Prologue
The Mourning Tide
Thalos
Thebonechimesdidnot sing that night. They screamed.
They adorned the ancient piers of the Reef, those chimes, carved from remnants of beasts so old that even the elders had forgotten their leviathan origins.
By daylight, they were idle ornaments, clicking softly when stray currents nudged them or when some predator breached the nets. Yet now, in the dead, suffocating stillness of the water, they flailed.
Clack. Clack. Crack.
A hollow, frantic song. The sound of bones rattling to rouse the sleeping dead.
"Thalos?"
The whisper was a small disturbance in the water, but it landed with force. I turned, my fins spreading with a sharp, aggressive motion. Elian was there, by the safety line.
"You should be in bed," I chided, my voice carrying a harsh, grating tone. "Have you lost your wits, hatchling? Or do you enjoy startling a perimeter guard in the darkness? You are fortunate my first impulse was not to attack."
Elian did not shrink from my words. He was well-acquainted with my irritable nature.
He had not yet grown his adult scales. His skin was still soft, appearing almost translucent in the dim glow of the bioluminescent moss. His eyes, typically alight with mischievousness, were now wide. The golden flecks in his irises pulsed with a frantic, irregular beat.
"The chimes are too loud," Elian murmured.
"They are merely foolish fragments of bone striking one another," I countered. I folded my arms, allowing a low, annoyed humming to resonate in my chest. "If the sound disturbs you, cover your ears. Return to your chamber, Elian. The reef is secure. The open water is not."
"It carries the taste of iron," Elian whispered. He remained motionless, his gaze fixed beyond my shoulder, toward the steep drop-off where the shelf ended and the trench descended into an endless, monochrome abyss. "The water, Thalos. It tastes of old blood."
I ceased the motion of my gills.
He was right. The water was speaking. It was a constant murmur to our kind, our breath and our home, but tonight its voice swelled in my throat. The familiar salt was there, but beneath it lay the tang of rust and a warmth that had no place in the living currents. It tasted of a fever breaking in the crushing dark.
The Mourning Tide was coming.
It does not arrive with the rage of a storm. It is a silent thing, soft as sorrow. First, an absence, then a weight.
It is a wrongness that settles into the very essence of the water, a silent demand that asks, without a shred of mercy, for a piece of you.
"Do not look at it," I rasped, pushing off the wooden support. Every motion was slow. "Elian, look at me. Keep your eyes from the trench."
But I soon saw Elian was not looking at the trench below. His gaze was fixed on the colossal shadow blooming above us, a stain that was devouring the faint light from the surface.
The water bowed.
The sensation was immediate. A crushing void in the pressure made my inner ears ache and my gills strain.
Something immense, a mountain of silent muscle, was passing through the throat of our world. The current froze. The fronds of the kelp forests below went rigid, unnaturally still. The quicksilver flickers of fish vanished into the silt.
Then, the pull began.
It was an inhale. The abyss was drawing a breath, and it demanded we fill its lungs.
Elian's fingers went slack on the safety line.
"No!"
