Chapter 1 Nerina #2
One inclined his head—barely a motion—eyes flicking to the others in a silent exchange too quick to grasp. Another was already lifting his staff, not in alarm, but with practiced precision.
Now, something in their posture said.
A crushing force snapped around my magic. Cold. Primal. Tight as a vise.
The Tidekeepers cut me off.
The weight of their power slammed through me. I choked, pain splitting behind my eyes as blood filled my mouth and drifted upward in a thin, scarlet ribbon. My strength went with it—drained so suddenly my vision dimmed at the edges.
I must have pushed too hard. Or not hard enough.
The light collapsed—but the emptiness didn’t. Holding myself upright took more effort than it should have. Something inside me stayed hollow, the song had been cut out mid-note.
The shockwave died in a hard, brutal drop.
The entire chamber had seen it. Felt it. They would never forget it.
Merfolk stepped back from me the way one might retreat from a wounded shark—slow, cautious, eyes sliding away as if looking too long might invite disaster.
Even the pod leaders looked shaken. The Court exhaled in fragments.
Whispers rippled through the gathered merfolk—fear, awe, disbelief tangling in the wake of what I’d done.
The Tidekeepers lowered their staffs in unison, movements precise and controlled. One adjusted the fall of his robe. Another steadied himself. No fear lingered in their eyes.
Only calculation.
A brief glance passed between them—quick, restrained—before Calder inclined his head once, confirming a task completed to satisfaction. Then he turned to the court.
“The imbalance has been contained,” he said calmly. Contained.
Containment required compliance. Resistance made power like mine unpredictable—and unpredictability was the one variable the Tidekeepers refused to gamble with. Abrupt corrections had a way of tearing holes where none had existed before.
Maleia swam to me, gripping my arm harder than she meant to. “Nerina… are you okay? What was that?”
Before I could answer, Calder cut in.
“It was dangerous.”
His tone was quiet, but the word sliced.
“It was uncontrolled,” another Tidekeeper murmured.
“A threat,” hissed a third.
Their robes drifted like kelp in a storm as they gathered around Meris, whispering rapidly—too low to hear clearly.
But I heard enough. “She is unstable.”
“What if it fractures the Veil?”
“What if—”
Meris raised a hand, silencing them. As she always did.
Her eyes tracked every movement I made. Measuring. No doubt weighing whether my existence tipped their scales too far.
Maleia’s voice broke through the hush. “You’re bleeding,” she whispered, horror threading her voice as she wiped blood from beneath my nose.
She glanced at Meris, then at the Tidekeepers clustered too tightly together. “You need to get out of here before—”
Before she could finish, a pod mother pulled her child closer, fins flaring as she guided them past me. The child stared over her shoulder, wide-eyed and silent.
“Nerina?” Maleia breathed.
I didn’t answer.
Part of me was afraid too. And part of me… wasn’t.
Part of me wondered what would have happened—what that had been, what it might have become—if the Tidekeepers hadn’t crushed it.
My limbs felt slow, my thoughts dulled at the edges. Nothing alarming. Just… distant. As though part of me had been set somewhere I could no longer reach.
“Did you see—”
“The stars—did you see the stars?”
“She’s not one of us.”
“What was that?”
“She’s dangerous.”
Dangerous.
The word tasted familiar on my tongue. I’d heard it many times before. But tonight, for the first time, something in me didn’t recoil from it.
Something in me leaned toward it.
“Nerina.”
I froze.
Meris’s voice was soft—almost gentle—but the chamber stilled at once. Her stare locked onto me. “You will report to the Tidekeepers at first light.”
Protection was never gentle. It was careful.
Measured. Necessary. The Tidekeepers bore the weight of the entire ocean.
If they were cautious with me, it was because they had to be.
They never impulsively confronted power like mine—not without consequences they could not yet calculate.
Still, being managed so precisely left me strangely unmoored.
They always spoke of balance, but none of them looked at me when they said it.
My mark throbbed in answer—heat flaring across my brow—and I left before she could change her mind.
The ocean beyond the Court felt altered—more aware.
Currents curled toward me, brushing my skin with curiosity as I swam from the towers and closer to the Sanctuary, and with every stroke, I felt weaker.
My magic stirred, but sluggishly, and I told myself it was nothing more than a lack of discipline.
That I was simply less… balanced than the others.
I should have been terrified. Instead, I trembled with something else entirely.
Anticipation.
The Sanctuary of Milos waited at the far edge of Thalassia, near the Veil’s jagged glow.
The water thickened ahead of me, pressure gathering against my skin as though the sea itself pushed back.
The Sanctuary was sealed. Guarded. .
Once, it had been a bridge between realms—where human prayers rose with incense and tide. But greed had found it. Pirates. Relic hunters. Bloodstained hands prying at sacred stone, shattering idols, trying to wrench secrets from the sea.
Some said the raid had been led by a ship wrapped in storm light, its captain’s eyes aflame with cursed fire. A man the sea refused to forget.
Now the Sanctuary stood mostly abandoned—statues softened by algae, holy scripts half-swallowed by coral. A forgotten place for forgotten prayers.
Perfect for a girl who didn’t fit anywhere else.
I didn’t feel like I was trespassing here. The water shifted when I approached, currents parting—not in warning, but recognition.
I found it by accident—a narrow fault in the pressure. Not an opening. A flaw. The sea barely acknowledged it, as if it hoped no one would notice.
I noticed.
I’ve always been good at finding what isn’t meant to be found.
I have a habit of drifting where I don’t belong.
Forbidden places. Abandoned ruins. Spaces guarded by fear rather than force.
Curiosity is my vice, and I’ve never bothered pretending otherwise.
Everyone else is content with tradition, with obedience, with accepting things as they are.
I’ve never been very good at that. I ask questions.
I push. I wander too far. And more often than not, it’s the reason I find myself in trouble—though part of me has always suspected trouble finds me first.
It struck me once how careful they were not to frighten me. They gently discouraged questions. Warnings came wrapped in concern, never threat. After a while, people simply ignored my questions altogether. No one forbade it. They simply stopped responding.
My mother says curiosity isn’t forbidden, though it can be dangerous.
When the currents stilled and the Court looked away, carefully choosing my moments, I crossed the line anyway.
The barrier hit me like cold glass—
My mark burned.
The magic answered—but slower than it should have, dragging through the water as if something resisted it. The wards shifted—not opening, not breaking—but thinning. Just enough.
A narrow seam appeared, trembling like a plucked string.
I twisted sideways. My head rang as I forced myself through, pressure scraping across my thoughts, skin buzzing while the wards sealed behind me—seamless and whole once more.
For a moment my mind snagged, threads pulled too tight to move cleanly.
The water felt heavier here. Older.
A faint scent drifted through the chamber—old incense, salt, and something sharper beneath it.
I moved toward the back wall—the one etched with symbols I’d traced a hundred times before, searching for answers that never came.
Except this time, something new glowed there. A crescent. Surrounded by spirals. Carved deep into the stone, lit from within by a soft, pulsing light.
I would have remembered it. The shape was too familiar.
My skin buzzed. My mark throbbed—once, then again—pulsing in time with the carving.
“Where did you come from?” I whispered.
No answer.
Only the steady hum of energy radiating from the stone, the pressure of standing too close to a storm.
I reached out.
The instant my fingers brushed the grooves, the world shattered.
Light slammed into me—violet-white, blinding. The water thickened, my lungs seized. A roar filled my ears—not sound, but pressure, a thousand tides crashing inward at once.
Images tore through me.
A blackened sea bruised by a storm. Waves heaving. Wind howling.
A ship cutting through the chaotic waves—sails torn, hull drenched in rain and spray.
At its bow stood a man.
Braced against the storm. Coat snapping around him like a shadow. Dark hair lashed across his face. A scar cut along his jaw, stark against his pale skin.
He lifted his head. Our eyes met.
They weren’t just eyes—they were a collision.
Storm-gray shot through with flame, like embers buried in ash.
Haunted. Hungry. The connection rooted itself, inescapable.
My heart lurched. The impossible distance between us thinned.
The sea blurred at the edges, and for a heartbeat, I felt rain sting my skin.
Cold air burned lungs not meant to breathe it.
Heat flared beneath my mark, searing. My body felt wrong—too small for the force trying to pour through it. At the edge of the vision, stars burned in unfamiliar patterns. Wrong skies. Wrong constellations.
A sensation of falling yanked at my gut—not down, but through. I tore my hand away.
The vision snapped.
The Sanctuary rushed back into focus—stone, water, fading glow. The crescent dimmed like an exhale finally released.
I gripped a statue to steady myself. My lungs burned. My heart thundered. My mark still throbbed, hot and insistent.
But his eyes stayed with me.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
The question vanished into the water.
The Sanctuary felt awake now. The carved stones hummed faintly. The crescent glowed softly, its presence settled into the chamber like a second heartbeat.
Like it had been waiting.
My thoughts got tangled. Was it a memory? Prophecy? A hallucination born of pain and exhaustion?
Part of me wanted to dismiss it.
But beneath the fear, something unfurled in recognition. Whoever he was, the sea wanted me to see him.
And I was suddenly, acutely certain of two things.
He was dangerous.
And my life had just changed.
The Tidekeepers would never tell me the truth. They would wrap it in doctrine and caution; polish lies until they sounded almost kind. Meris would tuck it away like an inconvenient storm—manageable, if ignored. Maleia would worry. And I loved her too much to lay this weight at her feet.
I had learned long ago which voices in Thalassia demanded obedience—and which simply offered truth.
There was only one being left who might understand.
The Oracle.
The Oracle had never commanded me. Never softened her words for comfort or twisted them to please the Tidekeepers. When she spoke, it was with unflinching clarity—sometimes kind, sometimes cruel, sometimes difficult to decipher, but never false.
Her warnings had followed me for years, clinging like barnacles to memory.
When the moons split, the stars will awaken in you. Don’t let them steal your light.
Now, with my power still trembling beneath my skin, I wondered if this was the moment she’d seen all along.
The currents shifted subtly around me. The Veil hummed in the distance. My mark burned each time I thought of crossing it.
I turned toward the darker tunnels leading away from the Sanctuary—toward the places the Tidekeepers avoided. Toward the one presence in Thalassia they could not predict, control, or silence.
And for the first time, the restlessness inside me didn’t feel like a flaw. It felt like a summons.