diff --git a/projects/cypress-bend/staging/Chapter_chapter-number_draft.md b/projects/cypress-bend/staging/Chapter_chapter-number_draft.md index c45a84e5..7e942e33 100644 --- a/projects/cypress-bend/staging/Chapter_chapter-number_draft.md +++ b/projects/cypress-bend/staging/Chapter_chapter-number_draft.md @@ -1,115 +1,117 @@ -# Chapter 4 +Chapter 4: Shadows of the Blackening -The cypress roots released her wrist with a wet, sucking pop, black sap oozing from the gash like the land's own blood, but the coven's eyes—milky and merciless—locked on her from the black pool's shore. Lena stumbled back, the mud of the Widow’s Deep claiming her boots, trying to drag her down into the rot where the aborted Rite still hummed. Her right hand was a map of fire. The fever, which had been a low simmer since the morning, now boiled over, turning the edges of the swamp into a jagged, hallucinatory smear of neon moss and charcoal shadows. +The cypress roots pulsed beneath her bandages like a second heartbeat, hot and insistent, as the black sap wept into her wounds. Lena Duval staggered away from the center of the grove, her boots slipping on the slick, mud-slicked knees of the trees. The interior of the Widow’s Deep was no longer a sanctuary; it was a throat, and she was being swallowed. -"The lineage is not a garment you can cast off, Lena!" Aunt Maribelle’s voice didn't carry; it curdled the air. She stood at the center of the coven, her skin looking like parchment stretched over old bone, her eyes clouded with that ritualistic white haze that signaled she was no longer seeing the physical world, but the currents of debt and blood beneath it. +The air tasted of iron and ancient rot. Every breath felt like inhaling wet wool. Fever burned behind her eyes, turning the edges of the world into frayed, glowing silk. To her left, a thick curtain of Spanish moss brushed her shoulder, and she flinched, her hands flying up to shield her face. -The other women, the aunts and cousins Lena had shared gumbo with every Sunday of her life, moved in a synchronized glide. They didn't walk; they drifted through the reeds, closing the circle. The Humming grew louder, a physical vibration that made Lena’s teeth ache. It wasn't music anymore. It was a snarl. +"No no, the sap, no no," she whispered, her voice a dry rasp. Her fingers trailed the rough, familiar bark of a nearby cypress, seeking the grounding friction needed to keep her mind from floating away. The tree felt wrong. Usually, the bark held a dormant, sturdy warmth, a slow-rolling patience that settled her soul. Now, it vibrated with a jagged thrum. The Humming. It wasn't just a sound anymore; it was a physical weight pressing against her ribs, rhythmic and demanding. -"The cypress don’t lie, cher—the roots whisper what your heart’s too stubborn to hear," Lena hissed, the words catching in her throat like dry husks. She clutched her mother’s silver locket, the metal biting into her palm. "You’re choking the land. This ain’t the protection you promised. It’s a cage." +The land wanted its due. She had pulled the veil of fog in the marshes to hide her movements, had disrupted the coven’s delicate weaving of power, and had given nothing back but a drop of blood and a scream. -"It is a shield," Maribelle countered, her hands rising. The black pool behind her began to churn, oily bubbles of sap breaking the surface. "And you have left us exposed. Look at your hand, child. The land has already begun to taste you. Do not think you can run from its hunger." +*Balance the scales, little bird,* the Whisper exhaled. It sounded so much like her mother’s voice that Lena’s heart stuttered, the silver locket at her throat feeling like a cold stone against her skin. -Lena felt the vertigo hit—a dizzying tilt of the world. She needed to move, but her legs felt like waterlogged wood. *Gator’s Truth,* she thought, *if I stay here, I’m just more fertilizer for Maribelle’s ego.* +She broke through the last line of dense brush, her feet sinking into the sludge of the black pool’s shore. The coven was there. They stood in a semi-circle, their hooded forms like jagged teeth against the rising mist. In the center stood Aunt Maribelle. -She didn't apologize. She didn't explain. She reached for the pain in her hand, that sharp, stinging bridge to the bayou’s power. With a jagged movement, she pricked her thumb against a sharp edge of the mother-of-pearl inlay on her locket and smeared the red across the damp bark of a leaning willow. +The ritual was broken, the "Rite of the First Sap" a jagged mess of interrupted intent, but the power hadn't dissipated. It had curdled. Maribelle’s eyes were still filmed over with that milky-white haze, staring not at Lena, but through her, into the dark heart of the swamp. -*Mist of the marrow, bone of the bend, mask the path that the shadows would rend.* +"You’ve brought a blight upon us, Lena," Maribelle said. Her voice lacked its usual honeyed deception; it was the sound of dry wood cracking. "The land was screaming for a guardian, and you gave it a wound instead." -The chant was clipped, rhythmic, a sharp staccato meant to startle the swamp. A sudden, unnatural fog billowed upward, not from the water, but from the very pores of the trees. It was thick, smelling of old rain and copper, rolling over the coven like a physical weight. +"It was already bleeding, Maribelle," Lena spat, clutching her bandaged hand to her chest. The pain was rhythmic, a stabbing heat that mirrored the thrumming of the water. "The Blackening... you’re doing this. You’re poisoning the deep to keep the developers out, but you’re killing the trees to do it." -"Lena!" Maribelle’s scream was muffled by the white-gray wall of magic. +"Survival isn't pretty, cher," Maribelle said, taking a step forward. The coven shifted with her, a collective rustle of silk and damp cotton. Their hostility was a physical heat, a wall of resentment. Lena was the Prodigal who had returned only to spit in the well. "The Terrebonne men, they come with dredges and fire. They want Phlegethon. Do you even know what that means? It is a river of fire. They will burn the soul out of this bend. If the cypress must weep black to drown them, then they will weep." -"No no, not that, no no," Lena whispered to herself, scrambling through the blinding veil. She tripped over a submerged log, her boots splashing into the shallows. The fog cost her. Each breath felt like swallowing grit, and the fever spiked, sending a fresh wave of tremors through her frame. She had to balance the scales for this—the land didn't give illusions for free—but that was a debt for another hour. +"The cypress don't lie, cher—the roots whisper what your heart's too stubborn to hear," Lena countered, her voice gaining a rhythmic, chanting edge. Her fever spiked, a wave of vertigo nearly dropping her to her knees. She gripped her mother's locket, her thumb tracing the familiar engraving. "I saw the markers. I saw the names. But you... you know more than you’re saying. You’re holding back the tide with a sieve." -She plunged into the interior paths, the dense thickets where the cypress grew so close their branches interlaced like skeletal fingers. Here, the silence was different. It wasn't the peaceful quiet of a sleeping swamp; it was the predatory hush of a hunter holding its breath. +Maribelle’s milky gaze sharpened. "I know the Sheriff’s pockets are lined with corporate silver. I know they plan to clear the Eastern Bend by the new moon. I am the only thing standing between this home and a parking lot. And you? You are a child playing with matches in a drought." -The Whisper came then. +A sudden, violent vibration tore through the ground. The black pool bubbled, a thick, oily burp of gas and sap. The Humming reached a crescendo, a sound so low it bypassed the ears and vibrated the bones. -It didn't come from the wind or the rustle of the palmettos. It resonated inside her bones, a low, vibrating frequency that shaped itself into a voice she hadn't heard in seventeen years. +Lena let out a strangled cry as the backlash hit. Her tremors intensified, her legs turning to water. The vision came in a flash of blinding white and swamp-green—her mother’s face, not as a memory, but as a presence. The Whisper wasn't just a voice; it was a tether. -*Lena… the scales… find the center…* +*The blood is the bond,* the voice murmured. -"Mama?" Lena stopped, her hand flying to her throat, twisting the locket chain until it nearly choked her. "No. No, it’s the fever. It’s just the fever playing tricks." +Lena collapsed into the mud, her right hand hitting a submerged root. The bandages tore away, leaving the raw, sap-stained gashes exposed. The Blackening from the root didn't just touch her; it reached for her. The oily substance coiled into her open cuts like thin, dark worms. -She leaned against a trunk for support, but the tree felt wrong. The bark was slick, weeping an oily black discharge that stained her sleeve. Near the base of the tree, something caught the dim, filtered light. It was a stake, synthetic and jarring against the earth, topped with a fluorescent orange ribbon. +"No no, not that, no no," she whimpered, her fingers clawing at the earth. She wasn't just losing her mind to the fever; she was being integrated. -*Project Phlegethon.* +"The land chooses its price, Lena!" Maribelle shouted over the rising wind that suddenly whipped through the trees, though the water remained unnaturally still. "Balance the scales! Give it what it asks or it will take the rest of you!" -The words on the marker felt like a curse. She reached down, her fingers trembling, and wrenched the stake from the mud. It came up with a screeching sound, as if the ground itself were screaming. She threw it as far as she could into the muck. The developers. Terrebonne. They weren't just coming to cut trees; they were coming to dredge the very soul out of the bend. And the swamp knew. The Blackening—this weeping, oily sap—it was a defense, a fever of the land trying to poison anything that touched it. +Lena gritted her teeth, her stubbornness flared into a cold, white-hot coal in her gut. She would not be a sacrifice. She would not be a puppet. She reached for the moss, the mud, the very filth of the shore, and forced her focus into a sharp, jagged point. By the bayou’s bones, she wouldn't go out like this. -The Humming intensified, a low-frequency thrum that made the water in the puddles ripple in perfect concentric circles. Lena’s vision blurred. The magnolia-scented air turned thick with the smell of wet earth and rot. She had to find Jax. If the developers were already placing markers this deep, the timeline Maribelle was hiding was shorter than anyone realized. +She dragged herself toward a rusted metal stake she had spotted earlier—a surveyor's marker she’d yet to pull. It sat ten feet away, a foreign infection in the soil. -She pushed through a final curtain of Spanish moss and stumbled toward the edge of the deeper water where the marsh gave way to the navigable channels. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps. Every inch of her skin felt sensitized, as if the swamp were trying to read the secrets under her flesh. +With a guttural groan, she reached the stake. She wrapped her bleeding hand around the cold, industrial steel. -The sound of a low-profile outboard motor cut through the rhythmic drone of the cicadas. A boat drifted into view, its hull dark and scarred, cutting a clean line through the black water. Jax Harlan stood at the tiller, his face a map of grim lines and exhaustion. +"Gator's truth," she hissed through clenched teeth, "you don't belong here." -"By the bayou's bones, Jax, I thought you’d be halfway to the Gulf by now," Lena called out, her voice cracking. +She didn't just pull. she poured the fever, the backlash, and the hungry thrum of the Blackening into the metal. The land’s anger found a conduit. The pulse of the swamp surged through Lena’s arm, using her as a bridge, and slammed into the marker. The steel hissed, the ground around it bubbling as if the earth were trying to vomit the object out. -Jax swung the boat toward the hummock, cutting the engine. The silence that followed was heavy. He took one look at her—the bleeding hand, the fever-bright eyes, the mud-caked clothes—and his jaw tightened. +The marker flew back, unearthed by a force that felt like a localized earthquake. The Humming eased, receding into a dull, manageable ache. The tremors slowed. -"You look like the swamp tried to eat you and changed its mind," Jax said, leaping onto the bank. He didn't offer a hand to help her up; he knew she’d jump at the gesture like a spooked gator. He just stood there, his presence a solid, grounding weight in the shifting world. "What happened at the Deep, Lena? The water’s acting like it’s being boiled from underneath." +Lena slumped against a cypress, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Her hand was stained a deep, indelible black, the sap having seeped beneath the skin, turning her veins into a map of dark rivers. -"The Rite… it didn't go right," she said, stumbling toward the boat's edge. She felt the urge to apologize, to say she was sorry for the mess she was bringing to his hull, but she clamped her jaw shut. She owned her disasters. "Maribelle’s gone past the bend, Jax. She’s triggering the Blackening. She thinks she can starve out the developers by turning the swamp into a tomb." +Maribelle stood frozen, her eyes wide as the milky film began to recede, revealing the hard, calculating brown beneath. The coven murmured, a sound of fear and awe. -"And the markers?" Jax asked, nodding toward the swamp behind her. "I seen 'em too. Closer to the main channel every day." +"You’ve tied yourself to the markers now," Maribelle whispered, her voice trembling with either rage or realization. "Every tip of the scale you force will draw them closer. You think you’re fighting them? You’re just ringing the dinner bell." -"Project Phlegethon," Lena said, the name tasting like ash. "They’re planning to dredge and clear-cut within the week. Maribelle knows. She’s known the whole time and didn't say a lick to the town." +"I’m finding Jax," Lena said, her voice stronger than she felt. She pushed herself up, using the tree for leverage. Her head swam, the scent of magnolia and mud thick in her nostrils. "He knows the water better than any of you. He knows what’s real and what’s just your games, Maribelle." -Jax spat into the water. "You think you can run to New Orleans and leave this behind? Look at you, cher. You’re leaking magic and fever like a cracked levee. You can't run from roots that deep." +"Jax Harlan is a ghost in a boat, Lena. He won't save you from what’s coming." -Lena twisted her locket, her heart hammering. "I never said I was staying." +"I don't need saving," Lena snapped, refusing to apologize for the mess she’d made of the ritual. "I need the truth. And the truth is hidden in those markers, not in your black pools." -"The cypress don’t lie, Lena," Jax said, his voice dropping to a low rumble. "You’re part of this mess now. You broke the Rite. That debt’s gotta be paid, or the swamp’s gonna take it out of your hide." +She turned and began to move through the thickening fog, her steps heavy but deliberate. Behind her, the unnatural silence of the swamp returned, a predatory quiet that felt more threatening than the humming ever had. She could feel the coven’s eyes on her back, a dozen pairs of predatory gazes watching her stumble away. -Lena looked back toward the interior. The Blackening was spreading; she could see the dark stains creeping up the cypress knees like ink in water. The land was hungry, and she had taken its fog without giving back. +SCENE A: -She turned to a young cypress sapling growing near the water’s edge. "Gator’s truth," she whispered. "A witch is only as strong as her word." +The transition from the deep interior of the grove back toward the navigable waterways was a descent into a heavy, suffocating sensory deprivation. Lena’s vision was a mess of bleeding colors and shifting shadows. Every time her foot connected with the earth, the impact vibrated through her teeth, a cruel echo of the Humming she had just suppressed. The silence Maribelle had left in her wake was worse than the noise; it felt like the swamp was holding its breath, waiting for her to trip, to fall, to finally stop fighting. -She pressed her bleeding palm against the sapling’s smooth bark. *I bind my heat to your wood, my blood to your sap. Peace for the mist, life for the map.* +Her right hand felt like it had been dipped in liquid lead. She held it close to her chest, the black veins visible even through the grime of the journey. It wasn't just a stain; it was a grafting. She could feel the trees now in a way she never had before—not as external entities she bartered with through charms and pricks of blood, but as a network of nerves extending through the mud. When a beetle skittered over a root fifty yards away, she felt a phantom itch on her own calf. When the wind sighed through the high canopy of a distant oak, her own lungs felt a momentary, airy expansion. -The fever didn't vanish, but it shifted. The jagged heat in her head flowed down her arm and into the tree. Her vitality drained in a sickening rush, leaving her knees weak, but the sapling’s leaves seemed to shimmer for a moment with a vibrant, unnatural green. The Humming in her ears quieted to a dull thrum. +"No no, get out of me, no no," she muttered, the panic cycling through her mind like a broken record. She reached for a clump of dry Spanish moss, trying to use the scratchy texture to ground her drifting consciousness. The locket around her neck was hot, reacting to the heat of her fever. She realized then that she was crying, not with the heaving sobs of grief, but with the steady, quiet leakage of a body that had reached its structural limit. -**SCENE A** +She thought of the New Orleans map folded in her satchel back at the cabin. The city was a dream of stone and concrete, of lights that never dimmed and sounds that weren't made by things with scales or roots. She had wanted to be anonymous there. She had wanted to be the girl who worked in a bookstore or a café, the one who didn't smell like magnolia and mud, the one who didn't have to carry the weight of a dying bayou in her blood. But the Whisper had followed her even then, a soft, insistent reminder that the Duval line didn't end just because one girl decided to take a bus. The roots were deep; the roots were ancient. And now, they were literally inside her. -The drain was more than a physical exhaustion; it was a hollowed-out sensation in the marrow of her bones. Lena leaned her forehead against the cool, damp bark of the young cypress until the world stopped spinning. The sapling took the heat of her fever, but it didn't take the memory of Maribelle's milky eyes. The coven was the only family Lena had ever truly known, a tangled knot of women who knew the exact shade of her mother’s hair and the exact rhythm of the tides, and now she had made herself a stranger to them. +SCENE B: -Every breath she drew felt like it was borrowed from the mud. She could hear the swamp breathing with her, a heavy, oxygen-rich wheeze of decaying vegetation and new growth. Behind her closed eyelids, she saw the map of the bend—not as the developers saw it, with lines and property values, but as a living circulatory system. The Blackening was a clot in the vein, a thick, necrotic defense that would kill the patient to save the heart. +By the time she reached the rusted mooring where Jax Harlan usually tied his shallow-draft skiff, the sun was a bruised purple smear on the horizon. The humidity had peaked, making the air thick enough to chew. Lena leaned against a sagging willow, her strength nearly gone. -She thought of the Whisper again. *Find the center.* The center wasn't the Widow’s Deep; that was the altar. The center was something older, something tucked away in the places even the coven feared to tread. Her mother had known it. Seventeen years ago, her mother had walked into the black water without a word, leaving Lena with a silver locket and a legacy of mud. If that voice in the roots truly belonged to her mother, then the debt Lena owed wasn't just to the land, but to the ghosts that inhabited it. +"Jax?" she called out. The name felt heavy in her mouth, a plea she didn't want to admit to. -She felt the locket against her chest, heavy as a stone. She had spent so long trying to keep the metal from staining her skin, trying to keep the bayou from claiming her pulse. She wanted the asphalt of New Orleans. She wanted neon lights that didn't flicker with magical intent and neighbors who didn't know the future by the flight patterns of crows. But as she touched the sapling, she realized the truth she had been running from: she wasn't just a guest in the Bend. She was its target. +A shadow moved near the water's edge. Jax stepped out from the gloom of his small cabin, a lantern swinging in his hand. His face was a map of hard lines and weary experience, his eyes narrowing as he took in the sight of her. He didn't move toward her immediately; he studied her the way a captain might study a mounting storm. -**SCENE B** +"You look like hellfire froze over, Lena," he said, his voice a low, gravelly rumble. He saw the way she was holding her arm. "What did the old woman do to you this time?" -"You done talking to the greenery?" Jax’s voice was sandpaper on silk, rough but not unkind. He hadn't moved from the tiller, but his eyes hadn't left her either. +"It wasn't just her, Jax," Lena said, her voice cracking. "The land... it's changing. It's turning into something else. The Blackening isn't just a sickness; it's a weapon. Maribelle’s using it, but she’s losing control." -Lena pulled her hand away from the tree. The gash on her palm had stopped weeping, though the skin around it was puckered and stained charcoal. "I was paying the toll, Jax. You know the rules better than most. Take a fog, give a fever." +Jax stepped closer then, the lantern light spilling over the black, map-like veins on her hand. He didn't flinch, but his jaw tightened. "I saw the markers today. Down near the old dredging channel. There were three men in suits being escorted by the Sheriff’s deputies. They weren't just surveying, Lena. They were taking soil samples. They were looking at the water like it was something to be sold by the gallon." -"I know the rules of the water, Lena. I don't know the rules of whatever madness your aunt is cooking up," he said. He reached into a small cooler near the boat’s bench and tossed her a bottle of water. "Drink that. You look like you're about to turn into sea foam." +"Project Phlegethon," Lena whispered. -Lena caught the bottle and drained half of it in one go. The cold water was a shock to her system. "Maribelle thinks she's a martyr. She thinks she's the only thing standing between the bayou and the bulldozers. But she's just the first one to start the burning." +"Aye. I don't know what that fire-water name means, but it doesn't sound like prosperity for the Bend." Jax reached out, his calloused thumb brushing her cheek, catching a stray tear. The honesty in his touch was raw, a sharp contrast to the layered deceits of the coven. "You're burning up. You've been out there too long, playing their games." -"The town thinks she's their protector," Jax said, his voice flat. He looked out over the water, his brow furrowed. "They see the fog she calls up, they see the way the fish stay plenty near her docks, and they think she's keeping the old ways alive. They don't see the markers. They don't see the way the trees are starting to bleed." +"I have to stop them," Lena said, her fingers twisting the locket's chain with a frantic, rhythmic intensity. "Maribelle thinks she can drown them in sap. The developers think they can dredge the soul out of the water. They’re both going to kill us all." -"Gator's truth, they don't want to see," Lena said. "It's easier to believe the coven has it handled. But these developers? They aren't scared of ghosts and they aren't scared of old women. They have lawyers and logistics. And now, they have lights." +"Gator's truth," Jax muttered, repeating her own phrase back to her with a grim nod. "Nobody ever talks about what happens to the people caught in the middle. We're just the moss on the rock to them." -"I seen 'em out there," Jax admitted, his grip tightening on the tiller pull-cord. "Small skiffs. Not local. They're moving like they're mapping a minefield. If they're this far in, they've already bought someone's silence." +SCENE C: -"They bought more than silence," Lena muttered, thinking of the hidden secrets she'd gleaned. "They're coming for the Eastern bend first. They want to dredge the Deep because they think there’s more than just mud at the bottom. And Maribelle is going to let them walk right into a trap that’ll kill half the parish." +The next twelve hours were a blur of cooling damp cloths and the smell of Jax’s strong chickory coffee. He didn't ask her for apologies, and she didn't offer any. He simply let her sit on the edge of his porch, staring out at the water as the fever slowly receded into a dull, manageable throb. The black veins on her hand remained, a permanent record of the scale she had tried to balance. -**SCENE C** +The night was unnaturally quiet. The frogs had stopped their chorus, and even the owls seemed to have fled the vicinity of Widow’s Deep. The silence was a physical presence, a thick blanket that muffled the world. Lena watched the mists roll off the bayou, thick and white, curling like fingers around the stumps of the cypress trees. -The sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, bleeding a bruised purple into the sky. In the swamp, the transition between day and night was never subtle. One moment the birds were screaming in the canopy, and the next, the silence of the predators took over. Lena climbed into the boat, her movements stiff and uncoordinated. She sat on the middle bench, her fingers automatically finding the silver locket. +She knew she couldn't stay here. The coven would come looking for her once they realized she had successfully bonded with the surveyor's marker. She had stolen their conduit; she had taken the land’s anger and redirected it. Maribelle wouldn't forgive that. The "Prodigal" was now a threat. -The boat drifted slightly in the current, the black water lapping against the hull with a rhythmic *slap-slap-slap*. The smell of magnolia and mud was overwhelming here, a thick perfume that felt like it was trying to coat her lungs. She looked back toward the bank where she had bound her fever. The little cypress tree stood out against the darkening woods, its leaves unnaturally bright, almost glowing with the stolen heat of her magic. +As the first hint of gray light began to touch the eastern sky, Lena stood up. Her legs were shaky, but the iron resolve she had felt in the grove remained. She had to find the rest of the markers. She had to see the extent of the infection before she could hope to cure it. -Across the water, the first of the night-bugs began their chorus, but the Humming beneath the sound was still there. It was a subterranean thrum, a vibration that seemed to originate from the very core of the planet. It was the land's heartbeat, and it was racing. +She walked down to the small, stagnant pool of black sap trapped between two roots near Jax's dock. The surface bubbled, a slow, viscous pop of gas that smelled of ancient peat and something sweet, like rotting jasmine. -"We can't hide in my boat all night, Lena," Jax said, his eyes scanning the tree line. "If your aunt realizes which way you went, she’ll have the whole coven calling the wind against us before moonrise." +The surface bubbled. -"She knows where I am," Lena said, her voice small. "She's probably watching us through a dragonfly's eyes right now. But she won't move yet. She's too busy trying to keep the Rite from completely unraveling." +A face formed in the oily tension—pale, beautiful, and frozen in time. Her mother. The image didn't smile; it didn't weep. It simply existed within the rot. The lips moved, and though no sound came out, the words vibrated directly into Lena’s mind. -Suddenly, the cicadas went dead silent. It was a vacuum of sound that made Lena’s ears pop. She stood up in the boat, her hand flying to the rail. The horizon wasn't dark anymore. +*New Orleans,* the image mouthed. *You cannot run from the roots, Lena. They are already under the city. They are waiting.* -As Jax's boat engine cuts through the thrum, Lena spots distant lights piercing the fog—Terrebonne surveyors, armed and closing on the Deep. \ No newline at end of file +Lena gasped, stumbling back into the mists. She didn't look back again. She scrambled toward the sound of a distant outboard motor, toward the only man who spoke the truth, even when it hurt. + +Behind her, the black pool settled, as smooth and dark as a grave, holding the secret of her flight plan in its suffocating depth. \ No newline at end of file