She is too young to have been there when the world caved in on itself, too young to have seen it rebuilt or the magic stripped and hidden away. She isn’t even sure she’s heard the stories of older lands, these beloved kingdoms he speaks of, and she is sure no one has ever spoken to her of a time when magic was harvested like a tithe to a thing no one knew how to believe in anymore. But Alleria doesn’t blame anyone for their silence, she is sure she would not want to speak of such a violation either - is sure because she knows what that fear is like, because hers is a gift that can be taken from her.

He speaks, and she knows she should be listening more carefully, hopes that somewhere in the back of her mind she is cataloging each word to pull forward again once this feeling has passed. But she is struck by the way the mountain bends beneath him, by the sudden magnitude of who he is. Until this moment he had occupied the role of absent father in her awareness, but now she can feel the shift from father to God. From man to entity, and there is something inside her chest that fractures at the way this realization casts her in such relative insignificance. She looks at the ground between them, at the place where the earth buckled beneath the weight of someone she had never truly fathomed until now, and she is sure there would be an identical impression on the surface of her pale chest if she would only look down.

She does not.

Those with abilities to do so descend into the fissure to begin their work, though, like her, a few remain above with faces transformed by thought and the shadow of uncertainty they mask so reflexively. Dig, he says, and yet she knows that she is not made for such a thing. There is a girl in the hole already, and with some amount of polite revulsion Alleria watches the bugs pulled to the gravity of her until the air is filled with a sound Alleria is sure she will never unhear. A scratching, a buzzing, a chittering of odd obedience that makes her skin crawl. Even so, this gift is something convenient now and Alleria feels a pang of jealously that she is so much less suited for her fathers task.

There is someone that goes to the Dark God before Alleria has decided what it is she wants to do, and she watches with some amount of disguised curiosity as something passes between the pair and then the bone armored chestnut is descending as well. She frowns, her mouth a hard line and her eyes a shade of borrowed steel from the edge of a blade. Seals are not meant for digging, and even if the selkie did have her aquatic form it would do no good here. But, and her mind is a thing unraveling, the silk of a web unbuilt and made once more into a solitary strand, Alleria has seen the way the ocean erodes and excavates, the hollow places beneath the waves that hide predators too strong to face. She has seen the winding smoothness of underwater mountain ranges worn away like dust beneath the strength of a thing she knows intimately well.

Water, of course.

There is something inside her poised to break when she finally comes to stand before this man who is both her father and no more a father than the moon is to stars that exist only in the perpetuity of distant silver flecks. She is of him, but she thinks that she is not his, not something he would claim because in all these years he hadn’t. “If you are what mom always said,” described as a God in every way but with the word itself, “then you already know that I am worth knowing, dad.” She says, claiming him in the way he had not because pride is a twin to the jealousy beneath her skin and both tangle like twin flames inside a chest not made to burn. “But I’ll prove it to you anyway.” There is no feverish desperation, no defiance in the way she lifts a face that is too pale and too delicate and too much like the angel from whence she came. There is only a shade of quiet certainty that reaches no more than skin deep, and she doesn’t care that he’ll see that too. “Make me the thing I know best, please.”

Which is how it comes to be that she reaches the belly of the pit as a pool of cool, glittering water that is both Alleria and not Alleria. She can feel the change almost immediately, and there is a strange distancing from the pain that hides away inside her chest and makes it hard to miss that body of flesh and bone, miss the burdens that bind her to that other skin. As water she knows only the company of herself, only the grooves of the ground beneath her and the manner in which the dirt gives way when she burrows against it. It is not work, exactly, but there is something dangerous in the way it sets her mind adrift, in the way as moments pass she forgets that she is Alleria and she is here for a purpose. It would be nice to drift, to be a tide that wanders without intent, to be the waves that lap against warm, white sands. To be never alone in the way that water is always pressed against water.

The more she tries to focus, the more pieces of her drift, but she is nothing if not stubborn, and this need to prove herself (to herself? to him?) is a fuel that leaves her smoldering. So she, a cord of water like a rope made of glass, writhes and spirals and erodes away at a mountain that does not want to share itself and yet, she thinks, aches to be breached. She had felt the way it sighed when Carnage carved it.

There are times when water meets stone and stone snaps the fine tendrils of her patience until she finds new edges to burrow against, new seams to rend. But she is the momentum of a current now, the pull of a tide and everything is coaxing her deeper, everything dragging her down.

But she has spent her whole life buried in the dark places beneath the surface, and she is not afraid.

She digs and she digs, like a worm burrowing deeper until there is hardly any piece of her left. Until she is rivers and oceans and delicate streams, until she is puddles and rain and the tears that fall down her mother’s cheeks - and the pain of that makes her caustic, makes her violent in her winding and her churning until suddenly, suddenly, there is nothing beneath her but a chasm of dark and she is torn from the oblivion hivemind of water and thrown back into the cognizance of a body that nearly breaks her heart in half.