The road to Glass Tide should have taken two hours.
Instead, it felt like the town was trying to keep outsiders away.
The old bus groaned through endless fog, stalling every few miles as if something beneath the engine was breathing instead of machinery.
Nobody on board seemed afraid anymore.
They sat in silence, staring ahead with the numb acceptance of people who had already survived too much.
Lodna watched rain crawl upward against the windows.
That was the first sign something was terribly wrong.
By the time the Mighty Nine arrived, Glass Tide looked frozen in the middle of a forgotten moment.
Shopkeepers stood motionless behind counters.
Laundry drifted in the wind but never fully fell.
Even the church bells rang out of rhythm, as though time itself had started skipping seconds.
The bloodworm was somewhere beneath the lake.
Nobody could agree on what it truly was.
Some called it a curse.
Others whispered it was the prison of the Cerberus Assembly, ancient beings sealed away centuries ago.
But Lodna felt its presence immediately.
It was alive.
Watching.
The group split up through the town searching for answers.
Imigen uncovered forbidden texts hidden deep inside the library, books thick with strange symbols that seemed to move when nobody looked directly at them.
Orim learned from the town elder that people had begun aging differently depending on emotion.
Fear made you older.
Joy made you younger.
Some townsfolk had lost decades overnight.
Meanwhile, Fearne wandered into a crumbling thrift store owned by a man named Mr.
Pik, whose shelves overflowed with objects that looked stolen from dreams.
Among them sat a small artifact wrapped in chains — the Tide Singer.
The moment Fearne touched it, every clock in town stopped.
Outside, the weather glitched violently.
Rain fell upward.
Thunder cracked without sound.
Creatures born from black water crawled from alleyways with too many limbs and hollow faces stretched into permanent screams.
The battle barely ended with their lives intact.
But none of it compared to what waited at the lake.
That night, Lodna and Chetney found the ferryman waiting silently at the docks beside a boat carved with symbols that hurt to stare at too long.
Hanging inside his cabin were dozens of tiny trinkets — rings, necklaces, children’s toys.
“Passengers?”
Lodna asked.
The ferryman nodded once.
“None returned.”
Still, they stepped aboard.
The lake was impossibly still, smooth as polished glass.
No wind touched it.
No insects buzzed nearby.
Even their breathing sounded wrong, muffled, distant.
Halfway to the center, the ferryman finally spoke.
“There is a place beneath this water,” he whispered.
“A place where time rots.”
Then the lake moved.
Not waves.
Not ripples.
The entire surface bent downward like something enormous had opened its eye beneath them.
Dark shapes drifted underneath the water — people frozen in place, mouths open in silent terror.
Some looked centuries old.
Others looked freshly drowned.
And directly below the boat, Lodna saw herself.
Not a reflection.
A corpse.
Its dead eyes snapped open.
The boat flipped instantly.
Freezing black water swallowed them whole as impossible whispers filled the lake, voices begging, screaming, promising secrets no human mind was meant to hear.
Then Lodna felt something wrap around her ankle in the dark below.
Something ancient.
Something awake.
And when she looked down into the endless depths, she realized the bloodworm was not trapped inside the lake at all.
The lake itself was the prison.
And the thing imprisoned there had finally started trying to climb out…
Read the full story here before the next chapter disappears into the lake forever.
