{"Your gut feeling is your body's way of telling you something. }
The deeper we went, the quieter it got, the kind of quiet that presses in on your eardrums and whispers that something wants you dead. Ralph swam ahead, his limbs smooth and deliberate, the moonlight above barely reaching us now. The currents were sluggish here, unnatural. The further we moved from the shore, the more I felt it: something alive in the water. Pulsing. Breathing.
And then we saw it. A large fucking nest.
It was not carved into stone, it was stone. Blood-coloured. Fused bone and coral and something else that gleamed like crystallized marrow. It pulsed, low and slow, like a sleeping heart. Hundreds of the vampire bugs clung to it, curled up like wet, glistening ticks. Each one the size of my fist, carapaces throbbing with red light.
I froze, mid-stroke. "Spirits above," I muttered through the small water-channelling charm in my mouth, voice bubbling. "What the hell is this?"
