Chapter 18
Alaric
The Black Marrow
The single word— Mother—hung in the air like an anchor, dragging my thoughts into darker waters. My pulse kicked, old fury waking. Meris. Her name alone was enough to rot the air. Of course it would be her.
The beams overhead groaned as the ship rocked, the scent of salt and damp parchment filling the cabin.
Every inch of the space carried the weight of time—walls lined with relics of voyages past: maps curled at the edges, rusted instruments, artifacts plundered from places best left undisturbed.
Lanternlight caught Nerina’s face in pieces—cheekbone, collarbone, bare shoulder—and for a fleeting second, I was struck dumb .
Not by what she’d said, but by the storm she’d walked into my life with.
Nerina’s face stayed unreadable, but her knuckles whitened around the glass, trembling ever so slightly. She was waiting for me to speak—to confirm or deny what she had just said. I could only stare.
"Mother?" My voice came out rough, edged with disbelief. "Meris is your mother?"
Nerina swallowed, nodding once.
The world tilted beneath me, a sensation I hadn’t felt in centuries. I’d faced storms that could split ships in two, watched men fall screaming into the abyss, but this?
This was something else. This was impossible.
"No," I murmured, shaking my head. "That can’t be."
Her lips parted, forming a retort—then she hesitated. Doubt flickered across her expression like shadow skimming water. She didn’t defend Meris. Didn’t argue against my words.
That silence spoke louder than any protest.
I pushed off the desk and paced the length of the cabin, stepping through broken glass and drying blood that still glittered faintly on the floor.
My boots struck the planks with dull thuds, glass crunching beneath them—each step a grim reminder of the chaos threading through my veins.
My muscles tensed, old bitterness coiling tighter with every step I took.
The lantern flickered as I moved, casting shifting gold across brass fittings and deep grooves in the wood—worn from centuries of men pacing just like this, seeking answers, searching for an escape from fates already sealed.
Through the porthole, the dark ocean churned—endless, restless—mirroring the storm unraveling inside my head.
Memories I’d buried clawed up with jagged edges: the Sanctuary of Milos.
The Trench, where I’d begged for more, thinking myself invincible.
And her—Meris—standing before me, eyes like the depths, voice like a riptide, sealing my fate with words that bound me to the sea forever.
And now, before me, sat her daughter.
The ocean’s cruelest jest—an echo of the woman who had damned me, delivered to my doorstep wrapped in starlight and storm. After centuries of torment, of being shackled to this cursed existence, the sea had sent me this.
Not a weapon. Not a monster. Not a key.
A girl. A joke.
It wasn’t just laughable—it was enraging. Poetic in a way that made my blood burn.
I turned back to her, something hollow forming in my chest. My fingers twitched at my sides, an old instinct surfacing—honed by years of rage and bitterness. Killing her might just be the perfect revenge for the hell Meris has put me through.
Something in her eyes froze me—a flicker of fear, or maybe defiance. Maybe it was the crescent, glowing faintly now, like it remembered something I didn’t. Maybe it was the echo of another life, another woman who once looked at me with hope and fire.
The thought cut deeper than I expected.
I rolled my shoulders, forcing the tension down. It did little to cool the heat rising in my blood. Instead of reaching for my blade, I asked, “Why are you here, Nerina?”
"What do you mean?" Her voice was quiet, but there was an edge beneath it.
Heat spiked behind my eyes. I felt it before I saw it—the sudden, involuntary pressure at my gums.
Nerina’s breath hitched.
I shut my jaw hard enough to ache, forcing the fangs back before they could fully descend. The hunger recoiled with them, snarling, unsatisfied.
Control returned—barely.
If I crossed that line, I would be no better than the goddess who cursed me.
"Don’t play coy, Nerina. You know exactly what I mean," I snarled. The sound of my own voice startled me—rough, cruel, too much like the man I swore I’d buried long ago.
In that fury, I saw her flinch—just slightly, just enough. She stepped back, bare feet pressing into the mess we’d made: broken glass, drying blood, the wreckage of too much truth at once. I should’ve felt vindicated.
I didn’t.
All I felt was the hollow echo of a man who’d just thrown a match into a room already burning.
Nerina straightened, eyes burning with a storm she clearly hadn’t expected to face tonight. "You brought me here."
A beat.
"The night you found me, I just crossed The Veil. I left Thalassia because I was drowning in questions no one would answer," she said, her voice trembling with something raw and wounded. "I never felt like I belonged—not really, not anywhere. Not when my voice didn’t match the others in the Choir. Not when the other mermaids looked at me like I was something strange, something broken. I tried to become what they wanted—graceful, obedient, quiet—but I couldn’t. The Oracle told me to cross the Veil. At the time, I thought it was just another one of her riddles, but there was a tremor in her voice... like she was afraid. Not for herself—for me. Like she knew something and couldn’t say it outright. "
As she spoke, the air around her seemed to shift.
Her crescent mark began to pulse faintly beneath her skin, triggered not by magic alone, but by something beneath the surface—betrayal, grief, the fragile defiance of someone who refused to break.
The mark on her brow flared in time with her words, her body betraying how deeply she meant them.
A soft glow responding to the weight of her emotions—unspoken pain and defiance woven together.
The light wasn’t bright, but it was enough to make me pause.
I felt it then—a pull low in my gut, subtle but undeniable. Like something old inside me stirred in response, something I’d buried with the dead.
Enough to make me wonder how much magic still lay dormant inside her.
The admission was raw. Honest. There was a wildness in her now, not just defiance. She was untethered—fierce and flayed open. Like someone who had finally seen the edge of the map… and realized the monsters drawn there might be real.
I leaned forward slightly, the storm still simmering in my blood. "The Oracle? Who is that? Some kind of priestess?"
Nerina blinked, realizing for the first time I wouldn’t know the name. "She’s... a seer. Or she used to be. She only speaks in riddles now, and lives in the maelstrom beyond the coral temples. Most avoid her. But I was desperate."
I studied her, the lingering edge of her confession still echoing. "What did she say, exactly?"
Nerina exhaled slowly and set the glass on the desk with a quiet clink.
The weight of her confession clung to the air between us, thick as old ink and seawater.
Shadows danced across her face in the lanternlight, her expression tight, as though she had only now begun to understand the gravity of what she’d done—what she’d left behind.
"She told me my answers weren’t in Thalassia, that I had to look beyond the Veil. That my fate was waiting where the ocean meets the unknown. I thought she meant the human world, but now..."
I had once been blind to warnings, convinced fate bent to my will. Now I wondered if she stood at the same precipice, staring into the unknown, waiting to see if it would swallow her whole.
"And you trusted her?" I asked quietly.
Her gaze flickered down, fingers tightening on the edge of the desk, bracing herself.
"I don’t know. Not really. But I couldn’t stay.
If I had, I think I would’ve... dissolved into the silence they demanded of me.
Not all at once—just a little more every day.
Like waves pulling sand from the shore, until there was nothing left of who I was. Who I am."
If she was truly Meris’s daughter, then she should have been untouchable—powerful beyond measure.
She wasn’t. Her magic didn’t strangle the room the way Meris’s did.
It shimmered like captured starlight. It pulsed with something raw and aching and alive—like it wasn’t born of dominion, but of defiance.
That, more than anything, made her dangerous in a way I didn’t yet understand.
And yet she was here. Confused. Lost.
She was powerful, sure—but not like Meris. Different. The sea did not bend to her will as it did for her mother. It moved around her, with her.
Her fingers curled into fists. "I always knew my mother was powerful, but I never thought... I never let myself think she was capable of something like this. I feel like I don’t know who she is. Or who that makes me."
The words should not have held weight. They should have meant nothing. Outside, the waves whispered against the hull—a quiet rhythm that had always felt like a warning.
Or perhaps a challenge.
For the first time in a long, long while, I found myself nodding—not in surrender, but in understanding. The sea had played its cruelest trick yet, and for reasons I couldn’t name, I was willing to see where this tide would take us.
For years, the sea had taken from me.
But maybe… maybe it’s been trying to give something back.
I narrowed my eyes. “That is who will come looking for you?”
Nerina hesitated a moment before nodding. “Yes.”
I muttered, “Shit.”
The deck was alive with movement as I stepped outside, the crew murmuring among themselves, voices barely audible over the rolling waves. Moonlight cast long, silver streaks across the weathered planks, illuminating wary faces that turned toward me.
I stood there a moment, letting the briny air wash over me before I spoke.
"Alright, lads, bad news first—turns out we've managed to piss off a goddess. Again."
My voice cut through the quiet, and the murmurs ceased.
"There’s something you all need to know. The sea has tested us before, but this? This is going to be a whole new kind of hell. The kind that makes you rethink every bad decision that led you here."
A few exchanged glances, unease spreading through them like ripples in still water.
"Nerina isn’t just some lost mermaid," I continued, leveling my gaze across them.
"She’s Meris’s daughter. And if the Sea Goddess is looking for her, it means she is looking for us."
Someone cursed from a distance. Another ran a hand down his face, exhaling.
"Fantastic," muttered Kael. "Because surviving one curse wasn’t enough. Let’s just stack them up, see what happens."
Garen stepped forward, arms crossed over his broad chest. "So, what be the plan? We can’t exactly sail away from a Sea goddess."
"No, we can’t," I admitted. "But we can be ready."
And we need to be, because I have a feeling this isn’t just about Nerina running away. If the Oracle sent her away from Thalassia, it means there’s something bigger at play—something we don’t understand yet. We prepare for storms, for battle, for whatever unnatural wrath she might send our way.
"We’ve survived more than most—we’ll survive this too."
Another voice piped up from the back. "Is there any good news in all this, Captain? Or are we just taking turns getting punched in the gut?"
I smirked, crossing my arms. "Oh, there’s good news, alright. You lot get to go down in history as the unfortunate bastards who defied a goddess. Twice. Think of the stories they’ll tell. If we live, we’re legends. If we die… Well, at least we won’t be around to hear the complaints."
I exhaled, glancing back toward the cabin. "I hope you’ve all made your peace with the sea, because Meris won’t stop until she gets what she wants."
Talking to myself more than anyone.
My mind drifted to what she might unleash to get Nerina back.
The ocean had always been her weapon, but it was more than that—it was her will, her reach, her wrath.
The tides could turn treacherous in an instant, shifting currents into churning maelstroms. She could summon leviathans from the deep—creatures of nightmare and shadow, things older than mermaids or men.
She could drown a ship without a storm, silence the wind itself, leave us stranded in a sea as still as death.
I had seen her power once before.
And if she was truly enraged, she wouldn’t just come for Nerina—she would make an example of all of us.