21 The Witch's Apprentice Chapter 21

Bell’s nose crinkled as she pored over the brittle, yellowed pages, their curling edges still scented faintly of dried herbs and something older—something sour and sharp. Dust clung to her fingers like ash as she turned the last leaf and passed the notes silently to Thera, who sat beside her, hunched in the flickering candlelight.

They crouched close together on the cracked mosaic floor of the ruined temple, their breath misting faintly in the cold. The walls rose high into shadow, their stone carved long ago with spiraling glyphs that glinted faintly beneath layers of soot. The air was heavy with the scent of damp stone, mildew, and the ghost of lavender—faint remnants of potions once brewed and bottled here, before time had hollowed the place.

Bell could feel the weight of memory pressing inward from all sides. It hung in the air like incense, thick and cloying. She looked slowly around the abandoned apothecary and couldn’t help but wonder: What had become of Isilwen? Had she ever found the others? Had she reached the totem? Or did she still haunt these long-forgotten halls, searching in vain for all she had lost?

“They were cast beneath the earth…” Thera murmured, her voice thin and reverent as she traced a finger along the ink. “By powerful magic—deeper and older than what we know today. Along with… some kind of totem. Something bound to the lake god.”

Her voice trailed off as the stone beneath them gave a low, groaning sigh—some deep tectonic memory shifting far below. A rusted shelf creaked in reply. The temple exhaled, and both girls jumped, instinctively turning their heads toward the deeper dark beyond the candle’s reach. There was no light there. Just the black breath of the lake, as if it might whisper something if they waited long enough.

“They were followed by something…” Thera went on softly, eyes narrowing. “A curse, maybe. A sentient one. And they tried to cast a relocation spell to escape, but it went wrong. That’s why everything down here is so misaligned.”

Her voice echoed off the temple walls like it didn’t belong—like something else was listening.

She leaned back, tapping the last entry, the candlelight catching the shine of her irises. “This spell she used—giving up her body to slip beneath the lake—it’s one we still use, actually. Commonly, in the deeper parts of Dûrnarn, when tunnels collapse or can’t be reached by foot.”

Thera’s expression darkened. “But it’s not meant to be cast alone. It’s only half a spell on its own. The other half—someone on the surface—must be there to track you through the tunnels… and bring you back. Without that, you’re lost. You become what you turn into.”

Bell said nothing. The silence stretched. The candles crackled faintly.

The darkness around them had grown thicker, as if listening.

Then Bell’s breath caught. The realization came not in words, but as a sudden knowing—a weight behind her ribs, a pull in her chest, like someone tugging on a thread woven through her very heart.

“She’s still here,” Bell whispered, rising to her feet so quickly the candle trembled. Her voice trembled too—part awe, part fear.

“She’s still here,” she said again, louder this time, eyes wide. “She’s been searching… all this time.”

Thera looked at her, confusion tightening her brow. “Bell—what are you—?”

But Bell didn’t answer. Something in her had already broken loose.

She turned and bolted from the shadow-cloaked temple, her boots echoing against the cracked mosaic as she ran, candlelight flickering wildly behind her. The moment she reached the moss-slick stones at the lake’s edge, she kicked off her boots with wild, clumsy urgency, nearly losing her balance as she scrambled toward the water.

The air here was thick with dampness, heavy with the earthy scent of silt and old rot. Cold mist curled off the surface of the lake, veiling it in a shimmer of ghostlight. It smelled of metal and forgotten things, of roots left too long in shadow.

“Isilwen!” Bell cried, her voice raw and trembling. “Isilwen—we’re here! I know you’re here!”

The black water swallowed her voice whole.

For a moment, there was only silence. No ripples. No response. Just the quiet lap of water against stone and the distant, eerie drip of condensation falling from the vaulted cavern ceiling above.

Then—a flash.

Far out on the water, something silver darted just beneath the surface.

Then another. And another.

A shimmer, a flicker, a flickering school—dozens, no, hundreds of silver fish erupting from the depths like stars cast into ink. They surged forward in a coordinated rush, luminous and fast and impossibly graceful, arrowing toward Bell as if summoned.

Bell gasped—just as her foot slipped on the muck-slick stone beneath her.

She fell.

The lake caught her like a throat swallowing. Cold—so cold—clenched around her body like a fist. She plunged into the black, disoriented, the shock stealing the air from her lungs and replacing it with silence.

And then—vision.

Projected on the surface of the water as if on a veil of living glass, a dream unfurled. Not her own.

Isilwen’s memories.

Bell saw it—felt it—through borrowed eyes: a final ritual, a quiet goodbye whispered to the stones, the breathless stillness before the transformation. A body dissolving, limbs twisting, shrinking, reshaping—not death, but shedding. A spell stretching back generations.

She became a fish.

She plunged into the labyrinthine darkness of the underground rivers, chasing something—searching. For the totem. For meaning. For escape.

Bell saw the coils of light: fish made not of flesh, but of memory—brilliant threads of living silver swirling through the water like forgotten dreams. They looped and circled, forming a living dance around something… something sunken and wrong.

There. At the heart of it. A simple wooden comb, nestled in the shadow of a tall bank covered in dark flowers. Etched with the shape of a fish, blackened by time. It pulsed with dark energy, as though it remembered being touched by something that should not have touched it.

Isilwen reached it.

And hesitated.

By then, she was too far gone.

No longer herself, she joined the others—dancing in circles, pieces of her flaking off and trailing behind like ribbons of thought. Her name. Her face. Her purpose. Each fragment drifted into the dark like lost scales in the current.

And there, beneath the still surface of the lake, they waited.