Waves crashed against the cliffs below, rising higher than they had any natural right to rise. The storm intensified, rain slashing sideways, wind howling in harmony with her voice.
Marina had never felt power like this.
Her whole life, she’d been quiet. Overlooked. The selkie who preferred baking to swimming, who kept her pelt locked away, who had never tested the depths of her own magic.
She wasn’t afraid anymore.
The song poured from her throat, inexorable, unstoppable, ancient beyond measure. She felt her grandmother’s presence in the melody, felt all the selkie women who had come before her, lending their voices to hers.
When the dragon comes, remember what matters.
Marina remembered.
Malachar tried to run.
Alessandro caught him.
The dragon descended from the storm-dark sky like vengeance made manifest. His scales gleamed bronze and gold in the lightning flashes, his wings creating their own wind, his eyes blazing with protective fury. He slammed into Malachar with all the force of centuries of frustration, driving the demon away from Marina, away from her song.
Dragon and demon collided in a clash of flame and shadow, ancient powers warring while Marina’s song wove between them. She could feel the curse now: a dark thread connecting Malachar to the Draven bloodline, siphoning power with every passing second. It was ugly. Corrupt. A parasitic magic that had fed on suffering for two hundred years.
She sang to that thread. Sang to break it.
The melody shifted, became something with teeth. Not a war-song anymore but a cutting song, the kind her grandmother had warned her about—music that could sever bindings that had lasted centuries.
“Little seal.” Malachar’s voice cut through the storm, desperate and furious. “You don’t understand what you’re doing. Break the curse and I die. Is that what you want? To be a killer?”
Marina’s song didn’t falter.
“You killed my grandmother,” she sang, the words weaving into the melody. “You fed on suffering for centuries. You threatened my pelt, my life, everything I love.”
“I was surviving. The same as you. The same as any creature.”
“You were parasiting. Destroying. And it ends tonight.”
The curse-thread pulsed in her awareness, dark and corrupted, centuries of stolen fortune condensed into pure malevolent power. She reached for it with her song, felt it resist, pushed harder.
Malachar’s human mask flickered. Beneath it, Marina glimpsed something ancient and terrible: a creature of pure hunger, endless appetite, the kind of being that could never be satisfied because satisfaction wasn’t in its nature.
He had killed her grandmother. Had threatened her pelt. Had fed on Alessandro’s family for generations.
And still, when Marina looked at him, she didn’t feel hate.
She felt pity. Malachar would never know what it meant to love. His existence was consumption without satisfaction, hunger without hope.
Alessandro’s tears fell onto the churning earth, genuine grief, freely shed. Marina felt what he was grieving for. Not just his family’s suffering. Not just the years lost to the curse. He was grieving for the man he should have been. The partner he should have been from the beginning.
His flame wrapped around Malachar, not claiming but offering. The fire of a man who had finally learned to let go.
Marina felt the magic respond.
This was what her grandmother’s recipe had meant. Not just dragon’s blood, dragon’s tears, dragon’s flame. The willingness to love without controlling. To give without keeping score.
And Marina sang.
Not a war-song anymore. Not a lullaby.
A love song.
