The eel’s expression changed from anger to confusion.
“Looking gas. Looking glass. Please, eel, show me the out.”
“There’s a tunnel,” the eel said. “But you won’t fit through it. You’ll have to go out the way you came in.”
“No! Can’t! Bad man there. Please, you eel, the out.”
“I’ll show you, but it won’t do you any good,” the eel said. She swam along the floor to the remains of a collapsed wall. Among the debris was a rock, roughly a foot and a half in diameter. “There,” she said, pointing behind the rock with her tail.
It was so murky in that part of the room that Serafina hadn’t seen the rock, never mind the tunnel behind it. Tugging on the rock now, she loosened it from the surrounding silt, then cast another commoveo to push it out of the way. She took her bag off her shoulder, knelt down, put a hand inside the narrow tunnel, and felt a slight current.
“How long?” she asked.
“Not very. Maybe two feet.”
“I me dig out,” Serafina said.
“Do what you need to do. Just get out of my house.”
Serafina started scooping handfuls of silt from the bottom of the tunnel. She’d enlarged it by a good six inches when she hit something hard and large. Unable to move it, she dug at the top of the tunnel instead, and then the sides, working silt, pebbles, and small rocks loose. She slowly made her way through the narrow passage on her back, blinking silt from her eyes, spitting grit out of her mouth, praying she didn’t loosen something major and bring an avalanche down on herself. When she finally reached the other side of the tunnel, she didn’t stop to look around, but quickly wriggled back into the eel’s house and grabbed her bag.
“Thank me,” she said.
“For what, exactly?” the eel asked.
“No, you. Thank you, eel,” Serafina said.
“Whatever. Just go,” said the eel.
Serafina pushed her bag into the tunnel. The she turned around and reversed into it herself, so that she could pull the rock she’d moved back into place. She didn’t want to leave the eel with a big hole in the side of her house. Shoving her bag ahead with her tail, she squeezed through the tunnel once more. When she finally came out the other side, she saw that she was in open water. Cautiously, she checked for any signs of movement, but saw none. The waters above her were bright. From the position of the sun’s rays slanting through them, she could tell that it was midday. She looked around and discovered that she was at the back of the terragogg house.
Behind it, foothills sloped gently down to the seafloor. The hills were colonized by corals and seaweeds now, but Sera knew they’d probably been terraced for grapes and olives before Atlantis had been destroyed. She swam to the front of the house, hoping to find her bearings.
There, the terrain fell away steeply into a valley. At its center, clustered along what had once been a street, were ruins that went on for leagues. Serafina stopped dead at the sight of them, wonder-struck. She had information to gather, talismans to find, and a monster to hunt down, but she was so overwhelmed, she couldn’t move. Tears came to her eyes.
“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, great Neria, just look at it!”
Its houses were broken. Its temples toppled. Its palaces ruined.
It was silent. Deserted. Desolate.
But it was still so beautiful.
It was a place Serafina had long imagined, but had never hoped to see.
It was a vanished dream. A fallen empire. A paradise lost.
It was Elysia, the heart of Atlantis.
SERAFINA STARED, not moving, barely breathing.
So much had collapsed during the island’s destruction, but here and there, buildings, or at least parts of them, had survived. She had studied Elysia in school, and had produced several term conchs on its art and architecture.
There in the distance, that bowl-shaped structure—that has to be the amphitheater, she thought. And that huge open space flanked by columns, that’s the agora—the public square. And there’s the ostrokon, which the Atlanteans called a library.
Unable to contain herself a second longer, she cast a canta prax camouflage spell that allowed her to blend into her surroundings, just like an octopus. Prax, or plainsong, was the most basic mer magic and took little energy or ability. As soon as the songspell was cast, she swam for the ruins.