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Coral spires glittered once with a million pale mouths. Now, they weep black slime that smells like oil and rot.
The great shell-petal gates stick and sigh like old men.
Water that should run in obedient bands loops instead. It eddies in useless circles.
The sea has learned to limp.
My people walk the docks like men counting breaths as currency.
Kelp rot. Foul bloom. Nets heavy with dead silver. Mer-wardens with rope-colored faces. Fishermen spitting curses into their palms and blaming storms that never come.
And the SoulTakers—our patient enemies—press like barnacles along the rocks, listening for the moment my hall gives way.
The sea has always been the first truth of my life.
A command. A reply. A ribbon of water bending obedient to my will.
I could lift a child’s skiff home with a whisper or drown a fleet that thought itself safe.
That intimacy—the control—is its own love.
Not soft.
A fierce, absolute thing that turns a Demon into a Lord.
And now it slips through my fingers like fine sand. Inevitable. Infuriating. Small.
There’s one remedy the writs still offer, written in the ink of tide and older blood.
The viyella.
Not a trinket.
A living tide-line.
A mortal soul bound to a Demon in the zareth—a weave of human heart and runes that can re-anchor a realm.
To my people it isn’t romance.
It’s math—flesh doing the balancing between a throne and a ruin.
So I do what I swore I would when I took the Tidal Lands.Anything.
I do anything and everything for it—for my people.
I send my magic farther.
Listen harder.
Read the thin places until they whisper a direction I can use.
And one night, in a place that reeks of salt and bleach and human laughter, the sea pulls the thread tight.
It’s the one I caught a glimpse of the first time I tried this.
And she stands knee-deep in a tank, sun-kissed, sandy hair tucked away, curvy and golden and infuriatingly radiant.
She laughs, low and honest, at a sea lion pressing for a fish, and my runes burn like they’ve remembered a language I forgot to speak.
