His head bobs, both with the movement of the currents and with the indication that he is listening as she speaks while they submerge themselves even further. At the back of his mind, he notes that he is growing more uncomfortable, though it has little to do with Deiti herself. It seems that his suspicion is accurate.. that he is not built for the deep sea diving that he’d been wanting to do. But he does not let it bother him too much. Yet.

He notices the way she pauses and the look that crosses her face, seems to dim it slightly, even if it is only for a fleeting moment. Though she may not wish to linger at that point in her recollections, he cannot help but to interject his curiosity into the quiet that swells between them. “Dark, how?”

She seems to have changed in the few minutes she has spent telling him of Ischia, become just a fraction softer than when they’d met on the surface. The duality that she both speaks of and that he is already seeing in her intrigues him. He has realized that most souls have an opposite side that lies beneath their natural façade, but some exhibit far more dramatic differences than others. He wonders if hers is of the latter group.

As the coral begins to dominate the scenery and the species of fish seem to change, he contemplates his own dichotomy. For just a short period of his young life, he had been largely cheerful and carefree, as most children tend to be. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his own darkness, he knows that hopeful child still waits for the gloom to pass. But the sheer weight of his losses keeps him mired in solemn melancholy and volatile anger most of the time.

Just as the glow filters through the blue-blackness of the depths, an invisible grip locks itself tightly around his body and the chill of the water simultaneously begins to seep into his bones. Though he is not suffocating from lack of air or being crushed between the heavy hands of the ocean’s pressure, he knows that he has reached his limit.

She continues on without him, so he cannot see what lies below the cliff’s edge, but he believes that her assumption that the glowing light belongs to Baltia is correct. A twinge of… something… pulls at the strings of his heart. He is not sure what he expected to find within the former kingdom’s boundaries, but he is sorely disappointed that he cannot even reach a tentacle into its borders.

When she looks back, a single tentacle drifts near his face, waving her to continue on, while he also calls out, “This is as far down as I can go, but you go on! I might just check it out from above.” As he finishes speaking, his tentacles balloon outward then contract rapidly, pushing him to a less oppressive depth. When the pressure eases, he moves forward until he is drifting above her; he glances down and finds his disappointment growing as he realizes he cannot see much from his position. Well, she can always return with her findings, if she chooses.

He watches her disappear into the canyon and his tentacles flick and snap in irritation as he hovers in place. Though he knew it to be possible, how bitterly unfair that he cannot proceed further, cannot explore the land of his ancestry. He cannot say that he had grown up hearing the greatest, most exultant stories of Baltia, considering his parents’ mutinous marriage, but that is entirely beside the point. Having inherited more Baltian traits than Stratosian, he’d always harbored some curiosity about the ocean kingdom, wondered a bit more about the aquatic family that his father had left behind; the connections, however tenuous, feels stronger to him now that his family has been missing some years. He finds it harder to feel the same pull toward the cloud city, despite the kinder stories he’d heard of his mother’s birthplace, but he supposes that his airborne sisters might feel the same way toward Stratos if they’d been tossed into a strange new world, alone and without the slightest hints to where their family might be.

In attempt to soothe the nervous energy that seems to electrify every inch of his skin, he takes to jetting himself in a haphazard manner in hopes of discerning even the smallest details of the kingdom below, but the height he must maintain prevents such gleaning. His father had never spent much time dwelling on the visuals when he’d spoken of the past, but Eddie does not let that stop his imagination from running wild with the possibilities. The most realistic parts of him suppose that the dwellings are simple and humble, like natural caves hollowed into walls of the cliffsides of the deep ravine that Baltia seems to be nestled in, or nests hidden in meadows of tall, waving sea grasses. The slightly more fantastical bits of him wonder if overlarge versions anemones exist, hiding away the less predatory Baltians as the normal-sized anemones do with similarly less threatening fish. The utterly ridiculous side of him imagines a large structure belonging solely to the royals, lavishly decorated with the finest sea treasures and somehow (magically, he assumes) the source of the almost pulsating glow that radiates up toward him.

He is not sure how much time passes while he loses himself to the illusions of his creation and he knows that it is reckless to let his guard down for any length of time here in the darkness, but he cannot seem to help himself. The desire to know more of Baltia is even more crushing than even the black depths surrounding him, especially with the target laying so teasingly close below him. Without realizing, he blindly drifts back to his starting point as he continues crafting the aquatic kingdom in his mind’s eye; a gentle brush of something against his tentaclesr snaps him out of his reverie. He jets away to a safer distance and his head begins to twist and turn as he looks for signs of danger (even though it’s too late to even attempt to defend himself), but all he sees is an odd blossom bobbing in the currents. No, that’s not quite right. His eyes focus beyond the glowing flower and notices a familiar figure not too far away.

His voice is loud enough to cross the distance, yet somehow subdued by the flood of emotion that washes over him as he calls to her, “What did you see?”