I strapped the blades to my wrists. Two on each. My face was covered with a black scarf. I took my wolf pelt off, set it to the side. Most of my armor too. I had nothing but cotton, stacked walls of cotton underneath my black cloak. I tightened the clothes around my waist. Put more leather straps on my arm, lifted the scarf up to my nose. Sylas nodded his head, fitting his black clothes on too. He had his knives on his back.

The Silverfangs were playing with the straws. Literally.

Long metal rods where they puckered their lips and breathed through.

“This thing is as big as Kal.” Edwin said.

“You sure you don’t need me?” Kal looked at us, from the corner of the tent. All our clothes were laying in bundles around the room. In the corners were scattered boxes, their lids ajar as we’d picked weaponry from them. A few posts were in the center of the room, it was a big room after all. And against one of them, Kal stood, watching us prepare for our mission.

“No. We need smaller bodies for this one.” I said.

“You could take Vicentius with you, at least.”

“Vicentius needs to lead the charge the minute those doors open.” I strapped my gloves tight, grabbing the band and twisting it around my wrist.

“And you’re just opening a door.” Kal said.

“That’s right. We’re just opening the doors, that’s it.” I said.

Kal scoped the little tent at all of us, soft eyes on him. We kept to packing and bagging and mounting pouches upon our backs and arms and chests and wrists. Bags of arrows. Bands of knives. Pouches of blackfyre powder, and what turned out to be an explosive element to combust it underwater. What could only be described as Dragon’s Breath. A black, flaky salt. Carefully separate from the blackfyre itself.

We walked outside the tent, making our way to the river to the side of our settlement. No horses. Dead of night. A heavy heat had come across the desert. The few growing ferns were wilted and depleted. We came to the river and tried to look beyond, to the city, but could only see the brief outline of a dark shadowy crystal tower. The features obfuscated in the dark cover.

Vincent was there, throwing stones on the surface, dressed in full armor. Pale as death in his suit of armor. He held his sword stiff by his side.

“You ready?” He did not turn to look.

“Yeah.” I said.

“What about the rest of you?”

Yes, they all said.

“This is an important mission, do you understand?” Vincent said. “There’s a lot riding on this. A lot of people we can save by ending this battle as fast as we can.”

“I know.” Sylas said. “I’ll be leading.”

“Good.” Vincent said. He nodded his head, he rolled his tongue in his mouth. “Good luck everyone.”

I went over to the water and dipped a toe in there. The rest looked to me. Sylas jumped, his head popped out the surface of the water and from his mouth a small tube grew out that he held with pursed lips. He looked like a shadow, some sea predator on the hunt and perhaps he was one in a way. A shark. A leviathan. His shadow disappeared in the depths. The tube grew smaller and smaller until it was barely at the surface. I dropped my legs into the river. I floated about the surface and did the same, placing the copper-tasting tube in my mouth. I breathed the salty air, deep gulps and descended down the water. Then I swam. Upstream. A difficult thing to drive in the dark. In one pocket, a dangerous powder that could burn through me like it had before and in my other pocket, the substance by which to ignite it at a moments notice. Just perfect. Being a walking bomb. Any leakage from either possible detonating me. The Silverfangs were behind me, Obrick too somewhere behind them. All of us able to kill each other with a single slip.

We swam. We came to the giant body of water, looking at each direction to a growing darkness. My clothes damp and sticky, wisps of threads floating in the air. A fear in me too, as I checked my body to see if my hazardous substances were still on me. They were. And I was still alive, so maybe it hadn’t gone wrong. I went to the walls of the castle, felt them. Sylas was above me, all of us floated relatively closer to each other. We went around and inspected, using hand symbols to speak. But it was dark. And the best light we could get was whatever was on the castle walls. Nothing, practically. We went around in a circle, looking for a grate or space to which to blast open. There was one, a giant gated wall for the boats. That one was guarded. We were looking for something smaller, a sewer pipe perhaps. And it occurred to me that it would be deeper in, farther in the depths. I stopped circling and waited for the other three. I told them as much, that I would need to go deep, need to go without the tube. Sylas nodded his head. But I took the lead. I took my final gulp and let go of my breathing tube and swam fast down into the deep of the lake. Down, into dark. The fear growing with the pressure, as I flung myself into a dark unknown. My stomach turned. My whole body went cold. My first bubble went out and I kept at it, close to the walls. A second bubble. I flailed about and touched the surface of the stone. It had to be something else, metal or steel. Something. I stopped when I touched the floor and started going around. Another bubble.

It was getting harder to breath.

I was just about coming up, my head was spinning, until I touched the metal. Rusty metal, something snagging on my gloves. I touched it further, cylinders of steel.

I went for my blackfyre pouch. I stacked it on the metal. I went for the dragon’s breath, a little baggy weighted with stone to make it fall. I took it out, gingerly, from its pouch. A small rock, ashy almost in color, tethered to a few normal stones. I placed it above the blackfyre. I must have been sweating.

I dropped the stones. They fell and I rushed up. Another bubble of air.

I swam and swam. The explosion popped below me, the currents of water struck me and I braced, feeling it slam into me. What must have just been a little chortle on the surface of the water. What felt like a punch to my body.

I couldn’t even tell where I was swimming to, only that there was black wispy flames below. Faintly orange. Faintly red. Steel dripping, molten, and cooling against the cold water. My body floated. My consciousness floated. Someone grabbed me from behind. I turned my head, Obrick.

He offered the tube and I took a giant gulp of air. Two of them. He took it back and we shared it there, looking down at the orange hole in the darkness of the pool. All of us nodded our heads.

The mission had begun.