I launched myself from the pier. I am an old guard. My tail bears the scars of a dozen battles, my fins are tattered like worn lace. But fear lends strength to even the old.
I propelled myself forward, my hands reaching, clawing for his tail.
My fingers brushed the soft, unformed scales.
He never kicked. He never struggled.
His body went limp, surrendering to the pull with a terrifying ease. His eyes were fixed on the darkness rising above us, but they held no fear. They held a look of absolute peace. He was listening to a song I could not hear, a lullaby of silence and cold.
"Elian!"
The name ripped from my throat, a desperate burst of bubbles that vanished into the heavy, metallic water. I lunged again, my fingers extended, reaching out to anchor him back to me, back to the living.
The pressure roared outward, a wall of unseen force that slammed into my chest like the fist of some deep god.
It drove the water from my gills in a painful rush and threw me backward, pinning me against the ancient stone of the pier. I gasped, useless air burning in my chest, and looked up.
He was not being drowned. No teeth in the dark tore at him. He was simply being erased.
The weight of the Tide pressed the life from his small frame in a single, soundless breath.
I watched the light die. The golden flecks in his eyes, those flecks that pulsed with his mischief and his joy, dissolved into a stark, sightless white. His body gave one last, small jerk, then settled into the drift. A single, dark ribbon of blood unspooled from his gills, a final word curling in the cold. It was the only part of him that still moved.
Then, as quickly as it came, it was over.
The pressure relented. The water settled, though it still tasted of iron. The chimes fell silent, their frantic clattering ceased, leaving only the dead, hanging weight of their existence. Above, the surface stars returned, their light no longer distorted, twinkling as if the world had not just torn itself apart.
I pushed off the stone, my own heart hammering a wild, desperate rhythm against my ribs, and swam out for him.
I gathered Elian's body into my arms before the deep could claim him completely.
He felt hollow, like a shell with the meat shucked clean.
I looked into his vacant eyes. They were the eyes of a boy who had once asked me why the abyss was dark, who had once laughed as a crab nipped at his fingers.
A cold, hard thing settled in my gut, heavier than the abyss, sharper than grief. In that moment, the truth of the Mourning Tide crystallized in my mind, sharp as the taste of iron still lingering on my tongue.
The Mourning Tide is no beast to be hunted, no leviathan to be feared with teeth and fury.
It is not a monster in the way our people understand such things. A monster, you can fight. A monster, you can kill.
It is a force of nature, as inevitable as the turning of the tides and the slow creep of winter ice across the northern reaches. Youcannot bargain with it. You cannot reason with it. You cannot outrun it.
They are the ones who listen to the whispers of the ocean, who know the signs of its coming—the subtle shift in salinity, the way the light bends just so before the Tide arrives. They are the ones who use the passing gods of the ocean as an excuse to execute their own people. They silence any voices rising too loud against the glittering corruption of the coral courts. Their fins, pristine and unscarred, never feel the bite of the deep, yet they orchestrate its terrors with the cold precision of a blade.
I held Elian's hollow body in my arms, and I understood.
At last, the true face of both The Mourning Tide and our Reef reveals itself to me simultaneously, its forms stripped of all prior illusion.
Elian was not taken by a monster.
The true monsters rule from golden thrones in the heart of our Reef.
Chapter 1
A Masterpiece of Arrogance
Vaelis
