Chapter 58
Nerina
Thalassia
The water shifted—a ripple stirring the chamber.
My eyes snapped open, pulse jerking sharp and fast. My vision blurred, the glow of my mark guttering like a dying star.
A figure drifted closer, her cloak unraveling like smoke. Too slight to be Meris. Too steady to be Maleia. And not a Tidekeeper—their presence always choked the current with cold.
This was different. The hood fell back.
Silvered strands caught in the faint light, eyes cloudy yet piercing—moonstone with a flame still burning inside. A face lined with time but not weakened by it, the kind of beauty carved by storms.
The Oracle.
She regarded me with that blind, unblinking gaze. Beneath it was something that made my skin prickle, like standing too close to an eel.
When she spoke, it was soft and resonant, carrying the weight of tides and years.
“If you do not learn what you are meant to become, child,” she said. “You will always find yourself back here.”
Part of me wanted to ask what she meant. The rest wanted to scream until the glass shattered. Instead, my voice scraped, raw and trembling. “I’m not really in the mood for cryptic riddles right now.”
I thought she might vanish like a vision. But her lips curved. “You’ve changed,” the Oracle murmured. Her voice was smoke and surf, gentle yet cutting. “Not the girl who once trembled at the Choir’s altar. No—there is fire in you now.”
She stepped closer and pressed her palm to the coral glass.
Nothing happened at first. The wards hummed louder, the runes flaring bright in resistance, the cage tightening.
Then the Oracle spoke again. Not louder.
Deeper. Her voice slipped through the water like a current cutting stone.
The sigils screamed—light flaring so bright I felt it in my teeth.
The chamber shuddered, the wards resisting, tightening— The light collapsed inward with a sound like breath ripped from a chest. Cracks raced across the glass in jagged lines, the seams groaning under the strain.
“Hurry,” she murmured. The cage split. Not cleanly. Not completely. But enough.
I staggered through, cold current washing over me. My skin still burned where the net had seared me, my chest still heaved with fury and grief—
The Oracle remained where she stood, steady as a reef in a storm.
“Why?” My voice scraped raw, trembling between anger and something far more dangerous.
Her head tilted, the faintest smile touching her lips, though sorrow still lined her face. “The path exists only after a step is taken.”
Her answer sank into me heavy and strange, like a language I almost understood but not quite.
My fists were clenched. “What do you want from me?”
She stepped closer, hand slipping into the folds of her cloak. “Nothing,” she said. “Only for you to carry what is yours.”
She drew a tattered bag and pressed it into my trembling hands.
I loosened the mouth of the bag. Light spilled out. Three shards of quartz lay inside—fractured pieces of the Crescent—each one humming with a resonance that thrummed against my bones.
I looked at her, wide-eyed. “How? How did you—?”
The Oracle only smiled, faint and knowing. “Sometimes,” she said softly, “mothers make mistakes.”
A laugh—wild and desperate—burst from my throat. For the first time in longer than I could remember, something like joy cracked through the sorrow.
The bag felt too warm in my hands—alive in a way that made my pulse stutter.
My mother—who had never truly been my mother—had called it protection.
She had lived inside that word the way people lived inside storms, convinced the damage was necessary, that survival justified the wreckage left behind.
It did not forgive what she had taken from me.
It did not heal the harm she had done. But it changed the shape of the wound.
Maybe she had not been the architect of my suffering.
She had been another piece on the board—one who realized the game too late, and tried, in the only way she knew how, to undo it.
“When you are ready,” the Oracle said, her voice dipping low, “you must assemble them. Piece by piece and place them where they belong.”
My gaze dropped to the shards. My mark flared in answer, the pieces pulsing in time with my heartbeat, as though they already knew me.
“And when I do?” I asked.
The Oracle’s smile faded, her face carved into shadow.
“Then tread carefully, child,” she warned. “Power like yours does not come without a price. It will love you—but it will hunger for you too. It will cling like a shadow you cannot outswim.”
Her blind eyes fixed on me, unblinking. “It will either crown you… or consume you whole.” She paused.
“And if you fall,” she said softly, “you will not fall alone.”