With every passing morning,

as the merchants poled rafts laden with new vases, fruits, tables, elixirs of every color, and scrap metal to their stalls down canals scored into the foundation of Gierdi Island, as eager fisherman cast fat lures below the bay's surface like simple mobiles, as Haraan returned to waking coiled in the same crevice he entered the night before, the possibility of it all being a dream slipped relentlessly from him. He felt the irony of the assassin's blade, that which pierced him then stoppered the wound, a terrible stay against the final despair, before it retreated from his victimized heart.

Scales. He was foot after foot of nothing but scales. A tube of armored flesh with nothing to anticipate but his next meal.

But even on this seventh morning, the seventh day of his vanishing, as he lay nestled within the rubble of a Talery Bay long since claimed by Lady knew what, peering through a half-window of what might have been a jeweler's, or a card house, he persisted. He no longer choked on water, his tongue deaf to its dissolved salts. Already he began to question how something as light as air could have sustained him, now that water's weight coursed through his lungs.

He had fallen into the bay and the bay had not smothered him. It did not devour him. It had embraced him. His first seconds of immersion had taught his serpent's frame subtle manuevers: to face left while traveling right, to float or sink, to charge until rage carried him no further. He gave up solving the mystery of his coils — questions led to conscious thoughts, and then the involuntary motions lost cohesion and he became a bruised knot.

A stone perched on a pile of rubble a little distance from his face. Had he still arms, he could have reached out, knocked it over, and follow it as it tumbled in slow motion. If the Order had wanted him to be a creature of the sea, they hadn't held back any expense for his transformation. So it had gone a little wrong with his escape.

He had who they were looking for nestled against his core and he had no intention to deliver.