The Night the Sea Kept Me

Prologue

The Mourning Tide

Thalos

The bone chimes did not sing that night. They screamed.

They adorned the ancient piers of the Reef, those chimes, carved from remnants of beasts so old that even the elders had forgotten their leviathan origins.

By daylight, they were idle ornaments, clicking softly when stray currents nudged them or when some predator breached the nets. Yet now, in the dead, suffocating stillness of the water, they flailed.

Clack. Clack. Crack.

A hollow, frantic song. The sound of bones rattling to rouse the sleeping dead.

"Thalos?"

The whisper was a small disturbance in the water, but it landed with force. I turned, my fins spreading with a sharp, aggressive motion. Elian was there, by the safety line.

"You should be in bed," I chided, my voice carrying a harsh, grating tone. "Have you lost your wits, hatchling? Or do you enjoy startling a perimeter guard in the darkness? You are fortunate my first impulse was not to attack."

Elian did not shrink from my words. He was well-acquainted with my irritable nature.

He had not yet grown his adult scales. His skin was still soft, appearing almost translucent in the dim glow of the bioluminescent moss. His eyes, typically alight with mischievousness, were now wide. The golden flecks in his irises pulsed with a frantic, irregular beat.

"The chimes are too loud," Elian murmured.

"They are merely foolish fragments of bone striking one another," I countered. I folded my arms, allowing a low, annoyed humming to resonate in my chest. "If the sound disturbs you, cover your ears. Return to your chamber, Elian. The reef is secure. The open water is not."

"It carries the taste of iron," Elian whispered. He remained motionless, his gaze fixed beyond my shoulder, toward the steep drop-off where the shelf ended and the trench descended into an endless, monochrome abyss. "The water, Thalos. It tastes of old blood."

I ceased the motion of my gills.

He was right. The water was speaking. It was a constant murmur to our kind, our breath and our home, but tonight its voice swelled in my throat.

The familiar salt was there, but beneath it lay the tang of rust and a warmth that had no place in the living currents.

It tasted of a fever breaking in the crushing dark.

The Mourning Tide was coming.

It does not arrive with the rage of a storm. It is a silent thing, soft as sorrow. First, an absence, then a weight.

It is a wrongness that settles into the very essence of the water, a silent demand that asks, without a shred of mercy, for a piece of you.

"Do not look at it," I rasped, pushing off the wooden support. Every motion was slow. "Elian, look at me. Keep your eyes from the trench."

But I soon saw Elian was not looking at the trench below. His gaze was fixed on the colossal shadow blooming above us, a stain that was devouring the faint light from the surface.

The water bowed.

The sensation was immediate. A crushing void in the pressure made my inner ears ache and my gills strain.

Something immense, a mountain of silent muscle, was passing through the throat of our world. The current froze. The fronds of the kelp forests below went rigid, unnaturally still. The quicksilver flickers of fish vanished into the silt.

Then, the pull began.

It was an inhale. The abyss was drawing a breath, and it demanded we fill its lungs.

Elian's fingers went slack on the safety line.

"No!"

I launched myself from the pier. I am an old guard. My tail bears the scars of a dozen battles, my fins are tattered like worn lace. But fear lends strength to even the old.

I propelled myself forward, my hands reaching, clawing for his tail.

My fingers brushed the soft, unformed scales.

He never kicked. He never struggled.

His body went limp, surrendering to the pull with a terrifying ease. His eyes were fixed on the darkness rising above us, but they held no fear. They held a look of absolute peace. He was listening to a song I could not hear, a lullaby of silence and cold.

"Elian!"

The name ripped from my throat, a desperate burst of bubbles that vanished into the heavy, metallic water. I lunged again, my fingers extended, reaching out to anchor him back to me, back to the living.

The pressure roared outward, a wall of unseen force that slammed into my chest like the fist of some deep god.

It drove the water from my gills in a painful rush and threw me backward, pinning me against the ancient stone of the pier. I gasped, useless air burning in my chest, and looked up.

He was not being drowned. No teeth in the dark tore at him. He was simply being erased.

The weight of the Tide pressed the life from his small frame in a single, soundless breath.

I watched the light die. The golden flecks in his eyes, those flecks that pulsed with his mischief and his joy, dissolved into a stark, sightless white.

His body gave one last, small jerk, then settled into the drift.

A single, dark ribbon of blood unspooled from his gills, a final word curling in the cold.

It was the only part of him that still moved.

Then, as quickly as it came, it was over.

The pressure relented. The water settled, though it still tasted of iron.

The chimes fell silent, their frantic clattering ceased, leaving only the dead, hanging weight of their existence.

Above, the surface stars returned, their light no longer distorted, twinkling as if the world had not just torn itself apart.

I pushed off the stone, my own heart hammering a wild, desperate rhythm against my ribs, and swam out for him.

I gathered Elian's body into my arms before the deep could claim him completely.

He felt hollow, like a shell with the meat shucked clean.

I looked into his vacant eyes. They were the eyes of a boy who had once asked me why the abyss was dark, who had once laughed as a crab nipped at his fingers.

A cold, hard thing settled in my gut, heavier than the abyss, sharper than grief. In that moment, the truth of the Mourning Tide crystallized in my mind, sharp as the taste of iron still lingering on my tongue.

The Mourning Tide is no beast to be hunted, no leviathan to be feared with teeth and fury.

It is not a monster in the way our people understand such things. A monster, you can fight. A monster, you can kill.

It is a force of nature, as inevitable as the turning of the tides and the slow creep of winter ice across the northern reaches. You cannot bargain with it. You cannot reason with it. You cannot outrun it.

They are the ones who listen to the whispers of the ocean, who know the signs of its coming—the subtle shift in salinity, the way the light bends just so before the Tide arrives.

They are the ones who use the passing gods of the ocean as an excuse to execute their own people.

They silence any voices rising too loud against the glittering corruption of the coral courts.

Their fins, pristine and unscarred, never feel the bite of the deep, yet they orchestrate its terrors with the cold precision of a blade.

I held Elian's hollow body in my arms, and I understood.

At last, the true face of both The Mourning Tide and our Reef reveals itself to me simultaneously, its forms stripped of all prior illusion.

Elian was not taken by a monster.

The true monsters rule from golden thrones in the heart of our Reef.