Chapter 32 Zoric
THIRTY-TWO
ZORIC
Ispend the night searching for alternatives that don’t exist.
The keep’s archives are a disaster—water-damaged scrolls from the siege, crumbling texts that haven’t been opened in decades, half-legible journals from captains who sailed these waters when Dreadhaven was still a pirate stronghold.
I’ve been through them all before, during the years I spent trying to understand the Wrecktide’s curse.
I go through them again, anyway, looking for anything I might have missed.
Anything that isn’t Aviora becoming a prison for something that shouldn’t exist.
Dawn finds me surrounded by parchment, my eyes burning, my mind running in circles that lead nowhere.
The brazier has gone cold. The candles have guttered to nothing.
Outside, the Wrecktide’s unnatural glow has faded with the sunrise, but I can still feel it—a wrongness in the water, a presence that wasn’t there before we woke it.
“You haven’t slept.”
Aviora’s voice cuts through my fog. She stands in the doorway of what passes for my study—a converted armory, shelves stacked with salvaged books and maritime charts.
Her hair is loose around her shoulders, still damp from washing, and she’s wearing one of my shirts.
It hangs past her thighs, too large for her frame, and something primal stirs in my chest at the sight.
Mine. The thought rises unbidden. She’s mine, and I won’t let the sea take her.
“Neither have you.” I gesture at her bare feet, the shadows under her eyes. “Bad dreams?”
“Worse. No dreams at all.” She crosses to where I sit, picks her way through the scattered documents, and settles onto my lap without asking permission.
Her arms loop around my neck. Her weight settles against my chest—light, warm, impossibly precious.
“Just darkness. And cold. And the feeling of something watching.”
I wrap my arms around her, pull her closer. Press my lips to her temple, the curve of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. Each kiss a claim. Each touch a refusal to let go.
“I’m going to find another way.”
“Zoric—”
“There has to be something.” I frame her face with my hands, hold her gaze. “Thalira’s solution isn’t the only option. It can’t be. Someone, somewhere, must have found an alternative.”
“The guardians chose this.” Her voice is gentle—not arguing, just stating the truth. “Thalira said they volunteered. Centuries ago, people who understood what was at stake gave themselves to contain the hunger. Maybe—”
“No.” The word comes out harsher than I intended. I soften it by drawing her closer, my nose brushing hers. “You are not choosing this. Not while I’m still breathing. Not while there’s a single possibility I haven’t explored.”
She doesn’t argue. Just threads her fingers through my hair, scratches lightly at my scalp, watches me with eyes that see too much and judge too little.
“You need to sleep.”
“I need to find a solution.”
“You need to sleep.” She shifts on my lap, adjusting her position until her head rests on my shoulder. “A few hours. Then we search. Fresh eyes might see what tired ones miss.”
I want to refuse. Want to push through the exhaustion, keep reading, keep searching. But her warmth is seeping into me, and the steady rhythm of her breathing is lulling me toward rest I’ve been avoiding all night.
“A few hours.” I let my eyes close. “Then we keep looking.”
She hums agreement against my throat. Within minutes, I’m asleep.
The shout wakes me.
I’m on my feet before I’m fully conscious, Aviora tumbling from my lap with a startled curse. I grab the cutlass at my belt—I never took it off—and I’m moving toward the door before my mind catches up to my body.
“Captain!” Brek’s voice, high with alarm. “There’s a boat approaching the sea gate!”
A boat. After what happened to Gyla’s fleet, after the horrors we witnessed rising from the deep—a boat.
I hit the corridor at a run, Aviora close behind.
Her feet are still bare, my shirt still hanging loose on her frame, but she’s grabbed a knife from somewhere and her expression has hardened into the survivor I first met on my shore.
We take the stairs two at a time, burst out onto the wall walk overlooking the harbor.
The boat is small. A fishing vessel, single-masted, riding low in the water.
It shouldn’t have made it through the Wrecktide—not with the hunger awake, not with the reefs more dangerous than they’ve ever been.
But here it is, slipping through the harbor mouth with unnatural ease, its sail hanging limp despite the morning breeze.
One figure stands at the bow.
Even from this distance, I can see there’s something wrong with how it moves. Too still. Too deliberate. Like a puppet being operated by hands that don’t quite understand human motion.
“Get the guards.” My voice is calm, controlled—the captain giving orders, not the man who was holding Aviora on his lap an hour ago. “Everyone armed. Prepare for—”
“Wait.” Aviora’s hand closes on my arm. Her grip is painful, her fingers digging into muscle, her whole body rigid. “Zoric. Wait.”
I follow her gaze back to the boat. The figure has lifted its head, showing a face I’ve never seen before.
But Aviora has.
“Finn.” His name escapes her like a prayer or a curse—I can’t tell which. “That’s... that’s Finn.”
We meet the boat at the quay.
Thorne wanted to send guards. I wanted to send guards. But Aviora insisted—this is hers to face, she said. Whatever’s wearing Finn’s face, whatever message it carries, she needs to hear it herself.
So it’s just the three of us when the boat scrapes against the stone.
The figure climbs out with movements that are almost right—a young man’s body, fit and capable, dark hair falling across a face that must have been handsome when it was alive.
His skin has the pallor of drowning, pale and faintly luminescent.
His eyes glow with the same hungry light that pulses in the Wrecktide’s depths.
He isn’t drowned. Isn’t a wraith, like Oreth’s crew. This is something else—something wearing a corpse the way a man might wear a borrowed coat.
“Aviora.” The voice is wrong too. It has Finn’s cadence, probably, the particular rhythm she would recognize from years of partnership. But beneath it runs something older. Colder. The patient hunger of deep water and endless want.
“You’re not Finn.” Her voice holds steady—barely. I can feel her trembling where her shoulder presses against my arm, but she doesn’t retreat. Doesn’t look away. “Whatever you are, you’re not him.”
“I’m what’s left of him.” The Finn-thing smiles, and the expression is almost right. Almost warm. “His memories. His wanting. The parts that didn’t quite dissolve when the sea took him.” A pause. “The parts that have been feeding me for years.”
My hand tightens on my cutlass. “You’re the hunger.”
“A piece of it.” Those glowing eyes swing to meet mine, and I feel the assessment in them—ancient, calculating, utterly inhuman. “The piece that learned to think from all the thoughts I’ve consumed. The piece that decided negotiation might work better than force.”
“Negotiation.” Aviora’s laugh is brittle. “You’ve destroyed five ships. Killed hundreds of people. And now you want to negotiate?”
“I want to sleep.” The Finn-thing’s voice carries something that might be weariness—if something that old could feel tired.
“I want what I had before your pirate captain stole from me. Before his curse disturbed my rest. Before you fed me enough lives to wake me fully.” Another smile, this one sharper.
“You created this problem, girl. But I’m offering you a solution. ”
“We’re listening.” I step forward, putting myself between Aviora and the thing wearing her dead lover’s face. “What do you want?”
“What I’ve wanted all along.” The Finn-thing spreads its hands—a human gesture, badly executed. “Want. Longing. The ache of desire unfulfilled. I feed on the gap between what is and what could be, and nothing feeds me better than grief.”
“You want her grief.” Understanding hits me like a boarding axe to the chest. “You want her memories of Finn.”
“I want the story of what she lost.” The hunger’s gaze slides past me to find Aviora.
“You carry him in your heart, girl. His voice. His touch. The burden of what you had and what you threw away when you swam for the surface. Give me that story—let me consume it completely—and I’ll have enough to sleep again.
Centuries of rest, fed by decades of your guilt. ”
Aviora’s fingers close around mine. Squeeze until my bones grind against each other.
“You want me to forget him.”
“I want you to release him.” The Finn-thing takes a step closer, and I raise my cutlass in warning.
It ignores the blade entirely. “He’s been drowning in you for years, Aviora.
Every time you remember his face, he feels the water closing over him again.
Every time you blame yourself for his death, he dies a little more.
You think you’re honoring his memory. You’re just extending his suffering. ”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s the truth of what I am.” Another step.
Close enough now that I can see the individual scales of luminescence on its skin, the way light pulses through veins that no longer carry blood.
“I am made of wanting. And I know—I know—how much you want to stop hurting. How much you want to put down the guilt you’ve been carrying. I’m offering you that chance.”
“At what cost?” My voice cuts through the manipulation. “What happens to her if she gives you what you’re asking?”
The Finn-thing’s attention returns to me with disconcerting speed. “She loses the memories. Finn’s face. His voice. The specific details of what they shared. It will fade like a dream fades—present one moment, gone the next, leaving only the vague sense that something was there.”
“And the grief?”
“Gone with the memories.” A shrug—almost natural, almost human. “You can’t mourn what you don’t remember. She’ll know she had a partner once. Know he died. But the guilt, the pain, the endless spiral of what-if and if-only—all of it consumed. All of it mine.”
I look at Aviora. She’s staring at the thing wearing Finn’s face with an expression I can’t read—fear and longing and calculation woven into something complex.
“That’s not sacrifice.” The words scrape out of me. “That’s freedom. You’re offering to take away the thing that’s been drowning her for years.”
“Am I?” The Finn-thing’s smile widens. “Or am I offering to take away the thing that made her who she is? The grief that drove her to run, to fight, to survive? The guilt that led her to your shore, Captain Druger. Without it—” A pause, theatrical and precisely timed.
“—would she still be the woman who chooses you?”