Tightly, she clung onto Arius just like he held onto her. Since they were being sucked down Charybdis’s throat anyway, Val decided to open her eyes.

Where its tongue should have been, a red orb glowed at its center. Streaks of black wavered throughout the water, marbled with power. That water disappeared when it poured down to the core like light eaten by a black hole. The maw of Charybdis consumed all, vaporizing the very water in which it resided out of existence.

They were about to be transported to Leviathan’s Cradle.

Her body trembled in Arius’s grasp, meek before the power of these insurmountable sea monsters. In preparation of this plan, Tavras had even warned her. She could not survive in Leviathan’s Cradle, not even for a moment. Val would die upon entry, yet here, she had enacted a clumsy plan to force Arius there all by herself.

Her haphazard plan had worked in that sense, as she had definitely gotten Arius to cast his gaze into Charybdis’s maw.

Her only hope for survival now relied on his ability to save her. If even Arius could subsist mere hours in Leviathan’s Cradle, doubt could not help but arise in her heart. Val would most likely die thanks to her own idiocy.

Yet again, she saw her life flash before her eyes whilst submerged underwater.

Val found herself helpless in the arms of god, so she closed her eyes and waited for what would come. A quaking tremor ran through her body as the back of Arius’s shoulders struck Charybdis’s core.

The next thing that she knew, a colossal pressure leveled against her body and crushed in all around her. The force resembled Tavras’s power to compress water beneath the sea, but this weight felt exponentially, inexplicably worse.

Cold sunk into her bones. Every nerve burned before rendering her numb. Only Arius’s body provided hope for warmth, though even his presence was slipping away from her.

He floundered and jerked to reinstate his grasp on her more tightly. His hand returned to support the back of her head and drew them closer together like that.

Val’s consciousness was barely able to perceive her surroundings, much less what happened next. Through her clouded thoughts, her mind managed to alight with the recognition of something precious—a thing that Val figured that she would die before she would get to experience.

A desperate motion brushed at her lips, then searching and probing for a moment. Thereafter, a fire alit in her and brought warmth back into her sense of being.

By sheer reaction, Val wanted to gasp and take in that first breath of life restored. Instinct kept her from taking in a lungful of the frigid water. Once she felt warm enough that her eyeballs would not freeze immediately, Val dared to peel open her eyelids against the immense weight of water.

The dim light let her see hardly more than Arius directly in front of her. In the darkness of some kind of abyss, they swam down towards a dark mass below.

The great, rounded body appeared like a planet’s surface from space and became omnipresent in her vision on their descent. A reverberating boom resounded as steady as a heartbeat—a monster’s snore. Each time, new bubbles appeared from the surface and drifted their way upward.

By one such crevice where the bubbles came, Arius dragged Val to the opening.

The rough, lumpy surface appeared before them such that Val could barely notice the curvature anymore. Like the ground seemed flat, so too did this portion of the object.

Inexplicably, she felt drawn to it. Val reached an outstretched hand towards the living, breathing body.

Arius’s hand snatched at her wrist, preventing her from getting any closer. Here, they waited in this manner.

The next bubble surged from the gaping hole and caught them within the pocket of air. Val sputtered out and took in a fresh breath, now able to breathe. That air inspired her chest to lift and sigh with relief. The tension of the bubble also let her rest upon her hands and knees.

Enough oxygen remained in the creature’s exhalation for them to while some time away, here in this bubble that floated away from its master. The water dripped from their clothes and started to dry, but not with the typical display of steam that Arius usually gave off.

“Arius,” she said in a lurid gasp, “you just saved me—”

“Shh,” he hushed her at once. “Look.” It was the one word that he felt compelled to say.

Out of encouragement, he draped his crouched body over top of her own. Arius turned her head downward and pressed their cheeks alongside one another. “That is Leviathan.”

“Leviathan?” she echoed. Her eyes widened at the unsurpassable creature—unreal that anything alive could ever exist at those proportions.

“I just want to make sure that you appreciate this moment. No one enters Leviathan’s Cradle and sees it in its slumber like this.” Arius’s voice was scarcely a whisper.

Val turned to Arius and witnessed the awe in his eyes. Even for a god like him, this made for a once in a lifetime experience.

Together, they gazed down to the deep shadow of Leviathan’s sleeping form. Between the heat that Arius had bestowed upon her and his body that blanketed her from above, she felt warm even despite how she was aware of the freezing waters around them.

More than a physical warmth, she felt hot from this position. It was a special talent that she had with Arius, the two of them finding a way to make every situation inappropriate. Either that, or Val had the mind to always see the obscene.

When she pulled her thoughts from their seemingly perpetual state in the gutter, she let herself appreciate how deeply Arius cared for her. As her supposed soulmate, he had come to this wretched place just to save her.

Even as he knew that she had been trying to trick him into falling into Leviathan’s Cradle, he had flung himself to Charybdis’s maw without hesitation. She could be dead right now, if only Arius had dismissed her plight for rote trickery and reacted too late.

Val found herself welling up in emotion. Her eyes closed up tightly, and she tried not to cry. “Really, thank you for saving me.” A few sniffles escaped while her fingers curled up along the gelatinous texture of the bubble, its surface pressing against her fists.

Without fail, she had been returning his cruelty ever since he had lashed out at her in abuse. Val finally realized that maybe she should listen to those words that he had wanted to say—and did say—before they had been trapped in Leviathan’s Cradle.

I’m sorry, Arius had tried to say. Those words had crystallized in her mind as what could have been his last words—the last thing that she could have heard, if not for Arius’s power to save them both.

Now, Val was finally willing to listen to an apology.