you have learned how truly to be water. I am proud of you.

  This feels good, for a second. Then I remember where I am. “Not that it matters much now. I’m going to die down here, aren’t I?”

  Urte smiles. So wise, and yet so much to learn.

  He glances over my shoulder, and I sense someone behind me. I turn to see Regiana, hair floating in a halo all around her, face peaceful despite a mottled black hue. “You’re here too?”

  It’s a stupid question, but she doesn’t snap at me. We all come here, child. I was faithful to Jeia, and her blood carries the same salt as the sea. Her voice is strange, like it’s coming from all directions at once. Then I realize Urte is speaking too, in unison with her. You of all people I would expect to understand that.

  “The overseers,” I say, remembering. They were the reason we lost the fight. “What happened?”

  Regiana scowls. I was betrayed. I should have seen it coming. Should have known they wouldn’t stop at politics or bloodborn. They poisoned me, Miyara and the rest. Serenroot in my tea, I think. Tasteless until it begins to clot your blood.

  “She was in league with Nerimes. He said so, up above. With Ieolat, too. I tried to stop them.”

  You did well, child. And you are not done yet.

  “How—”

  We were wrong. I didn’t know before, but this—she gestures vaguely at the water around us—We were all wrong, ancestors and kin. But there is still time now. Don’t ask how. Ask why. I understand this even less, but she is nodding to someone behind me. You would have made a fine theracant, but I guess it’s too late for that now. Do your best, girl.

  I turn to see who she’s nodding to, and find a stern figure in robes of state, beard cut in a square line, eyes wide and violet. I gasp. “Dad?”

  Theia, he says, his voice echoed in Regiana and Urte. You’ve come.

  Anger comes up just as fast as the love. “Like you never came for me.”

  His face clouds. I was—preoccupied. The insight was never so clear as this, but I had tastes of it. Of what was coming.

  The Immersion Chronicles. “So this is what was more important than being a father?”

  This experience is unique to you. But all immersions say the same thing, deep down.

  “So what? What do you want to say to me?” I’m too proud to ask for it even now, even with this strange underwater version of my father who might just be me going insane.

  Stergjon clenches his jaw. I was not a good father. I know that. I am sorry. It was hard for me once you’d grown. When your mother died, I—I spent a long time in the caves, in the water. That was when I realized we had missed Uje’s message.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “So you abandoned me to the temple.”

  No. I needed you in the temple. Needed someone I could trust. And the forces against me—Nerimes, the others—he shakes his head. It was enough that I put a girl in, without also seeming to favor her. I never thought they would kill me. I thought there was time.

  “Well, there wasn’t.” I want to stay angry, but I feel it slipping away. Feel the deeper sadness coming up. The loneliness. “Instead, you wasted the time we could have had.”

  He shakes his head. I always knew you would survive the immersion. Knew we would have this time together.

  “Have I survived it then?” The thought of going back to the surface, to the ruin I made of the temple, to an undefeatable Nerimes doing whatever he wants to Gaxna, is suddenly horrible. The urge rises in me to just stay down here, to stay with my dad, though I know it means my death.

  No. You have to fight that urge. The urge to give up. Your trial is not over.

  He turns, and behind him is my mother—not the fragile, wasted thing she was on her death, but the vibrant, sweet-tongued woman I remember from my youth, violet silks floating around her. “Mom? Are you—okay?”

  She cannot talk, Aletheia. My father still speaks with the voices of Urte and Regiana too. She has been here too long. My mother mouths the words, though I can’t make out her voice. Can’t remember it, either. The urge rises again to stay down here, to stay with her until we can talk.

  A new wave of anger brings me back. “You never mourned her. It was like she died and you just gave up on the whole family.”

  I mourned. In my own way. In the waters. That’s where I saw that the plague that took her is part of our larger fate. It was a Seilam Deul invention, Aletheia. All the plagues have been.

  I clench my fists, anger redirecting, remembering Ieolat and what she did to destroy my father. So she killed my mother, too. “What do they want?”

  What we all want, father-mother-Regiana-Urte says. To save the world.

  “What? I don’t—” But another figure is coming. My mother again, only shorter, and less distinct somehow, her skin blurring into the water. “Who is this?”

  Your grandmother. The pilgrim from the north shores.

  I never met her, but I know her all the same, recognize her violet eyes. Her blood runs in yours, Aletheia. It is the second river of life.

  Behind her I see a long line of people, all violet-eyed. They do not speak, but I get images from them, flashes of light in the dark water. I see a long and frozen coastline, the sea itself icing over. See them gathered around crackling fires, smoking dulse and telling long tales against the winter nights. I smell salmon cured and smoked twelve different ways, feel the brief glorious summers when the mountains burst into green. There are more people now, a great ring of them, expanding above and below me, showing me their life, our life, before we came to Serei. The palaces we built on the rocky promontories, the huts that came before that, the simple mud shacks along the shore in an early time when the ocean didn’t freeze, and the waters teemed with clams and sea spiders and kelp forests.

  To a time before that, when the mountains above the shore were still dirt, still silt and mud, to the last deluge, when a starved boatload of people arrived on the shores, their strange clothes in tatters, their gleaming cities destroyed in a single day.

  This is our past, Aletheia. And our future.

  “What? Wait—” But the images roll on, back to the north shore palaces, to the decrepit shambles I understand are today, to the winters that grew longer, forcing my grandmother and others to leave. But there are still people there, still chopping holes in the ice to fish, still lighting cook fires in the ruins of palaces, as they always have. I see a sunny morning when the water rises higher than any wave, all the way up the cliffs, and I know now I’m seeing ahead. See people fleeing up the mountains in a panic, escaping, while others stay and chant. This is the religion we left behind, something of seaweed-induced visions and reverence for plant life, a whole worldview based on it. A belief it will save them.

  It does not: the water swallows the priests, swallows the people fleeing, swallows the entire land like it never was. I shake my head, crying. It’s so sad. So awful.

  Keep looking, Aletheia. You need to see this.

  I look again, and see the high mountains above the north shore, see fabulous cities clinging to them, shining metal and glass towers against snow-capped peaks. Seilam Deul work amongst them, fixing gadgets, mining deep in the mountains and sweating in cramped manufactories. I see the water rise for them too, higher than the mountains, defeating all the ingenious devices they built to keep it at bay. They are swept away too, clinging to their machines until the very end.

  The Daraa are next, the swarthy caravansers with their belts of gold and gems, in a city of towers and palaces I can only assume is their island capital. I see the power those with wealth exude, the strength and vitality that keeps them strong into their second and third centuries, and the reverence the rest of the people give them. See it all swept away on an unremarkable afternoon, a million souls drowned.

  Then the Bamani, the pale and proud warriors of the southern continent, making wars behind the high walls of their stone castles. See their heroes reborn on the battlefield, animated by the legends of the people. See a single dark wave engulf the whole thing, leaving only ocean. I cry through it all, but tears don’t hinder my vision underwater.

  And then I see Serei. The shingled rooftops and cobbled streets I’ve come to know so well in the last week. There are a few additions, a few subtractions, as if this were next month, or next year. It’s not far away—that much I can tell. Theracants keep watch from fountains as overseers patrol the streets. The water starts to rise, the bay forming a vast whirlpool that carries buildings out to sea and smashes ships into the city as the whole thing drowns. When it hits the temple, I want to scream at them to run, to panic like the rest of the city, but the seers watch calmly, secure in their faith that Uje will save them.

  He doesn’t. The water flows backwards up the channels and aqueducts, gouts from the fountains, and the temple is caught in the seething tide of wrecked ships and houses and bodies. The seers stand calm till the end, too strong in their beliefs to see what’s wrong.

  Because there is something wrong. I can feel it, as I felt it in each of the other places. Something right about their beliefs, and something wrong too. Something limiting. Something keeping them from being saved. Because I feel the salvation there too, the power to stop all this, like it’s just out of reach.

  Then for a moment I see myself, standing in a circle of dry land, arms raised, weeping blood from one eye and tears from the other, and I am controlling the tide, pushing it back out to sea. Saving my people.

  Then the vision fades and I am with my father again, only he is also my mother and my ancestors and all the people I have seen here, Bamani and Daraa and Seilam Deul, floating around me in the waters.

  Dead. They are all dead. Or they will be. It’s unbearable. I forget Gaxna in that moment, forget myself, forget my worry that I might be trapped here at the bottom of the ocean. Grief wells up in me like a cold spring—grief for the people who will die, for the ones who’ve already died, for the ancestors I can barely make out before them, and for the endless cycles of humanity building new lives only to be destroyed.

  “Why? Why is this happening?” I speak it to the void, but no answer comes.

  I weep then. There’s nothing else to do. I am not that powerful girl pushing back the ocean with her bare hands. I am a beaten one, one who failed her family and friends and city. My tears mix warm into the cold waters. The urge comes again to stay down here, to just breathe deep of this water, to join my mother and father and all my ancestors and kin. Going back will only delay the inevitable.

  But there is still that sense of wrongness nagging at me. The errors in Ujeism—my father talked about them too, in his letter. I know one, the one Nerimes used finally to defeat me in our battle of words during the ceremony: Ujeism’s prejudice against women. What finally won the hearts of the seers was him framing me as a theracant, a witch, and therefore an enemy. Even though they all knew I was a seer, had all lived with me for years. As if my gender had anything to do with my abilities. It’s stupid. I’ve always known it was stupid, but now for the first time I see how it’s holding the temple back. How many great seers have never been allowed to enter the training, because they weren’t male? Would the temple be saved if it didn’t discriminate? Would the theracants, if they had allowed men in their ranks?

  I want to know. Want to change the system. The idea that I can do something to stop the deluge, anything, is more powerful than my despair. I want to fight it. To show everyone stuck in the old ways, and using them to get power, that they are wrong. That Ujeism is wrong, and the seers and theracants have been at war for so long because they have not seen the truth.

  They should be one temple, one guild, one belief system open to change, to deeper truths, not the details that separate us. I know this deep down, and like an echo of the figures receding from me in the water, I feel a wave of approval.

  It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted from my father. And I know if I get out of here, I will be carrying him with me, somehow. He never was a good father, really, but at least now I understand why. He did his best.

  Now it’s my turn.