Chapter 60
Nerina
Thalassia
If I didn’t get out of Thalassia—now—there would be no later. I wasn’t just running anymore. I am an escaped prisoner. A traitor.
Each flick of my tail sliced the water clean, carrying me past collapsed towers and statues with eyeless faces. My pulse thundered with every inch I put between myself and the chamber. Beneath my skin, the crescent mark ached faintly—alive, answering the steady thrum of the shards at my hip.
The Oracle’s words still weighed on my mind, heavy as the sea itself, but it was the bag clutched tight against my side that made my heart race. The fabric was frayed, ancient—yet inside it pulsed with light and promise.
All three shards. Mine at last.
I held them close as I slipped through Thalassia’s bones. Coral arches leaned inward like broken ribs. Mosaics dulled by silt and shadow watched me pass, their beauty long buried, their faith long spent.
Treason carried only one sentence here, etched into law and memory alike: death—slow, public, meant to be a warning.
I imagined fitting the shards together, the way their edges had sparked when I touched them. I imagined the rush of knowing—the truth denied to me for a lifetime finally cracking open.
Hope flared in my chest—bright, reckless, unbearably fragile.
The sea has a way of reminding you that nothing is ever truly yours.
Cold rippled over my skin as the crescent mark prickled, burning just enough to warn me. The water ahead stilled. The current vanished beneath me.
I froze. Something felt wrong.
My gaze swept the dark beyond the ruins—
A shape drifted in the deep, suspended just beyond the reach of light. Too still. Too heavy to be debris, yet not moving with the water either. The sea around it was unnaturally calm, like even the current didn’t dare touch it.
Every instinct in me screamed. To turn away and keep going to the surface. But the curiosity in me pulled harder.
The shape below shifted with the current. At first it was only shadow—an interruption in the rhythm of water and light.
Not driftwood.
Not debris.
Too deliberate. Too… human.
My stomach tightened.
That was a shoulder.
A hand.
The body floated face-down, limbs slack, hair stirring faintly like ink spilled into water. No blood clouded the deep. No struggle marked the space around it.
Just silence.
I drifted closer, heart thudding, the Crescent shards burning cold against my ribs as the distance closed—
The water rolled him an inch.
And I saw his face.
Every sound in the ocean vanished. No current. No distant whale-call. No pulse of tide.
Just the violent, animal roar of my own heartbeat.
Alaric.
His body hung motionless in the water, dark hair fanning around his face, skin pale as bone. His chest didn’t rise. His arms were limp.
I screamed his name. The sea swallowed it. My throat burned. My chest heaved. The water blurred with tears—salt against salt—as my hand shook and reached forward, stretching until my arm trembled with strain.
“No. No. No—” The word fractured out of me, a broken plea. “Please. Please—no.”
A sob tore through my chest, raw and ugly. It felt like the sea spun. I wanted to scream again—to curse the ocean, the Tidekeepers, Meris, fate—anything that had ever touched me and taken from me. But all I could do was tremble.
I had thought he was untouchable. A storm made flesh.
A cursed, unkillable shadow. He had been endless, infuriating, reckless—but he had been here.
And now he was nothing but a pale shape sinking into the dark.
The man who had undone me. Who had kissed me like I was his salvation.
Who had fought for me like I was worth bleeding for.
Gone.
The hollow ache in my chest widened until I thought it might split me open.
I lost Thalassia. My mother. My sister. But this was different. This was worse.
The sea pressed closer, cold and suffocating. I folded in on myself, arms wrapping around my chest trying to hold the pieces together before they shattered completely. My mark pulsed, aching—but it wasn’t comfort. It was a reminder.
My fingers closed around his arm at last. Cold.
Heavy.
“No—” The sound cracked as I dragged him toward me. His body sagged against mine, dead weight in the water. His head lolled, dark hair tangling with mine as the current rocked us both. His lips were parted.
His chest did not move. His eyes stayed shut.
I wrapped my arms around him and held on—harder, tighter. “Don’t you dare,” I choked, words scattering into bubbles. “Don’t you dare leave me.”
I pressed my forehead to his. The heat of my mark seared, desperate—sparking nothing in him.
Nothing.
“You bastard,” I sobbed, clutching him so tightly my arms ached. “You foolish, infuriating bastard.”
My chest heaved. Salt blurred my vision until the world became light and shadow. There was no wound. No blood. Only the awful stillness of a body the sea had claimed before I could.
“Please,” I whispered.
Then, softer—like a confession meant for only the sea. “Please… don’t leave me.”
It hollowed me out. Tore me open. My body shook around it, but I held him tighter, burying my face against his neck like I could breathe life back into him.
But the silence didn’t break. His body stayed cold. No matter how tightly I held on, I could feel the ocean trying to take him—relentless, merciless.
I forced my thoughts into motion before grief could swallow me whole.
Eira.
The name hit like a lifeline. She could heal him. She had to. I’d heard stories—how she could pull life back from the edge with bloodied hands and iron will.
This wasn’t over. It couldn’t be. Not like this. Not when the truth had finally been placed in my hands.
I gathered him against me, wrapping my arms around his weight as the bag at my hip flared hot—like the shards themselves refused to accept this ending.
I turned toward open water—Toward the battle above.
Before I could move, the current stuttered—then vanished entirely, leaving me suspended in a silence so complete it rang.
Shadows surged from the ruins. Robes billowed like ink in the tide. Hands seized my wrists, my shoulders, yanking me back.
“No!” I thrashed, my scream shredding through the water. “Let me go! He needs me—he needs—”
They wrenched me away. Ripped him from my embrace.
My nails scraped across his skin as my grip was torn loose. “Alaric!”
He drifted as my arms were pinned, his body rocking once before slipping lower—further from reach. The light from my mark flared across him, silver staining his face—
But it wasn’t enough. He sank out of the glow. Out of my reach.
Something inside me fractured. My limbs felt distant, heavy, as if the sea had poured stone into my veins. I watched him sink. Watched the dark close over his shoulders. My hands were useless.
I kicked then—too late—twisting in their hold, strength returning only once the space where he had been was empty. Their grips were iron now, unyielding as law itself. They dragged me backward into the ruins as I screamed for him, my throat shredding around his name—
“ALARIC!”
But he was gone—pulled into the dark, swallowed by it, beyond my sight.
Calder drifted forward from the shadows, contempt curdling into something cruel as he took me in. I spat at him, the glob of salt and rage disappearing into the water.
My vision flashed white-hot. I strained against the Sentinels’ holds until my shoulders screamed. “Let me go!”
Calder’s hand slid into his robe. He withdrew a syringe. He grabbed me, the needle pierced my arm.
“No—get off of me!”
Something sharp and searing flooded my veins like molten chains. My body convulsed, a scream ripping out of me raw enough to shake the ruins. Fire crackled under my skin, rushing through every vein, burning me alive from the inside out.
Calder’s laugh slithered close. “See how easily you break? All that defiance—and one drop of what I carry reduces you to this.”
I gasped, body trembling, vision fracturing. I didn’t know what he’d put in me—only that it scorched, clawed, hollowed me out until I thought it would strip me down to nothing.
Still, beneath the agony, something inside me clawed back. With a strength born of fury and grief, I tore my arm free long enough to wrench the bag from my hip.