Not just curiosity. Something unreadable settles into his expression.
A thought comes quietly—and doesn’t leave. That somehow, he knew of its existence. But maybe just didn’t expect to find it here.
His gaze lingers a fraction too long before sliding away again, his shoulders going slightly too still. His fingers flex once at his sides—but he doesn’t ask about the crest. Just watches itlike it’s shifted something beneath the surface and he’s decided, in the same breath, not to say why.
I reach out, brushing my fingertips over the worn silver-blue surface. The hum is instant, low and slow, and it stirs something in me like an ancient current dredging some silt of memory. My breath catches.
“I think—” I swallow, blinking hard. “I think this crest is the result of elemental fusion.”
Gavrail looks up sharply from his desk where he’s been inspecting the Thalrien ledger we took. For a long moment, he studies me, then the crest. He picks it up and turns it over in his palm.
Nothing happens.
His expression flickers with disappointment. “It doesn’t respond to me,” he says quietly. He examines the crest like it’s a lock he hasn’t yet found the key for. Like he’s already figuring outwhyit won’t yield to him—and what that means for the world that tries to use me to unlock it instead.
“It would make sense,” I murmur, heart beating too fast in my chest. “If the Thalriens were one of the great lines that were capable of true elemental fusion—maybe they fused their magick into the one thing they knew would be passed down through generations. Their crest.”
“Not just a symbol,” Gavrail says. “But a vessel.”
He holds it out to me again, and the moment it touches my palm, that pulse flares, echoing in my ears, my chest.
Then—a pull. Gentle, but insistent, like the tide pulling at the shore. I feel the shift behind my eyes first, then in my head: fragments of memories that aren’t mine. A woman standing knee-deep in the surf, arms raised to call a storm. A man kneeling in fog, blood in the water around him, whispering my name—not Celeste.Thalrien.
The air tastes of salt. My vision swims.
I feel Gavrail’s hands at my elbows, steadying me.
And then the cold rushes in—not empty, but full of something: sorrow, strength, love, legacy, and water.
Water remembers.
Magick is definitely infused into the crest, ancient, deep, filled with the water of the many hands that came before me.
I nod, words spilling. “They imbued it. Each generation adding something—grief, power, memory. Pieces of themselves.”
“Something that would survive,” Gavrail adds softly, “even if they didn’t.”
I turn it over, where a motto is inscribed in a crescent arc on the back.
“To know the depth, one must first dive in,” Gavrail reads aloud.
“What does it mean?” I ask, confused.
“I don’t know,” he replies. “But I might know where to look.”
* * *
Back at the Blue Dahlia,I tiptoe into my bedroom so as not to wake Rozsen, who’s snoring softly as dreams drift heavy around her. I grab the book and walk back into the living room. It’s well after midnight now.
The pages of my elemental fusion tome crackle softly as Gavrail turns them, the firelight catching in the gold-veined script. Outside the bay window, wind whispers against the glass, the hush of a world trying to press close.
I lean over his shoulder, an elbow planted on the coffee table, the weight of the Thalrien crest like a pulse in my pocket. I haven’t been able to stop touching it since I found it—my fingers drawn again and again to the carved lines of the mermaid, the ridged edge worn smooth with time.
“There,” Gavrail murmurs, tapping a page near the bottom. “Read that.”
I narrow my eyes. The passage is dense and lyrical, but one line catches:
And when thesea’s heir forgets the tide, she must return the sigil to a sacred source, where memory sleeps in stillness.
