Joan watched the guards drag Urma away. On one hand, she really wanted to help the mermaid, even if their acquaintanceship had been very brief. On the other hand, she preferred her head attached to her neck. The inner conflict only grew more urgent until the former human could stand it no longer.
With a frustrated grunt, Joan took off after the two mermen and their prisoner (after retying her bra, which she had been holding since before the guards showed up). She was still unused to manipulating her tail, and she found herself quickly falling further behind. Thankfully, her vision seemed much more acute than it had been as a human. It allowed her to keep the others in sight even as they entered murkier waters.
The reef was soon left behind. Joan had to fight an instinctive sense of dread as the sea floor beneath her gradually fell away into a dark, endless abyss. Forcing her eyes back on her quarry, she redoubled her efforts, swimming faster than she ever could before. Even then, she only just managed to keep up.
Right when she was tempted to abandon her chase, a distant shadow ahead caught her attention. The shadow expanded and soon resolved itself into a towering cylinder of stone. The structure stood upright a good distance below the surface and stretched downward as far as the eye could see. Overall, it looked like a giant chimney or an artificial volcano. Lights lined the top, guiding the mer-people towards the huge circular opening in the center.
Without stopping, the guards and Urma entered the hole. Joan swam up to the edge and stopped. Gingerly, she approached the gaping hole, trying to get a glimpse of what could be down there. As large as the interior seemed, it still made her claustrophobic just to imagine swimming in there. What courage she had mustered for the journey finally gave out. There was simply no way she could follow them into that waiting maw.
