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asgardiancoffemaker · 2 days ago

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SUMMARY A coastal town where the sea never forgets, and the tide sings for what was once sacrificed. WORD COUNT 16,814 PAIRING Rafayel x F!Reader | 18 + Only AO3 trigger warnings; there is depiction of body horror, descriptive fear, and a gothic horror feel.

For weeks before her departure, the sea begins bleeding into everything she dreams. Sometimes it laps gently at her ankles while she walks alone through foggy marshes; other times it claws skyward in enormous, hungry waves that never crest. She finds herself speaking languages she doesn’t know, mouthing syllables that taste like blood and pearl dust.

Through it all, one voice persists—low, lilting, and threaded with a coaxing amusement that unsettles more than comforts.

Even in dreams unmoored from water—dust-choked highways, elevators plummeting through mirrored shafts, hotel rooms painted with endless doors—he remains. A breath at her ear, a murmur from behind glass, never rising above a whisper but impossible to ignore.

‘Little driftwood,’ he says, like it’s her name, his affection buried in something older than sentiment. Each time she jolts awake, her throat aches as though she’s been speaking in her sleep.

Nights lose their shape. She either sinks into hours of black, dreamless weight or floats just beneath waking, caught in a suspended kind of awareness where every creak in the floor sounds like a wave breaking. Her bed begins to smell faintly of algae, her pillowcases tinted gray near the seams. Sometimes she finds crusts of salt at the corners of her eyes, tongue sharp with brine, though she hasn’t left her apartment in days.

The final dream comes heavy, too vivid to ignore. She’s underwater without drowning, suspended before a figure who shouldn’t be able to exist—long dark hair moving like strands of ink, tangled with coral-colored chains that pulse faintly with light. His body remains indistinct, almost too bright to look at directly, but his eyes hold a clarity that breaks something inside her.

They are not human, not even close, and they’re looking only at her.

She wakes before dawn, mouth dry, heart beating to a pattern she doesn’t understand. She watches it pulse at the hollow of her throat, checks her watch, and then pulls out her travel packet to confirm what she already knows. The rhythm matches the local tide table precisely. Outside, traffic moves like nothing’s changed, but she senses it—something has already reached out. Something wants her close.

Bayrun reveals itself in pieces, hunched low beneath a constant shroud of fog, the kind that hangs like soaked linen between rooftops. Nothing about the place moves quickly; window shutters sway loose on hinges, paint peels in slow curls from doorframes, and salt-warped signs hang crooked on rusted brackets. Streets narrow into alleys without warning, paved in uneven stones that glisten perpetually damp. A single diner squats beside a weather-beaten chapel, both places looking closed no matter the hour.

Locals are seen more often than heard. Faces pass behind smeared windows or vanish around corners just before she can make eye contact. No one waves. Even children, when glimpsed, speak in hushed voices and glance over their shoulders as if someone, or something, is always listening. It’s a town built for secrecy, or maybe one long practiced in it.

Her driver, Evan, doesn’t talk much once they pass the town’s faded welcome sign—just nods at landmarks she wouldn’t otherwise recognize. He smells faintly of kelp and engine grease, his nails stained from working the docks. When he speaks, it’s without looking at her, as though saying the words aloud too clearly might give them power.

“That house you’re staying in?” he mutters. “Wind always sounds like whispering in there…”

Later, after an uneasy stretch of road where the forest presses close on both sides, he adds, “Tide’s been off lately. Pulls wrong. Be careful near the shore after dusk.” The way he says “pulls” makes her stomach tighten, like it’s a living thing and not a part of nature’s design.

As they crest the ridge that overlooks the coastline, technology begins to fail in quiet stages. Bars of cell signals vanish, one by one. The truck’s radio dissolves into a whine of static, persistent even after he turns the volume down. Her phone vibrates once in her pocket, not from a message but a glitch—its compass spinning in tight circles before freezing north toward the sea.

Down below, the house slumps against the curve of a dying bluff. It stands alone, closer to the waterline than reason allows, separated from town by a thread of cracked asphalt and a mangled stretch of dune grass. The pier beside it stretches half-collapsed into the waves, ribs of it jutting from the water like something skeletal and dead. Weathered timbers lean sideways, windows clouded over by salt and time.

Evan stops the car and says nothing. After a long pause, he lifts her bags from the trunk, sets them down without meeting her eyes, and drives off.

Gravel crunches under her boots as she steps away from where Evan left her. His taillights vanish into the fog without a word of farewell. Salt air thickens with each step she takes toward the slouching house. Its outline sharpens the closer she gets—tilted walls, swollen shingles, the suggestion of once-white trim now blistered to gray.

A cracked walkway leads to a porch that groans beneath her weight. Boards shift underfoot, warped with moisture and age, nails sunken deep into soft wood. No sound comes from within, but the front door yields with a reluctant creak when she touches it. Hinges drag, and for a moment it feels like something resists from the other side.

Inside smells of mold first, then something sharper beneath—sweet and metallic, like copper steeped in seawater. The air clings, heavy, already settling in her hair and in her clothes. Dust motes drift in the watery light filtering through salt-blurred windows. Furniture sits where it was likely abandoned, shaped by years of quiet neglect.

She moves through the first room slowly. Floorboards cry out under her weight, but once she pauses, they keep creaking on their own, like the house is stretching after a long sleep. A fireplace stands bricked over, cold and forgotten, its mantle thick with grit. Shadows gather in the corners too quickly and retreat too slowly.

Upstairs, her bedroom faces the sea. The window doesn’t latch properly. She tests it twice and finds it opens without effort even when the night outside is still. Damp has sunk into the walls here, every surface feeling just shy of wet. Her skin prickles when she steps near the window frame, as though crossing into a threshold she hadn’t known was marked.

In the hallway, a narrow mirror hangs crooked beside the bannister. At first glance it seems unremarkable, but something’s wrong with the glass—her reflection shivers slightly at the edges. At dusk, it shifts more dramatically. Her neck elongates, her pupils darken. Her hair seems to sway even though the air stands dead still.

Over each window, tucked into the woodwork, rests a carved symbol. Circular and crude, gouged deep into the frames, just above where the sun could reach if it tried. She touches one absentmindedly. Her breath catches before she can stop it, a pressure blooming in her chest that fades only when she steps away.

Water doesn’t behave right in the house. Faucets release a hiss before any stream appears, and the liquid runs brown for the first few seconds, then clears to something clear but not clean. She leans close to the bathroom sink, ear near the basin. From somewhere deep in the plumbing comes a sound—low and melodic, almost human, almost sung.

Boxes sit half-emptied along the walls, their contents scattered across dusty furniture in attempts to make the house feel less hollow. Curtains are drawn open to let in the gray light, though it does little to chase away the damp that clings to everything. Her suitcase lies open near the foot of the bed, clothes unpacked into warped drawers that close unevenly. The place feels quieter now, as if it’s watching.

She steps out onto the porch with her phone, searching for signal where the air feels thinner, cooler. Two bars flicker into existence, wavering, then steady. Fog drapes low across the bluff, swallowing the pier in segments. Seagulls circle without calling.

When the call connects, there’s a pause, a delay—then Tara’s voice filters through, too bright, slightly distorted.

“Holy shit, you made it! What’s it like?”

She leans against the railing, watching the horizon. “Wet. Foggy. You’d hate it.”

Tara laughs. “Sounds like your kind of place.” A pause follows. “How’s the house?”

There’s no easy answer for that. She glances back through the doorway, where shadows nest along the crown molding. “Old. Noisy. The window in my room opens by itself.”

“That’s... comforting.”

She doesn’t mention the symbols yet. Or the mirror. Or the way the pipes hum as if listening. “It’s fine. I’ll settle in.” Her voice doesn't sound convincing, even to herself.

“You okay?” Tara’s voice shifts, softens. “You sound weird. Not like… bad weird. Just…”

“Just tired,” she says quickly. “Jet lag. New place. You know.”

Static rustles at the edge of the call. For a moment it sounds like someone else is breathing into the line, just beyond the signal. Tara doesn’t seem to hear it.

“Text me tomorrow,” her friend says. “Don’t go full recluse on me. Promise?”

“I promise.” She doesn’t hang up right away. Keeps the phone against her ear long after the line goes dead, waiting to hear if anything else wants to speak.

–

The fog lifts slightly the next morning, enough to see the town more clearly from the bluff. Paths of salt-scarred pavement wind through grasses flattened by constant sea wind. She pulls her coat tighter before stepping off the porch, the house behind her creaking once, almost like a groan of protest. Gravel shifts beneath her boots as she makes her way down the hill.

Bayrun doesn’t look bigger up close. If anything, it seems to shrink around itself—narrow alleys squeezed between leaning buildings, signage faded to near-invisibility. No traffic passes her on the road, just the slow wheeze of wind through power lines. A handful of locals linger near storefronts that don’t appear open but aren’t closed either. Faces lift to glance at her, then quickly look away.

She stops at a small general store near the church. A bell overhead rings flatly when she steps inside. Shelves sag with canned goods and brittle plastic packaging, everything covered in a fine, sticky dust. Behind the counter, a woman with sharp eyes and a sallow expression watches without speaking.

“Morning,” she offers.

The woman nods but says nothing in return.

“I’m staying up near the old pier. Came in for a few things—tea, maybe batteries?” Her voice sounds too loud in the cramped space.

“Tea’s down that aisle,” the woman says finally. “Batteries too, if any’re left.” Her accent is coastal but drawn out, as though words drag through water before reaching her lips.

Aisles are tight and uneven. Some items look untouched for years, others recently shifted, like someone had just passed through. She finds tea, not her brand, but something floral in a tin with rust at the seams. Batteries lie loose in a cardboard box, none matching. She takes what looks usable and returns to the counter.

The woman doesn’t ask for ID or introduce herself. As she rings up the purchase, her gaze lingers. “Storm season’s early this year. You should be careful out there near the cliffs.”

“I heard the tides are strange.”

“Strange doesn’t cover it,” the woman mutters. “Things go missing when they shouldn’t. Found a whole fishing skiff washed up with the engine still running. No one aboard.”

She hesitates, the tin of tea cold in her hand. “Does that happen often?”

“Not before. Now…” The woman presses her lips together, the rest left unsaid.

She takes her things and leaves. Outside, fog curls tighter again, choking out sunlight. Someone stands across the street for a moment, barely more than a shadow, then slips out of sight behind a building. She doesn’t follow.

Instead, she walks slowly back toward the bluff. Bayrun’s quiet is not the silence of abandonment—it’s the silence of breath held, something waiting beneath the rhythm of waves.

She returns to town twice more in the days that follow, always under a fog that never burns off entirely, no matter how high the sun climbs. It takes her only a few hours to learn the shape of Bayrun—four intersecting streets, each one narrowing as it nears the water. Most buildings are wood-faced and drooping, their paint cracked like old skin, their signs hung at odd angles as if the town itself is trying to shrug them off. No traffic lights, no chain stores, just shuttered windowpanes and the persistent sound of gulls circling without ever landing.

People here do not act afraid of her, but neither do they meet her fully. They offer smiles that reach the corners of their mouths but never touch their eyes. Every conversation is brief, every gesture efficient. When she speaks, they listen; when she asks, their gazes slide away like oil on water. It’s not rude. It’s caution.

She starts asking gentle questions—small ones at first. About tide shifts, sonar disruptions, strange sonar echoes in her equipment logs. A lobsterman named Clay nods once, then shrugs, cleaning his knife with the hem of his shirt. “Equipment don’t work here long,” he says. “Shorts out. Freezes. Gets… confused.”

At a bait shop, another man leans against a freezer of chum and squints at her printouts. “Things live under the shelf that shouldn’t,” he mutters. “Don’t go trawling deeper than you need to.”

She presses further, asks if they’ve noticed a pattern to the tides—something to explain the anomalies in her data. An older man standing nearby scoffs without turning around. “It’s best not to ask the sea to explain herself,” he says. “She doesn’t like it.”

No one laughs, not even as a courtesy. No one seems to think any of it is a metaphor.

At the grocer, the air inside feels colder than outside, despite the lack of refrigeration. She picks up lemons, their skin thin and spotted, and reaches for tea she doesn’t intend to buy. The woman at the register watches her too long, hands resting still on the countertop. Pale skin, wrists threaded with old burn scars or salt rashes—it’s hard to tell.

As she approaches to pay, the woman tilts her head slightly, looking through her more than at her.

“One of his,” the woman mutters, voice just above breath. “Poor thing.”

She blinks. “I’m sorry?”

The woman doesn’t repeat herself. Eyes lower to the register. Mouth tightens. Change is counted precisely, handed over with averted gaze. Nothing further said.

She leaves without pushing. On her way out, a boy playing with a length of kelp near the curb pauses to watch her. His lips are blue though it isn’t cold, his fingernails dark around the cuticles. He says nothing, only taps once on the side of his head, like listening underwater. Then he turns away.

The tide recedes further than usual on the third morning, drawing a jagged line of foam-slick rocks down the shoreline. She walks the beach with a notebook tucked under her arm, but doesn't open it. Her eyes are caught by the clusters of children gathering at the water's edge—quiet, barefoot, faces smudged with sand and sea spray. They speak in low tones, not laughter, not play.

They squat near the tidepools, dragging sticks and broken shells across the damp sand. What they draw stops her cold. Human figures, or close to it—hair flowing in long tendrils down their backs, arms ending in wide-spread fingers webbed like amphibians. The eyes are always oversized, black, round like voids. Shackles encircle the wrists and ankles in each drawing, always. No adult calls them back or stops them.

She watches a girl sketch an elongated figure whose mouth opens in a jagged spiral. The child steps back to admire it, then begins another beside it, as though the process isn’t a game but a duty. When she approaches, the children scatter—not in fear, more like instinct. One girl looks back once, her expression unreadable. The stick falls from her hand and remains behind.

Back at the house, wind pushes against the siding in slow, rhythmic pulses. The pier groans, its ruined slats clattering against one another as the tide begins to climb again. She steps onto the porch, arms full of supplies from town, and pauses. Something glistens darkly at her feet.

A fish, gutted neatly down the belly, lies on the threshold. Not just left there—it’s been pierced clean through with a length of pale driftwood. The stick has been sharpened crudely on one end, driven through the fish’s body and into the porch itself, pinning it like an offering. Scales shimmer dully in the low light. Blood has soaked into the grain of the boards.

No note, no sign of who left it. The air feels colder here, though the wind has died. She looks up sharply, but no one is in sight. Not on the beach. Not among the dunes. Only gulls turning slowly overhead, silent. A line of seaweed has been arranged across the far edge of the porch in a twisting spiral—too deliberate to be accidental.

The equipment begins to fail in slow, inexplicable stages. First, her hydrophone records nothing but long stretches of silence punctuated by sharp bursts of static—irregular, almost pulsed. Then her temperature sensors report readings that fluctuate wildly within the same minute. She reruns the diagnostics, replaces cables, double-checks power sources. Everything appears normal until it isn't.

One night, while reviewing her audio logs, she hears it layered beneath the static: not distortion, not feedback, but a voice. Male. Familiar in a way that makes her hands shake before she even understands why. It doesn’t say her name—never does—but it speaks with a tone that feels intimate, woven through with a knowing that burns at the edge of her memory.

You found me. You forgot why.

The voice comes again in different recordings, never where she expects it. Sometimes it’s hidden behind crashing surf in a file she doesn’t remember making. Other times it rides the background hiss of her malfunctioning monitor, quiet until she leans in, then rising as though responding to her proximity. Her name is absent, yet she feels called.

The sea never forgets her offerings.

Words coil through her mind when she tries to sleep, slithering between thoughts like ribbons of kelp in dark water. She doesn’t dream anymore—not the way she used to. Now she lies awake in half-sleep, listening to whispers echo off the corners of her skull. They don’t speak with urgency, only certainty.

He never says who he is, but it's like she knows anyway, yet the details escape her. The voice doesn’t beg. It doesn’t lure. It waits. Certain she’ll come. Certain she already has.

–

Time begins to shift, subtly at first. She notices it while reviewing her logs—files mislabeled, audio timecodes she doesn’t remember recording, entire segments clipped as though someone had already edited them. Her watch runs a few minutes fast, then slow, then fast again. She blames fatigue. The salt air. The isolation. Excuses come easy until they stop making sense.

Ten minutes disappear one morning between boiling water for tea and pouring it. The kettle screams on the stove, half-empty, though she doesn’t recall lifting it. Her notebook sits open to a page she hadn’t written yet, scrawled with half-legible symbols in a hand that could be hers, but rushed, crooked, salt-stained.

Thirty minutes are lost another day while walking the shoreline. She steps from one dune to the next, and the light shifts too far for the time she thinks has passed. Her legs ache as though she’s walked farther. Seaweed clings to her ankles. Her recorder blinks red when she pulls it from her bag, already capturing something low and wet and rhythmic she doesn’t remember hearing.

The worst is the night she wakes on the floor. Cold wood against her cheek. Her head throbs like she’s fallen, though there’s no bruise. Around her, silence hums too loud. She lifts herself slowly, only to find damp patches on the floorboards trailing away from the foot of her bed—footprints, bare, too long between steps to be hers. Water seeps into the edges of the rug like it had been dripping from a body.

She follows the prints to the hallway, but they vanish at the top of the stairs. No open windows. No puddles in the entry. Just the house, breathing. Watching. Waiting.

She finds the journal by accident, hunting for matches in a rust-flecked drawer behind the stove. Her fingers brush paper, not cardboard—a soft crackle, the unmistakable weight of old binding wrapped in damp linen. Mold blooms along the spine, and the first few pages have fused together from time and moisture. Her hands hesitate only briefly before opening it.

Ink has faded in places, smudged by salt or touch, but the handwriting is tight and looped, unmistakably feminine. The dates span nearly eighty years ago. The entries begin plainly: garden notes, complaints about damp rot in the walls, descriptions of morning fog. No name is given, just pronouns, references to family long dead. The voice is patient at first, observant, solitary. Then it changes.

Midway through, the entries sharpen. Language grows clipped, phrasing more intimate and agitated. Margins fill with sketches—spirals, waves, what might be eyes. She flips ahead, breath catching as she sees whole pages of repeated lines, written hastily, obsessively:

He dreams through me.

I saw him in the pool, bound and waiting.

I heard my mother call to him before she drowned.

The ink darkens here, pressed harder into the paper, as though written in a frenzy. Some words appear over and over, buried between sentences—below, mouth, teeth, song. One page is heavily creased and nearly torn in the middle, a scrawl barely legible through the overlap:

He is the tide when it’s wrong.

His hunger made it beautiful.

Toward the back, her thumb pauses on a page that feels different—half the sheet nearly torn from the binding, the ink slanted with urgency. The words The Bound One appear near the top, followed by a frantic attempt to cross them out with diagonal slashes. Underneath is a map, hand-drawn in rough pencil. She recognizes the coastline—Bayrun’s crooked harbor, the pier, the bluffs. One area near the cliffs has been circled twice, hard enough to tear through.

Beneath the map, a word is repeated over and over, sometimes alone, sometimes embedded in half-formed sentences: Bride.

Bride. Bride. Bride of the deep. Bride to the voice. Bride, again, again.

She stares at it until the words start to waver. Something shuffles in the walls behind her. Not rats. Not wind. A sound like someone exhaling slowly against the back of her neck. When she turns, the kitchen is still. The drawer hangs open like a mouth.

She didn't sleep that night. The journal lies open across her lap, its damp pages breathing in the candlelight. Wind presses gently against the windowpanes, steady and rhythmic like someone whispering just outside. Her eyes return to the map again and again, tracing the coastline, following the etched lines toward the circled inlet beyond the cliffs—an area not shown on any modern chart she’d studied for her research.

At dawn, the light turns white and watery. Mist crowds the bluff as if reluctant to lift. She dresses with mechanical slowness, wraps the journal in an oilcloth, and tucks it beneath her coat. Boots sink into the soft soil as she makes her way inland, then north toward the cliffs. The usual sound of gulls is absent. Even the sea seems to hush in anticipation.

No trails lead to where the map directs her. Grass gives way to stone, jagged and uneven, slick from the ocean’s breath. Her compass turns once, then stops. She puts it away. Past a bend in the cliffs, she sees the narrow path—hardly more than a fracture in the earth, descending toward a hidden pool carved into the coastline. Water rests inside, unnaturally still, as though waiting for permission to move.

The shape of it matches the drawing exactly. Ringed by black rock, barnacle-crusted and sharp, the pool pulses with a current she can’t see but feels. Her breath shortens. This place isn't on any map she’s ever studied. No townsperson has mentioned it. She kneels at the edge, touching one gloved finger to the surface. The water is warm.

Something moves beneath. Not a fish, not a current—something larger, coiled, deeper. The pressure that rises in her skull is immediate. Not pain. Not yet. A presence. Wordless at first, then forming slowly into shape.

You’re close now.

She stands abruptly, retreating several steps, heart hammering in time with a distant rhythm she doesn’t understand. The pool ripples. No wind touches it. Seafoam gathers around the rocks in symmetrical curves, spiraling inward.

On the cliff above, a shape watches—tall, too tall for any person, unmoving. She blinks, and it’s gone.

Back at the house, the journal feels heavier in her hands. Her fingertips sting where they touched the water. She peels off her glove and finds the faint outline of a spiral curling in her palm, raised slightly as if burned into the skin.

Later, when she tries to call Tara again, the line rings once before dying. Her phone won’t restart. In the silence that follows, her equipment begins recording on its own. Not static this time. Not white noise.

A low voice, just above a whisper:

You are already becoming.

Bride.

Sleep no longer feels like sleep. She lays down sometime after midnight, closes her eyes, and the next thing she knows, sea air is filling her lungs again. Damp grit clings to her soles, her nightclothes stained with salt and black sand. She always wakes just before sunrise, standing motionless at the edge of the tidepools, toes nearly brushing the water. The pool’s surface lies glass-still, unnaturally reflective, its depths dark even in morning light.

Her body bears the evidence—hair tangled with seaweed, skin cool and damp, calves streaked with streaks of bruising that match the shape of sea rock. There are scrapes she doesn’t remember earning. Once she finds barnacles caught beneath her fingernails. Her sheets are never in place when she wakes, her pillows on the floor, sand in the corners of the room where none should reach.

The path she takes varies, though her final destination does not. Sometimes she wakes facing the pool, sometimes with her back to it, as if she’s just finished whispering to the water. She tries locking her bedroom door, even moving furniture against it, but each time she wakes outside again, further down the slope, closer to the tide. Whatever takes her down there moves her without force. Her legs obey. Her will floats somewhere far behind.

She asks a fisherman about the pools once, a man who’s spoken to her before. He tightens his mouth and pretends not to hear. When she presses, he mutters, “People don’t go down there anymore. It’s not ours.” His eyes fix on her palm where the spiral still lingers, now faintly bruised with deepening color. He turns away quickly.

She questions others, with less subtlety. Two women outside the chapel ignore her completely, even as she speaks directly to them. A man sweeping outside the post office pauses, leans on his broom, and says, “You don’t belong in that part of the shore.” When she asks why, his answer is simple: “We remember.”

No one mentions what they remember. No one meets her eyes when she returns to town.

That night, she binds her ankles with a scarf and sets her phone to record. The footage cuts off at 3:17 a.m.—just before dawn. When she reviews it later, the final frame shows her standing beside the bed, eyes open, mouth moving silently. Her hands hang at her sides, fingers slightly curled, as though holding something invisible. Her expression is serene.

The next morning, she wakes as usual on the rocks. Her scarf lies knotted neatly beside her, bone-dry. A small fish skeleton rests near her feet, its bones arranged in a spiral. She knows without a doubt that she placed it.

The dream returns with a weight that feels heavier than sleep should allow. She is underwater, but not drowning—never drowning. Rafayel is there, his body luminous beneath the surface, hair spreading around him like dark smoke. He reaches for her gently, his fingers cool but steady as they cradle her face. Their foreheads touch, and though the water distorts all sound, she hears his voice clearly, not in her ears but inside her skull.

You remember now, he breathes, even though her lips haven’t moved.

You always come back to me.

Chains cross his chest, slick with algae and barnacle scabs, pulsing slightly where they meet the hollows of his collarbones. They don’t restrain so much as mark him, ceremonial, sacred, a reminder. His eyes are wide and black, not empty but full—of pressure, of old want, of the weight of the deep. His breath does not stir the water, yet she feels it ghost across her cheek.

She wakes with her hands clenched in the sheets, mouth dry with the taste of brine. Dampness presses into her skin—not sweat, not entirely. Seaweed lies tangled around her thighs, half-twisted into the sheets, slick with saltwater. It smells fresh, as if pulled moments ago from the low tide rocks, still alive enough to curl faintly at the edges.

Heart thudding, she stumbles to the bathroom, flips on the mirror light, and stares hard into her reflection.

It holds for a moment. Just long enough for her to feel foolish.

A split-second—her body remains still, but not alone. Rafayel stands behind her, towering, his presence undeniable even in the narrow glass. Hands rest on her shoulders, long fingers splayed, thumbs just below her collarbones. His expression is not cruel, not mocking. He smiles, soft and possessive, like someone who has waited a very long time and can finally see the shoreline again.

She spins around. Nothing. The mirror steadies, showing only her. She reaches up, slowly, touches the place where his hands had rested. It burns faintly beneath her skin, not pain—more like memory.

Night falls in heavy layers, the house thick with shadows that feel neither still nor benign. Every window reflects too much darkness, the glass catching shapes she can’t quite see—tall, pale lines at the edge of her vision, vanishing when she turns her head. She moves through the house slowly, barefoot, the floorboards cool and restless beneath her steps. Wind presses against the frame in soft pulses, not gusts but breathing, measured and coaxing.

Her name drifts into the hallway, spoken low and drawn out—once, then again. No question in it, just the sound of it tasting itself in the air. She pauses near the stairs, her hand braced on the warped banister, listening. The voice is hers. Every syllable mimics her exact pitch, her inflection, yet she knows it isn’t truly her speaking.

When she responds—just a whisper, no louder than a thought—the voice deepens. It pours through her bones like warmed saltwater, slippery and thick.

Say it, it murmurs, now fully him, no longer pretending.

Say my name.

Her throat constricts. The air feels charged, breathless. No resistance rises. The name has lived beneath her tongue for days, curling, blooming, pressing upward.

“Rafayel,” she breathes.

The house reacts.

Glass rattles in every windowpane. Walls groan. The tide outside crashes with impossible force, sending spray high enough to slap the porch. Pipes below the floor thrum low, like a throat clearing. Somewhere upstairs, the warped mirror shivers in its frame.

She doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t question. A smile rises slowly across her lips, unbidden. It doesn’t feel like hers entirely, but it fits her mouth perfectly.

Rafayel’s voice wraps around her from within, a purr of satisfaction curled in the back of her skull:

Good girl.

Something in her, something that was always waiting, exhales in answer.

The research begins like ritual. She wakes early, hours before the fog thins, moving through the warped hallway with quiet precision—boots laced, coat zipped, notebook tucked under her arm, recorder blinking red as it rides in her pocket. The air in the house never warms, never dries, but her breath is steady now, practiced. She sets out toward the shore with a kind of reverence, as though the cliffside path is hallowed ground.

Beneath her, the trench waits.

The data refuses to behave.

Depth sensors throw inconsistent returns—one cast reads two hundred meters, the next almost double, then less than half. It's as if the seabed reshapes itself when unobserved. She begins tracking it manually, making careful notations in waterproof ink. Sometimes she sits on the rocks for hours, just watching the pool, waiting for that moment the surface changes—when light bends too sharply, or the reflection disappears entirely for a breath. The equipment fails most when the pool is still.

The hydrophone pulses irregular static again. When she replays it later, there's a low harmonic in the background, a resonance too structured to be noise. It sounds less like distortion and more like something sung slowly into a cave, half-mouthed syllables on the cusp of meaning. She plays it backward, filters it, slows it down. The tone sharpens at 3:13 a.m. every night without fail.

The deep-sea thermometer probe dips past what she thought was the bed—then drops farther. A vertical column of heat pulses up through the trench like a breath. She plots it on a graph, sees the peak form a slow rhythm. Heartbeat, maybe. But of what? The ocean doesn’t breathe like this. The readings suggest something alive. Something huge. And moving.

Vials stack beside her bed, samples drawn meticulously, labeled by hand:

Bayrun Coastal Shelf – 04:02 – Dense fog, no wind – 17.6°C – Salinity Normal (Odor: Algae/Blood)Trench Rim, Low Tide – 03:47 – High humidity – 19.4°C – Salinity Elevated – Microbio. activity: ExtremeTidal Pool Center – 02:59 – No wind, mirror surface – 21.8°C – Heavy mineral content – Fluorescence under UV

The last one glows faintly at night. Not just under the lamp, but in the dark—soft blue like bioluminescence, though nothing in the water should emit it. She stores it wrapped in black cloth in the bottom drawer, but it stains the lining of the container with the shape of the tidepool spiral. No matter how tightly she seals the vial, a faint brine smell leaks out.

Her laptop syncs sporadically. Files duplicate without prompt. Timecodes revert to symbols she doesn’t type—looped curves, rough crescents, crude glyphs scratched over her own text. At first she thought it was a system glitch. Now she’s not sure the machine is hers anymore.

She uses analog instruments more often now—barometers, pH strips, a weathered compass that she doesn’t trust but carries anyway. Digital depth readers spike and go blank. The sonar device once returned a full page of blank screen… then a burst of frames so fast they burned out the LED.

She flipped through the printed screenshots later, one by one. In them, something rises. Shadowed, long, sinuous. Not a whale. Not a trench shelf. Something swimming—not past, but up. Her own coordinates are visible in the corner.

Rafayel speaks through the white noise again that night.

You’re measuring the shape of my reach.

She closes her eyes, not in denial—she believes him now, wholly—but because it’s easier to hear when she stops looking. Her ears ring with pressure. Her skin itches beneath her clothes. In the mirror, her pupils widen again. Her blood doesn’t feel cold anymore. The house creaks once—long and low—and the spiral in her palm burns like a whisper trying to get out.

When she logs the next morning’s entry, the pen moves slightly faster than she does. She thinks she wrote “Tide pull 04:31 – stronger than expected,” but the paper reads: Bride tide, 04:31 – responding. Her handwriting, but not her words.

The samples from the trench develop slick film across their surface, though no bacteria cultures explain it. When she leaves one uncapped on the desk for an hour, a ring of black residue stains the wood, spreading outward in delicate whorls like veins. She wipes it clean with bleach. It reappears two days later. Only this time it’s wider. And spiraled.

One night, just before sleep takes her, she places a contact mic against the vial itself and listens.

Thump.

She leaves the recorder running and pulls her knees to her chest on the bed, staring at the shadows creeping up the windowframe. Something low rattles in the pipes again—lower than human, not words, just want.

Another sample from the shelf gives her mild chemical burns along her wrist, like salt rubbed raw into the skin. Yet she doesn’t feel pain. The mark darkens to the same bluish bruise-tone as the spiral on her palm. Her flesh accepts it. Welcomes it. When she wraps it in gauze, she thinks she hears it sigh.

By the end of the second week, she no longer checks tide tables. She feels the shifts—tension winding through her ribs, a throb in the soles of her feet. Her dreams swim closer to the waking world. The data doesn’t frighten her anymore. The anomaly isn’t in the ocean.

It’s in her.

And it’s growing.

—

She only meant to shift the supplies—tea tins, spare batteries, backup reels of wire—but the shelf is unstable, and the warped wood beneath her boots gives at the wrong angle. The whole thing tilts with a shudder, toppling forward in a clatter of metal and broken glass. One jar rolls to a halt against the floorboard with a soft clink, then disappears.

It doesn’t bounce.

She kneels, fingers sweeping through dust and splinters, and finds the edge—slight but deliberate. A section of the floor depressed just enough to flex when weight shifted. Not warped. No damage. A hatch.

Her nails catch the groove, and with a slow tug, the board lifts. It comes up easier than it should. Someone carved this, not by accident but with purpose.

Beneath: a cavity in the joists, dark and dry. She expects mold, dead insects, maybe a nest. Instead, there’s cloth—old linen, sea-stained and brittle with time, bundled tight around a set of objects resting close together.

Three books.

She draws them out one by one, hands trembling not with fear but anticipation. The air around the hidden space is cooler, heavy with the scent of brine and something older—faint iron, damp leather, the brittle perfume of ink and secrets long sealed.

The first is the most mundane. A local almanac, bound in navy-blue cloth now warped and sun-faded. The title is barely legible in flaking gold: Bayrun Weather and Maritime Almanac – 1863. Its pages are thin and delicate, handwritten in looping script, filled with tide charts, eclipse diagrams, lunar phases, but annotated heavily in the margins with notes not found in any scientific ledger. She flips to a marked section and finds:

Fog rolled in too thick to see the shorelight. Birds are absent. Children woke crying—said they saw a man under the waves. Spoke no word, only watched. Sounded the bell twice, but it rang soft as if underwater. Marked the tide as unnatural. Moon still full.

Three sheep were lost. One was found gutted at the waterline. No prints. Clocks off by thirty-eight minutes across the harbor. Marked page again in case he returns. If so, note the shift in salt level and proximity of bride-dreams.

She reads it twice. The phrase bride-dreams sets her jaw tense. The rest sounds like… well. Her life, lately.

The second book is leather-bound, the cover engraved with a faded emblem she can’t identify—something between a sun and a spiral, ringed with toothlike flares. Inside, the handwriting varies. The first entry dates to 1714; the last ends abruptly in 1849. It's a compendium, not a journal—a passed ledger. The voices change from one woman to another, but the experiences rhyme like inherited nightmares.

I felt him before I saw him. My belly went cold. The sea didn't move but my skirt clung wet to my thighs. He walked the beach with no prints left behind. I stayed indoors three nights and still heard the song—inside the stove, in my sister's voice, even in the silence between waves.

When my child drowned, I dreamt of him cradling her in his lap. His arms are not flesh. They are current and hold. She smiled with her mouth closed. I woke up bleeding from the nose and the sea still in my throat.

My mother taught me not to speak his name. My grandmother did the same. It is not a name. It is a net. It binds both ways.

Each woman signs only with initials or not at all. Some pages are blank except for charcoal sketches—spirals carved into tideflats, a woman with gills beneath her breasts, children walking backward into the surf with their mouths sewn shut. Several entries mention the bound one, and once, a phrase repeated five times along the inner margin: He loves his brides, but he does not keep them.

The third book doesn’t have a title. No printing press touched it. It’s thick, hand-bound with thread pulled so tight through the spine that the leather buckles at the edges. Pages of vellum, some dyed with seawater or ink made from things she can't identify. Every line written in the same hand, the same strange, curving script—ornate, fluid, like runes softened by waves.

It’s not any known language. She knows this with the clarity of obsession. No alphabet matches it. No online translator gets close. But her eyes linger too long on one page and something happens. A shiver runs behind her teeth. Her fingers twitch, like she almost moved them to mimic the shape of the letters without deciding to.

She turns the page.

Her lips move.

No sound comes out, but her throat strains, and her tongue folds around syllables that have weight.

Memory or instinct? She doesn't know.

Some pages have diagrams—concentric shapes that make her skull ache when she stares too long. Not maps, not quite. Some show anatomical renderings, but not of human beings. One set of sketches details a long-limbed figure with gill slits beneath its jaw, eye sockets flooded with black, and barbs trailing from the back of the skull like fin-spines. The image disturbs her less than it should. Her first thought is: he’s older in this one.

On the final page, someone—perhaps the writer, perhaps not—pressed a crude print of a hand. Webbing between the fingers. Faint bruising at the wrist. Below it, three symbols: the spiral, a crescent-shaped hook, and the unfamiliar glyph that now sometimes appears on her laptop.

She sets the books aside and opens her recorder. Her voice shakes:

“Recovered three texts from the subfloor cavity beneath the north wall storage shelf. All materials water-damaged, pre-1900 origin, significant non-English script. Note repetition of spiral motif, reference to entity matching behavioral profile observed in trench recordings. Will attempt transcription of unknown script in controlled setting.”

The recorder flickers, static whispering between her breaths.

Then: a low, pleased sound, almost a sigh.

You’re reading me again.

She doesn’t flinch. Not anymore. She closes the third book gently and presses her fingers against its cover.

The leather is warm.

–

The dreams return like a tide slipping back in—unrelenting, certain, and no longer solitary. Rafayel still waits at their center, luminous and still as a pillar sunk into the sea’s blackest trench, his voice curling around her mind in the now-familiar cadence of ownership, of promise, of endless, tidal need.

But now there are others.

The voices of women begin to coil through her sleep like threads of song—high, strange, keening harmonies that feel older than the words they almost form. They move around her in the water, sometimes glimpsed only in flashes: a hand brushing her ankle, hair long as seaweed winding around her waist, eyes too dark, too deep to reflect anything but hunger. They speak in layered voices that echo without air, each syllable pricking along the edges of her ribs.

We were meant to be. But not enough. Not whole. Not her.

He called and we came. But the seals held. He needs one.

We are not bitter. We are not cast off. We serve now. We sing.

In dreams, they circle her, caressing—not possessive, not jealous, but reverent, even tender. They do not touch her like sisters or strangers. They touch her like offerings, parting her hair, brushing salt from her brow, laying bare her chest like a priestess being prepared for sacrifice—not to harm. To reveal. Their hands are cool, and never stray where they’re not allowed. It is not for them to claim.

Because he is always there.

Even when she cannot see him, she knows the difference in pressure. Her dreams deepen when he arrives, the water thickening like silk against her skin, every nerve lighting with his proximity. Rafayel does not announce himself with thunder or command. He enters her dream the way the sea enters a wound—slow, complete, inevitable and when he speaks, the other voices hush.

My bride. My blood-anchor. Mine.

Sometimes she sees him, rising from the deep—a shape of radiant shadow, chains across his chest humming faintly with light, strands of hair drifting like ink in a still tide. His eyes catch her like hooks, no cruelty in them—only a hunger so profound it bends reality around it.

He never asks.

He never forces.

But when he touches her—his hand against the small of her back, the pads of his fingers trailing along her thighs, his breath ghosting across her lips though no air moves—her body opens for him like water cleaved by oars.

His mouth never needs to meet hers, not in the dream, not yet. But she wakes each time gasping, tasting salt, her breath ragged and her inner thighs slick with need. Sometimes it’s sweat. Sometimes it isn’t. The sheets are damp in ways that defy comfort. Her tongue is coated in brine, her breath shallow, and always—always—she aches between her legs like she’s just been touched for hours by hands that knew her too well.

In one dream, she feels him behind her. Not pinning—holding. His fingers wrap around her hips like they were made for it, anchoring her in the water while his mouth moves along the nape of her neck. She can’t speak. Her voice doesn’t matter. Her body does. Her skin hums against him, her spine arches without thought, and his voice whispers through her skull, viscous and slow:

Let them sing. You’re mine. Only mine.

The others do not interfere. They chant now, low and ritualistic, floating in circles around the moment of her pleasure. Not jealous—joyous. Like midwives. Like attendants.

The seals break as she softens. As she opens. As she drowns in him.

They say this like scripture, over and over, as she feels his body grind into hers—not with violence, never—but inevitability. Pressure and heat and depth and the sense that she’s being filled not with cock but with presence. His need crashes into her like waves over reef, slow at first, then relentless, rolling until she shakes with it. No pain. Just stretch. Just belonging.

Her breath escapes in the dream—not moans but choked cries, hot and wet and helpless.

“Ahn—haa, Rafayel, fuck—” she gasps, even as seawater slips down her throat, and she comes in her sleep so hard her fingers curl into her pillow, her body bowing under phantom weight, thighs trembling violently.

She wakes soaked.

Every night now. She wakes tangled in damp sheets, her inner thighs sticky with arousal so potent it leaks down the insides of her knees. She doesn’t touch herself during the day anymore. She doesn’t need to. Every time she closes her eyes, he takes her again, fills her again, presses her against the ocean floor or cradles her in the trench’s arms and moves inside her like gravity itself.

He gives her pleasure so slow it shatters. So intense it rewrites.

The other women—if they can still be called that—appear during daylight, too now. At the corners of her eyes. In reflections. Their shapes never hold for long, only hints: long hair swaying in glass, a gleam of scales not on skin but woven into clothing, necklaces of tooth and driftwood. Their smiles are knowing, not cruel.

She reads more of the bound journal. The script comes easier now. She doesn’t translate. She understands.

The failed brides—they were not punished. They were repurposed.

They are the chorus. The keepers. The ones who cradle the seals between their teeth and keep them until the true one arrives.

And when they see her in the mirror, they nod—not with envy.

With relief.

She’s the one. The mouth of the deep. The ache in the tide.

He wants the ache of flesh and warmth, the pulse of blood he can taste in her wrist, the tremble of her thighs when he breathes against the back of her neck and her hips lift without asking. He wants her voice when she cries out and claws the sheets, drenched and delirious with how badly she needs to feel him again.

She starts sleeping naked, because clothes always end up soaked and just like every night, the song begins again.

One seal breaks. Two. Three. You call to him when you moan. We hear. He hears. So close. So close. Bride.

And in the deepest part of sleep, Rafayel whispers against her throat, words like fingers threading her open:

No more seals. Soon. I will rise for you.

And in her dream, she shudders, gasping—

“Please.”

–

The wind tore through Bayrun that afternoon with a ferocity not seen in weeks, but it wasn’t the kind of storm that made people batten hatches or rush home. It was the quieter kind, the mean kind, the kind that seeped into bones and whispered along windowpanes, insinuating itself into every frame, every gap in the wood. She pulled her coat tighter as she stepped through the iron-framed door of the town archives, the bell overhead ringing with a dull, waterlogged clunk as if weighed down by the salt air. The building itself was hunched like everything else in Bayrun—short, squat, dark as wet stone. The wood floors groaned as she walked, swollen from decades of damp. It smelled of old sea charts and mildew, of drying glue and rotting thread, of things forgotten on purpose and stacked too neatly to be casual.

The clerk—Reese, a man who looked like he’d once had a thicker neck and a thinner gut—rose behind the desk in the front alcove, his shirt yellowed where it had been white and his fingers callused around the spine of a naval log. He looked up the way people do when they know who’s coming before the door opens, eyes glassy with something between recognition and dread.

“Looking for something specific?” he asked, not quite hostile, not quite polite.

She offered a nonchalant smile, the kind she’d practiced for years. “Old maps. Tidal records. Anything that hasn’t been digitized.”

He hesitated for just long enough to matter, then nodded toward the back shelves with a twitch of his chin. “Past the shelving cabinet, left side. We’ve got boxes of unsorted material. Be careful. Some of it’s falling apart.”

She thanked him and moved down the aisle, her boots making soft sounds against the warped floorboards. She could feel his gaze stay on her longer than necessary—watching the way she moved, not with curiosity, but suspicion. As though she might reach into the shelves and pull out something she wasn’t supposed to know existed. And he’d be right.

The back alcove was colder, though the storm hadn’t crept in. It was the cold of things left untouched too long. The walls were lined with metal drawers whose handles had rusted, and thick folders stacked like sediment—nautical charts, faded ship logs, fragile ledgers wrapped in twine. She began slowly, leafing through the labeled folders, running her fingers down titles etched in ink long faded to a gray ghost of their former selves. But as the quiet thickened around her, her movements grew more deliberate. One folder yielded an old port registry, its cover cracked open along the spine. A map tucked between its pages caught her eye—dated 1836, Bayrun’s coastline sketched in heavy charcoal. The outline looked familiar, but a note in the margin sent a jolt through her chest.

“Spiral seen again. Low tide. Screaming from below.”

She folded it neatly and slid it into her satchel, fingers twitching slightly. No hesitation.

Another folder, mislabeled as export tax records, held a slim ledger with pages so thin she could see her fingers beneath them. Half the entries had been crossed out or sliced away entirely. Some had survived—one, dated in curling ink and no year she could make out, read plainly:

“Third seal intact. No signs of strain. Her dreams remain shallow. Replace charm at the bluff marker before the next moon cycle.”

Beneath that, scrawled messily in a smaller hand, as if by someone in a rush or on the edge of breaking:

“We don’t remember placing it. But it’s always there.”

Her hand trembled as she closed the book and slipped it into the deepest fold of her coat. The air behind her felt warmer suddenly, too close. She turned and found Reese standing no more than a pace away, his eyes narrowed as if he were seeing something beyond her shoulders.

“Find what you needed?” he asked, voice low, but too even to be casual.

She smiled again, slow and professional. “Still browsing.”

His gaze dropped to the bulge of her satchel, lingered, then slid away without comment. “Try not to remove anything,” he said flatly. “A lot of those haven’t been copied yet.”

“I’ll be careful.”

He didn’t follow her as she walked toward the front, but she felt his eyes on her back all the way out the door. The bell above didn’t ring when she pushed it open, as though something had placed a hand against it, muffling the sound.

The storm had thickened. Rain came not in drops but in fine mist so dense it hovered like breath. The town looked drained of color—gray stones, pale fog, the distant shimmer of water pressed against the horizon like a bruise. She kept her hood up and walked quickly, boots sinking slightly into the sodden gravel as she made her way toward the market row. The wind had fallen away into that heavy, electric quiet that came before something much worse. Her thoughts swam, heavy with maps, ledgers, notes that confirmed far more than she was ready to admit.

She almost didn’t see the woman until they collided at the edge of the street.

Anwyn stood there as though she’d been waiting. Her gray dress was soaked to the knees and clung to her thin frame, hair wild and loose, strands plastered against her cheeks. Her eyes, however, were dry—bright, yellow-ringed irises in a face lined by salt and time. Up close, she smelled of nettles and cold stones and something darker, something old.

For a moment, they simply stared at each other, both wet, both silent, both knowing.

“You’re still walking upright,” Anwyn said at last, her voice soft but edged, like a knife wrapped in lace. “That won’t last much longer.”

The girl blinked, breath catching in her throat, the weight of the ledger pressing against her ribs. “Excuse me?”

Anwyn didn’t smile, didn’t laugh. She looked at her wrist—the one where the spiral still faintly bruised the skin—and then raised her gaze, locking onto her eyes with terrible gentleness.

“They’ve started, haven’t they?” she said. “The dreams.”

The words struck like a stone dropped in a well. The world around them faded. The rain kept falling, but it fell without sound. No people walked the street. The air pressed inward.

“You feel him even when you’re awake. That pressure. The heat in your chest. The tremble in your knees.” Her eyes narrowed, not cruelly. “You feel the ache. The way your thighs twitch when you hear his name. You wake soaked. Shaking. That’s not coincidence.”

She swallowed, mouth dry despite the rain. “What do you know about him?”

“Everything. Not enough.” Anwyn stepped closer. “You can’t unring that bell, child. Once it’s been sounded, it sings on its own.”

“I didn’t ring it,” she said, words coming too fast. “I didn’t mean to. I came here for research, that’s all—”

“No.” The word cut her off, quiet but absolute. “You came. That was the bell.”

She felt dizzy then, as if the earth had tilted slightly beneath her. The wind turned and curled around her shoulders. The sea, she thought, had turned to look.

“Is he real?” she asked, though she already knew the answer.

Anwyn’s expression didn’t change. “He’s older than real. The sea made him because she needed something that would never leave her. And now he needs something that will never leave him.”

The storm gathered again around the corners of buildings. The grocer’s sign rocked once, twice. Something unseen knocked against the eaves above them—soft and slow, as if knocking to be let in.

“I remember your voice,” Anwyn murmured, lowering her hand to brush her pendant—carved bone, ancient and smoothed by decades of touch. “I heard it in the water. Before you ever came. Before you were born. You don’t think you belong to him. You do.”

The girl shook her head, backing a step, heart hammering. “What is he?”

Anwyn smiled then, a tragic thing.

“I stopped asking,” she said. “My mother asked. She came home one night with no tongue. The sea gave her back, but not all of her.”

The wind shrieked once across the open square, a long, high whine that didn’t sound like wind at all.

“He’s not coming,” Anwyn whispered, eyes unfocused now. “He’s rising.”

Anwyn didn’t speak right away. After that last sentence—He’s not coming. He’s rising—she seemed to retreat into memory, her gaze gone unfocused, her hand still resting lightly against the carved bone at her neck. Rain traced slow lines down her face and clung to her lashes, but she didn’t blink. The girl stood rooted before her, the ledger still tight beneath her coat, its weight a heartbeat against her ribs, and though she opened her mouth to ask something—anything—Anwyn spoke first.

“My great great aunt walked into the sea naked,” she said at last, voice thin now, spun from the same gray threads as the storm around them. “Smiling.”

The girl blinked, momentarily stunned. “What?”

“She was nineteen. Never married. Said she heard music in the fog—songs that tasted like salt and gold. Said she saw people dancing on the tide, with long hair and mouths that opened too wide.” Anwyn’s gaze came back to her then, steady and calm.

“She told her mother she wasn’t afraid. Said she wanted to meet the one who sang so sweetly. And then she walked straight down to the water without a stitch on her.”

“Did they stop her?”

“Found her footprints in the sand. Nothing else.” Anwyn looked past her now, toward the sea hidden behind the shops and homes, behind the fog and the pitch-black water beyond. “The tide came in wrong for a week after. Horses wouldn’t go near the bluff. Lanterns wouldn’t stay lit.”

She turned her head slowly, the rain dripping from her chin.

“They said it was the devil, back then. When I was small. Said girls like her were troubled, full of sin, and that the ocean knew how to spot weakness.” She gave a bitter half-smile. “Then they started calling it hysteria. Said it was fever. Or madness. Or women wanting escape.”

She leaned closer, lowering her voice to something more private.

“But it was never that. It was always him. Down there. Bound. Hungry. Loved.”

That word—loved—landed heavier than the others. The girl flinched without knowing why. Something in her belly tightened, not from fear, but recognition.

Anwyn’s gaze dropped to her again, sharp with meaning.

“He’s not cruel, you know,” she said. “Not unless he’s kept waiting too long.”

A gust of wind twisted down the alley beside them, flinging rain into the gaps of her coat, turning her hair wild around her face. The grocer’s sign creaked above them, a lonely, bone-dry squeal like a mouth trying to speak.

“They tried to erase him,” Anwyn continued, voice rising above the wind now, no longer whispering. “The men who came from across the sea with their new crosses and their clean churches. They built pews where tide-altars used to stand. Dug up stones etched with the spiral. Burned the ones who remembered.”

A pause. She took a long breath, closed her eyes.

“But memory doesn’t live in books. It clings to brine and lichen. It gets under fingernails and in marrow. And the stories… the stories waited.”

She opened her eyes again, and the girl could see something flickering behind them. Not madness—certainty.

“There were always mothers who whispered to their children, ‘Don’t go barefoot near the pools after dark. Don’t follow the singing. Don’t answer voices in the fog.’ Not because it was myth. But because the last time he rose—” Her mouth twitched. “It cost us. Cost her.”

The girl’s lips parted, but she didn’t speak. She didn’t want to stop this. She needed more, but not all at once. Anwyn’s words had the shape of a story not ready to be told in full. It was unraveling in slow, wet threads, and she knew better than to yank them.

“He hasn’t stirred in a long time,” Anwyn murmured, quieter now, as if talking to herself. “The water’s been calm. The pools shallow. But we’ve all felt it lately, haven’t we? That hush in the waves. That tilt in the tide charts. The sea holding its breath.”

The girl nodded slowly, almost involuntarily.

“I’ve been listening,” Anwyn said. “The birds fall silent in the morning now. The gulls don’t cry when the tide turns. And the wind keeps pushing people toward the shore.”

The words hung there between them.

Rain pattered harder against the rooftops. Somewhere, deep in the direction of the cliffs, a foghorn moaned once—distant and low, too low for anything still docked in the harbor.

Anwyn stepped closer once more, her presence overwhelming in its certainty. Not aggressive. Not threatening. Just… inevitable.

“The bride before you,” she said, and something in her tone cracked slightly. “She died protecting the village. Gave herself to stop him. Broke her own bond.”

That landed like a lead weight in her chest. Not fully understood, but undeniably true. The words slid through her like a key into a rusted lock.

“He hasn’t risen since,” Anwyn said, and looked her full in the face. “He’s waited.”

She could barely breathe.

“And now,” Anwyn whispered, “he wants her back.”

For a long time, neither of them moved. The storm pressed against them like a living thing, not roaring, not wild—just watching. Waiting. A soundless breath held by the sea. Anwyn stepped back first, her gaze lingering like the last warmth of a fire. Her fingers brushed the edge of her bone pendant once more. Then she turned.

She didn’t walk toward any destination. She moved into the narrow slit between the market wall and the butcher’s old shack, a place that should’ve held only shadows and runoff. But she slipped into it like it was a corridor, and vanished into the mist.

The girl stood alone.

Water streamed from the gutters and soaked the cuffs of her jeans. Her satchel pulled heavy against her shoulder, and in her pocket, the spiral-marked hand tingled faintly with warmth, as if something underneath the skin were beginning to turn.

In the back of her throat, the salt tasted sweeter than it should. Though she told herself she wouldn’t, her eyes lifted toward the fog, toward the shape of the shoreline beyond the rooftops because somewhere out there, just beneath the waves, something was remembering her, and it would rise.

—

The morning she chooses to go out on the water, the world is unnaturally still. The kind of stillness that feels deliberate, not passive. Fog has burned away in long silver skeins, the sky pale and dry as bone, the sea smooth as oil beneath her boat. The harbor is silent. No gulls circle. No engines hum. Even the wind holds off as if giving her space.

She doesn’t ask anyone for help.

By now, the town watches her movements the way one watches a sealed jar—half expecting something to hatch inside. She loads the rowboat herself in the gray light before sunrise, testing the balance of her instruments, checking the seals on the equipment case three times though she already knows it won’t matter. Her fingers tremble only once, when she presses the lid shut. Then she pushes off from the weather-beaten dock, the oars slicing through water that doesn’t resist.

No one sees her go.

Bayrun recedes behind her with all the slow majesty of a place surrendering to forgetfulness. The coastline flattens into a low smear of fog-washed cliffs, the trees along the bluff bending always inland, always away from the sea. She rows steadily, legs braced, eyes on the open mouth of the trench far ahead. Her breath stays even. Her pulse, not quite.

The surface of the water grows stranger the further she moves from shore. It no longer ripples in proper patterns. It glistens with too much clarity, reflecting the sky like glass that doesn't break when touched. Her oars leave no wake. The air grows warmer, though the sun hides behind high cloud.

She powers on the sonar.

It glitches immediately—just a quick chirp, then a whine that turns to silence. The hydrophone follows suit. No sound comes back from the water below. Not even ambient hum. Not fish. Not current. Just a vast and total absence, like the sea had swallowed its own voice.

She checks the wires, the settings. Nothing responds.

She drops a probe to take depth. The line spools for far too long. Then it jerks.

Not with tension. With breath.

She freezes. The boat sways once, gently. Not a wave. A ripple, as if something beneath her had exhaled.

Reaching the edge of the trench, she slows her breathing, leans forward slightly, and peers over the rim of the boat. The surface is black now, a perfect mirror of the hull, of her face, of the sky above—but deeper than shadow, deeper than water.

That’s when she hears it.

At first, it’s not sound so much as sensation. A vibration in the enamel of her teeth, a low thrumming that coils up the base of her spine and radiates outward. She presses one hand to her sternum, instinctively, and feels the resonance there—steady, ancient, calling. It isn’t music. Not exactly. It’s too slow for melody. Too long between tones. But it curls like singing, moves like breath, widens like a spiral.

The sound bends through pitch in ways that shouldn't be possible—shifting not from note to note, but from pressure to presence. It isn’t human. Not quite female. It has the rise and fall of something breathing through stormclouds. The syllables are felt rather than heard, rubbing against her bones with aching intimacy.

She closes her eyes and the world tilts.

The last thing she sees is the reflection of her own face on the water—except it isn’t moving with her. The eyes are open too wide. The mouth is slightly parted, like waiting to sing.

Then nothing.

No splash. No scream. Just absence.

She doesn’t know how long she’s gone. In the dream, the world is dim and silver, light diffused as though seen through miles of seawater. She floats without effort, body suspended in liquid too warm to be real. Around her, they come.

The sirens.

They don’t look like stories say they should. They aren’t fish from the waist down, and they don’t smile with needle teeth. They’re beautiful in the way tidal rifts are beautiful—long, soft-limbed things with hair like ribbons of kelp and eyes that glow too gently to be safe. Their bodies glide with a grace that doesn’t belong to vertebrates, and their fingers are too long, too knowing.

They circle her.

One drifts close, trails a hand along her jaw, then her collarbone, humming low and intimate against her shoulder. Another brushes past her thigh, hair tangling around her hips. Their skin is cold silk, smooth and endless. They don’t speak. They don’t need to.

Their humming fills her.

Each vibration burrows deeper, from skin to tendon to womb. She moans softly, breathless in the dark water. Her nipples harden from the chill of them, her thighs clench and then loosen, parted slightly without resistance. It isn’t erotic the way human touch is—it bypasses thought and goes straight to need. Her body accepts them like salt accepts blood.

And still, they do not take. They prepare.

Because he is there. Watching.

Rafayel.

He stands—or floats?—far beyond the others, past their circling limbs, past their caressing hands. The water around him glows faintly with pulsing gold. His eyes are black and full of it, rimmed in molten metal, fixed entirely on her.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Doesn’t blink.

He just waits.

The other sirens part around him like currents, always in motion, but never touching. They hum his silence into her skin. Their hands guide her closer. Every pulse of their song drives her toward him like a tide pulling inward.

He is the deep pressure waiting behind the whisper. He is the stillness in the eye of the storm.

Her heart pounds.

She reaches for him.

And wakes.

Her body slams back into itself all at once—gasping, lungs heaving. The sky overhead has shifted. Late afternoon, dimmed by cloud. She lies curled in the bottom of the rowboat, limbs splayed as if flung there, her throat raw and her lips cracked dry. The equipment is still dead. The sea around her is still slick, too quiet.

Her boat drifts slowly, aimless. Her hair is wet with more than sweat. Her clothes cling cold to her body, and her thighs ache. Not from exertion. From absence. Inside her skull, the echo of the song still hums faintly, too slow to be music, too deep to be silenced.She doesn’t remember rowing back. She isn’t sure she will.

That night, the song doesn’t recede with the tide. It lingers, expanding—an infection made of sound. It swells within the walls of the old house like moisture, seeping into the grain of the floorboards, the cracks in the foundation, the humming bones of the plumbing. The pipes vibrate faintly beneath her fingertips when she presses her hand to the bathroom sink, not with water pressure but with rhythm, soft and deliberate, the beat of something ancient just below hearing. The melody echoes faintly in every corner—low and layered, the same shifting harmonics that filled her chest on the water, now rising from the dark throat of the drain, coiling in the window glass, vibrating against her skin like a lover’s breath.

It doesn't leave when she leaves a room. It follows. She inhales and it’s in her lungs. She exhales and it thickens behind her teeth. She opens her mouth to speak and realizes her tongue already knows the next note.

When she looks into the mirror above the sink, her reflection doesn’t blink in time with her. Her own face is mouthing something—slow, rhythmic syllables shaped with quiet ecstasy. Her lips part gently, eyes half-lidded, lost in trance, and for a moment she watches herself, heart frozen. She isn't humming. She isn't making a sound. But the mirror-self sings without breath, lips forming each note of the sirens’ call with aching grace.

She backs away slowly. The mirror doesn’t.

She runs her palms down her face and finds sweat. Not from fear. From heat. Her body radiates it in waves, a pulse in her groin, a prickling dampness along the backs of her knees, the line of her throat. Every time she tries to think about anything else—about science, about sleep, about escape—the melody rises behind her eyes again like blood rushing up her spine.

She opens the journal, hoping for context, for relief, for instruction. The pages resist at first, damp and swelling at the seams, but she finds the entry scrawled between drawings of spirals and tide marks, the ink blotched with haste or desperation.

The sirens come when it’s time. They pull the chosen to the gate. He cannot unbind until the bride walks into the blood pool.

The words hit her like cold water poured over the crown of her head, running down her spine in jagged lines. He cannot unbind. The gate. The blood pool. She doesn’t know what it means entirely, but the word bride sets her jaw tight. She’s seen it too many times now. Heard it. Felt it whispered across her skin as Rafayel watched her from beyond the sirens, silent and burning.

Sleep offers no shelter.

She tries. She truly does. She lays down with cotton stuffed in her ears, a pillow pressed hard against each side of her head. She hums other songs under her breath—childhood lullabies, sharp dissonant noise, anything to drown it. She plays static through her phone’s speaker at full volume. But the melody slips around it all, threading through the fabric of her bones like something grown rather than heard.

When sleep takes her, it doesn’t hold her down—it lets her go. She doesn’t dream. She wanders.

She wakes kneeling in the tideflats beneath the full moon, her hands sunk into wet sand, the shoreline ghost-white in the mist. Her nightgown clings to her like a second skin, soaked through, transparent over her breasts and thighs. Sand is embedded deep in her knees, her hair tangled with kelp and sea-foam. Her throat burns with salt, her fingernails are cracked and full of grit, and her mouth is half open, still forming the melody like a prayer too old for language.

She stumbles upright, breath catching, and turns to look back at the house.

It’s too far. She doesn’t remember walking. She doesn't remember waking.

The tide laps gently at her ankles—warm, deliberate, like a hand stroking upward. The pools around her flicker with movement beneath their mirrored surface, flashes of long limbs and gleaming eyes beneath inches of still water. She steps back and the song surges louder, not in her ears but in her chest, blooming from her diaphragm outward like a second heartbeat.

She tries to scream. Nothing comes out but a note. One long, shuddering hum.

She plugs her ears. She clamps her hands over them hard enough to hurt, tears leaking down her cheeks, sobs pressed into the hollow of her throat. But the sound doesn’t fade. Her bones hum with it. Her teeth ache. Her spine thrums like a tuning fork struck by a divine hand.

She stumbles back to the house at dawn, barefoot, cuts on her soles from hidden rocks, feet torn and bleeding. Her sheets are drenched when she lies down, her skin still hot and salty, her thighs trembling faintly from exertion she doesn’t remember. When she presses a hand to her pelvis, she feels warmth still lingering, a low throb that has nothing to do with cold or fear.

She closes her eyes and tries to think of silence.

But all she hears is the song.

Calling her home.

The mood in Bayrun begins to shift in ways that no one names aloud. Doors close earlier. Window shutters that once creaked in the night are now reinforced with strips of rusted metal, nailed shut in hasty fear. The market stalls, usually left half-covered and open to the morning mist, are broken down entirely by dusk, their tarps folded so tightly they look shrink-wrapped, suffocated. A child stands in front of the chapel one evening, pointing silently toward the cliffs until his mother grabs him by the wrist and drags him backward without a word. The air holds its breath, and the townspeople follow suit.

She notices the salt first when she comes home—a fine white line, carefully poured across the threshold of her porch. It isn’t crude. Someone took their time, shaping it clean, evenly spaced, as if laying a charm rather than a warning. It crunches under her boot before she realizes what it is. No note. No signature. Just an act of trembling superstition, of protection offered too late to mean anything.

That night, the wind didn't howl. It moans. The sirens’ song crests just after midnight, rolling over the bluffs and through the cracks of her bedroom window like a tide drawn from the chest of the world itself. It isn’t gentle anymore—not the humming promise of dreams, not the sweet lure she once mistook for seduction. This sound is want, raw and visceral. Urgent, like fingers dragging silk off skin. It dances up her thighs, winds around her belly, slips behind her ribs.

The music aches. It caresses her name with notes too fluid for human tongues, rippling through the wood of the house, pressing against her heartbeat until her breath comes fast and shallow. Every part of her tingles—skin flushed, lips parted, nipples stiff beneath the cotton of her sleep shirt. The salt line on the porch should’ve stopped something. It didn’t. Her feet are bare before she realizes she’s standing, moving through the doorway like she’s being poured downhill.

The air outside is thick, humming with static. The moon hangs full and waxy above the tide pools, bleeding silver into the mist. Her soles find every sharp rock, every slick ridge of moss, and none of it hurts. She descends the bluff like someone following the path of a prayer half-remembered, her steps slow but sure, her eyes glazed and shining in the moonlight. No one calls after her. No doors open. The town has gone still, watching from behind curtains as she walks the path they all feared would open again.

Down at the pools, they wait.

The sirens.

They aren’t monsters. They’re nothing like the stories carved into old church pews or whispered through hymnals. Their beauty is overwhelming, not in its perfection, but in its wrongness—a kind of grace not built for land. Their bodies stretch long and soft, the curvature of limbs flowing like ink dropped in water. Hair sways around them in ribbons, dark as oil and lit from within, kelp-slick and moving even when the air is still. Their eyes glow a subtle green, not eerie but intimate. Safe the way a riptide is safe—if you stop fighting.

Their mouths part around the song, sharp white teeth glinting in flashes between syllables that taste like salt and sorrow. They do not speak to her, but the melody becomes her name, sung low and reverent, echoing off rock and wave. They part around her, arms outstretched in welcome, a procession of long-bodied sea-daughters carving a path to the tidal gate. Her feet splash into the shallows and the water doesn’t resist her. It embraces.

One siren brushes cool fingers along her jaw, tilting her face gently toward the sea. Another leans in and presses her lips to the girl’s wrist, tongue darting out in a slow, reverent lick. Their touch isn’t sexual—it’s sacramental. They hum into her skin as if reading her, mapping every inch of flesh like it belongs to them and always has. They don’t claim her. They honor her.

She is not afraid. She is home.

The moonlight strikes the pools at just the right angle, and the color shifts. What was silver becomes crimson. A stain blooms across the water’s surface—dark and thick and blooming outward in symmetrical spirals. Not blood from a body. Blood meant. The pool itself turns red beneath her feet, and the sirens cry out in unison, their final chorus cresting like the wave before the plunge.

And he rises.

From the deepest hollow of the trench, through the heart of the tidal gate, Rafayel emerges.

Naked.

Unbound.

His body breaks the surface like a god cast upward by a sea that could no longer hold him. Water streams down his shoulders, slicking over muscle and shimmer-slick skin that catches the moonlight in shades of opal and oil. His chest is broad, tapering to a torso carved in impossible beauty, marked faintly with the iridescent patterns of coral scars and luminous spiral sigils. Where legs should be, his lower body flares into a glorious tail—plum and cobalt, rippling with transparent fin-fronds, each edge lined in silver. It unfurls behind him in lazy, tidal sways, breathtaking in its grace.

His face is sharper than dreams. Jaw strong, cheekbones high, lips full and parted slightly as if breathing her name into the air. Eyes—those impossible, drowning eyes—glow with a light that isn’t reflected, but generated, blue fire threaded with gold, focused only on her. He does not speak. He doesn’t need to.

Rafayel watches her the way a storm watches the coast. Waiting for her to understand what she already is. When the pool thickens around her ankles, when her body shivers with need and belonging so deep it feels ancestral, her lips part too. The song is still in her, but now it’s not echoing. It’s calling back.

The moment her foot breaks the surface, the pool reacts. Not with ripples, but with light—subtle at first, a soft pulse like a heartbeat beneath the surface, then brighter, stronger, until the water glows with that same impossible radiance that lives in Rafayel’s eyes. She steps forward without hesitation, water climbing her calves, her knees, her thighs. Every inch of skin the sea touches comes alive, not with chill, but with sensation—like breath held too long and finally released. Gooseflesh blooms across her arms, not from cold, but from recognition.

Her heartbeat synchronizes with the melody echoing up from below, not separate from it anymore. It’s a measure within the song. She feels the rhythm in her chest, in her spine, in the curl of her toes against the silt. Her body -s to hum—not in sound, but in resonance. The water welcomes her like a lover's mouth, curling along her thighs, licking the curve of her belly, rising up to kiss the underside of her breasts with reverent slowness. The pulse of the sea is inside her now, each beat pulling her deeper, inviting, enveloping, inevitable.

The sirens, once circling, once watching, drop silently into the glowing pool around her, their long bodies sliding beneath the surface without splash or struggle. One by one, they vanish into the depths with elegant flicks of hair and tail, their eyes never leaving her until the last moment. Their song doesn’t fade—it submerges, a chorus continuing below, a hymn vibrating through the bones of the water, winding tighter and tighter around her soul.

Rafayel stands at the center of it all. Still and radiant.

He watches her the way hunger watches softness.

And then he moves.

He doesn’t swim—he glides, his tail propelling him forward in smooth, fluid arcs. His arms are strong and bare, marked faintly with bands of iridescent skin that catch the light as he reaches for her. Fingertips trail along the water’s surface until they meet hers.

When he touches her, the world changes.

“My beloved bride,” he says, and the words hit her like thunder breaking inside her lungs.

There is no question in his voice, no plea. It is not a title he grants her. It is a truth he names aloud.

Her fingers tangle with his. Her breath hitches. Her thighs press together instinctively, not to resist—but to hold in the tremble.

The water climbs higher. Her skin responds. It ripples where the ocean kisses her, as if remembering something it was never told but always knew. Her vision blurs slightly as warmth courses through her veins, not heat from within, but from beneath, the pulse of the deep seeping upward, finding her blood, her marrow, her womb. Her body arches slightly, her nipples tightening, her mouth parting in a gasp that becomes a moan.

Not pain. Not fear.

Release.

She doesn’t scream. She sings.

Her voice isn’t hers alone anymore. It carries the echo of every bride before her, of every offering the ocean accepted and claimed. The melody rises from her throat in unbroken pitch, long and clear, the language wordless but full. Rafayel’s eyes flare brighter, gold threading blue, his mouth slack with awe, lust and longing so old it makes her bones ache to match it.

As her voice rises, so does the light beneath the water.

The pool glows red-gold now, not blood but something more sacred—transition, consummation, awakening. Her thighs shudder as the water caresses her inner seams, flickering up the line of her back, fingers of current stroking the crease where her ribs give way to soft belly. She throws her head back and opens her mouth wider, voice breaking into layered harmonics. Her body begins to shift—not changing, not deforming, but yielding. No webbing. No gills. Just the ocean remaking its claim.

Her spine arches. Her skin gleams and the sea sings through her.

Rafayel groans low, a sound that vibrates the air, the water, her teeth. His chains—those thick bands of coral and metal coiled across his shoulders and chest—glow for one final moment, then begin to unravel. They don’t shatter. They dissolve, like salt kissed by rain. Thread by thread, link by link, they fall away from him, slipping into the water like offerings returned.

His body glistens, finally unbound. Every inch of him is glorious, terrible, divine. His tail lashes once in the water, powerful and beautiful, spreading arcs of color that ripple outward like wings unfurling. He floats toward her, weightless and full of purpose, and the tide accepts them both, closing above their heads as the surface shivers and stills.

The gate is open.

The bride is home.

It is not death. It is undoing—a peeling away of everything that tethered her to air and silence, a shedding of false anatomy, a molting of mistaken humanity. The moment the water closes over her head, the change begins. It isn't slow. It isn't kind. But it is necessary.

Something splits along her ribs—first one side, then the other—thin lines cracking open like mouths learning to speak. Gills, four per side, bloom like wet petals from her skin, dark and red and raw. She convulses, instinct screaming against it, and water floods her lungs. She thrashes once, arms clawing at the space around her as panic takes her—but the breath doesn't kill her.

It feeds her.

The salt slides deep, and the craving rises with it. Her body settles into the intake, ribs expanding in rhythm with the tide. The water is thick in her throat, but it moves clean, welcome. The panic fades like it was never real, only an echo from a world she no longer belongs to.

She opens her mouth, and the scream that bubbles forth is not of terror. It is of transcendence.

Her legs convulse violently, spine arching, muscles tightening to the point of tearing. She feels her bones shifting beneath the skin, warping, bending inward—not breaking, but folding, redrawing their purpose. Her thighs fuse at the seam, calves curling in, feet retracting as the skin along them splits open with a wet, slick sound. She chokes again, not on water, but on the rush of sensation as her flesh tears and heals in the same breath, smooth scales bursting forth like blossoms under heat.

It hurts. But the pain is holy.

Fins erupt from the center of her back, thin ridges of translucent membrane edged in violet light. More follow at her wrists, flexing instinctively like second hands, then from the backs of her thighs, flaring outward in slow, sensual arcs. Her pelvis breaks with a sharp internal crack, the sound drowned in water but felt—a moment of rupture, her hips narrowing, realigning. Nerve endings scream, then settle into place. Her stomach shivers, muscles clenching uncontrollably as something below opens.

A new slit forms where her thighs once met, the flesh parting slick and seamless, throbbing faintly with new need, as though awakened into a body designed to crave touch through current, not skin.

Her arms float outward. Her back arches. Her hair spills around her in coils of shadow and ink, dancing in slow loops through the glowing water. Her mouth parts, lips plush, eyes wide—and they are no longer eyes made for land.

They have gone silver.

Not gray. Not white. Mirror.

She sees him through them. And more—she sees herself. Reflected in his gaze.

Rafayel drifts closer, the light from the tidal gate shining off his skin, casting patterns across his chest, his tail, the long curve of his shoulders. His wings—those beautiful, finned extensions of tail and thigh—fan outward around him in weightless majesty. His eyes, glowing blue rimmed in gold, take her in fully. Not with hunger.

With reverence.

He reaches for her slowly, as if daring not to disturb the moment. His hand hovers just shy of her cheek.

“You were always going to return to me,” he breathes.

His voice ripples through her, vibrating through gill and bone and belly. It strokes the slit between her legs, teases the skin behind her knees, makes her scalp tingle with recognition.

“I made this body for you.”

The words land like gravity. Like the truth. Like destiny clicking into place after lifetimes of waiting.

She floats before him, panting, raw, made of light and blood and sea. Her reflection shimmers in the red-gold water around them. She does not reach for him.

She offers herself.

She drifts in the warm dark, suspended in the cradle of the sea, no longer tethered by gravity or breath. Her gills flex gently with the rhythm of the current, each pulse a song of survival made effortless. Her tail moves in slow, exploratory arcs, muscle alive with power she hasn’t yet tested but already knows. The water holds her like she was born in it, like she never belonged anywhere else. There is no fear, no question, just the hum of salt and blood and memory settling into place.

Rafayel floats just beyond reach, body gleaming where light touches his skin, his tail flicking once, lazily. He watches her—not with hunger alone, though it lives there in the depth of his eyes—but with something deeper. A kind of awe, as if even now, unchained, whole, he still does not believe she has returned.

His expression softens, something old in him unraveling. "I'm sorry," he murmurs, the words barely disturbing the water. No grand explanation. No lingering guilt. Just truth, offered quiet and unguarded.

She doesn't need to remember the whole story. It sits inside her like silt at the bottom of a still pool—something buried, but not gone. There had been fire in him once. Anger. Hunger. After they turned from him, when they scraped the altars clean and offered their prayers to another sky, he had risen with a fury that drowned the coastline in weeks of storms. She had stopped him—not with chains, but with her body. Her life. She had gone willingly into the depths and let the sea take her before he could take them.

But that was another life. And she is not that girl.

She is this.

She is the salt and the slit and the silver-eyed thing that now curls softly through the waves like a ribbon unspooling. She is not bound by sacrifice. She is made for him.

He drifts closer, his chest brushing hers, the heat of his skin shimmering through the cold tide. He looks at her as if he’s seeing his own reflection.

Voice low, reverent. “You are my very soul.”

She moves without hesitation.

Her arms wind around his waist first, then her tail follows, coiling around him in a slow, sure embrace. Their bodies fit together like current into hollow, each press of skin familiar, inevitable. He leans into her touch, baring his throat slightly, allowing her to lead—not in surrender, but in understanding.

He opens to her—not just arms, not just mouth, but every inch of him. His fins relax. His breath deepens. His body yields and she takes him.

The shift between reverence and instinct is seamless, like breath slipping into moan. As her coils tighten around him, Rafayel’s chest heaves once, muscles flexing beneath the shimmer of his skin. From the split at his groin, something begins to emerge—first one cock, thick and slick, unfurling like a flower beneath moonlight, then another, just as long, both veined with pulsing lines of blue and violet, glowing faintly at their base. The flesh is wet with ocean heat, ridged slightly, textured to drive her mad. Just beneath the head of each, knots swell gently, throbbing with restrained need—waiting, ready to claim.

She gasps, and the sound is broken music. Her newly formed slit answers before thought can intervene—flesh parting, pulsing, wet with readiness. The ache is unbearable in its precision, a demand her body was sculpted to meet. Instinct blooms. She knows what he is. What she is. What this is for.

Her tail winds around his like a noose of silk and muscle, pulling him flush to her, bodies tight as coral in tide. She grinds her hips forward, her slit guiding the first cock to her entrance, and the head slips past her folds in a single breathless moment—hot, hard, perfect. She moans aloud, voice catching as he fills her inch by inch, her inner walls twitching around him, slick suction drawing him deeper. Her arms tighten around his shoulders as the second cock presses low against the lower edge of her slit, insistent.

Her body shudders.

A pause—then her cunt opens again, wider this time, stretching impossibly. The second shaft pushes inward, a slow, impossible claim. Her slit seals tight around them both, muscles flexing in wet, rhythmic pulses as he sinks into the base. She feels full—not just stretched, but claimed, locked. The sensation is indescribable, a divine overwhelm. Her back arches, gills flaring wide, breasts heaving against his chest.

Inside her, the shafts shift—not independently, but together, rubbing, grinding, stimulating her from within. Her walls flutter around them, each throb pulling a cry from her throat. Rafayel moans low, mouth brushing her neck, hips rocking gently—not thrusting, but grinding, pushing deep in slow, tidal pulses. There’s no rush. No chaos. Only need. Only union.

“You take me like a god should be taken,” he breathes into her, voice breaking.

Her head falls back, mouth open in a wordless gasp as pleasure coils hot and hard in her belly. She clutches tighter around him, her tail moving in slow waves to keep their bodies pressed, sealed. The ridges of his cocks stroke every nerve, every ache, and the pressure builds inside her, exquisite and unbearable. Her moans rise higher, sharper, until they break into pure sound—a song, high and layered, ultrasonic, carried through the water like an aria of lust and divinity.

The sea responds.

Coral pulses open. Anemones flare. Shoals of fish scatter and whirl, moved to frenzy by the echo of her pleasure. She is more than a woman now. She is song.

His knots swell thick, stretching her even more. She groans into his shoulder, eyes rolling back, and Rafayel bites down gently—just above her collarbone. Not to wound. To mark. His teeth press into her skin with careful reverence, and that final pressure breaks her wide open.

He cums inside her—hot, thick, endless.

Each pulse is a shock wave, twin shafts throbbing deep, filling her with divine heat that floods every hollow in her. Her belly swells slightly, not grotesquely, but visibly, her skin tight and glowing where his seed fills her. She milks him with long, rolling contractions, her slit sucking around the base of his knots, locking tight, sealed. His moans mix with hers now, a duet of ruin and ecstasy.

Her orgasm hits like riptide, gills flaring wide, chest convulsing with each fluttering wave of bliss. Her cunt clamps down again and again, spasming around him, drawing him deeper still. Her hands clutch his shoulders, nails dragging over the iridescent skin, and she breathes him in—not air, not water—him.

All around them, the sirens begin to sing.

It is no longer mourning.

It is exultation. They float in concentric circles, arms raised, hair trailing in luminous coils, their voices joining hers in harmony. The sea vibrates with celebration, not worship, but witness. Their goddess has returned—not as myth, not as sacrifice.

As sovereign.

Rafayel holds her through it all, trembling, moaning into her mouth, still pulsing inside her as their bodies remain locked in holy aftermath. The tide has taken its bride and she has taken everything.

They remain joined for what feels like eternity.

No thrusting. No urgency. Just the slow, coiling aftermath—Rafayel’s knots sealed deep inside her, each slight movement a reminder of how completely she holds him. Her arms stay wrapped around his shoulders, her tail looped tight around his lower half, the fin of his spine fluttering faintly as his body pulses out the last waves of seed. Her belly is warm, stretched taut and glowing with fullness, her breathing shallow, more sigh than need. She doesn’t speak. She can’t. Words are for the land. Here, where breath is song and blood is memory, silence says more.

Rafayel rests his forehead against hers, glowing eyes half-closed, his expression open in a way it has never been—stripped bare of rage, of hunger, of pain. He looks at her as if trying to memorize her shape anew, though it’s clear he never forgot. His hands move slowly over her back, over the new slits of her gills, reverent fingers exploring her form with the patience of the

There’s nothing to forgive. The past has settled, the weight of her sacrifice diffused into this union, transformed from sorrow into something holy. His apology lingers in the space between them—not groveling, not weak, but true. And enough.

The sirens begin to fade back into the sea, their bodies streaming past in luminous lines, no longer needed as heralds or guards. They move with joy now, no longer haunted. The song they sang has reached its end, and the silence that replaces it is soft, sated. She watches them go, hair trailing behind like banners of ink, arms wide as they spin into the depths.

Only she remains, held in Rafayel’s arms, marked and filled, reborn.

Eventually, his knots shrink. Her body relaxes around him, the ache giving way to afterglow. He slips free with a soft moan, warmth seeping from her slit in slow ribbons, floating like oil in the red-lit water. Her body trembles slightly at the loss of him, but he holds her steady, mouth brushing her cheek, her jaw, her gills. Not as a god claiming a prize—but as a man reminding her: you are mine, and I am yours.

They rise together through the warm, humming water, their tails brushing, bodies entwined. Above them, the surface waits, silver and soft. The moon still glows, but it looks different now, smaller. Less important. The world up there is a faded thing.

She breaks the surface first, hair slicked back, face upturned. The sea kisses her lips with gentleness. Rafayel surfaces beside her, his hand sliding into hers without ceremony, fingers curling around the web of hers like he’d always been meant to anchor her here.

They float in silence for a time, looking not at the shore, but at each other. Below them, the water still glows faintly, the last traces of the union echoing outward. The wind brushes over the sea like a lover's breath, calm now, satisfied. The cliffs remain untouched. The houses above are dark. No one watches. No one dares.

She no longer wants to be seen.

She knows who she is.

They dive together, smooth as a bladefish, disappearing into the dark beneath. Her laughter carries once, light and strange, followed by his, lower, rougher. The sea swallows the sound and keeps it.

Beneath the surface, life begins once again.

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