The surface lies still, yet beneath, the water stirs and remembers, watching like a living graveyard. Every wave knows the names of the damned who dared to trespass. There are souls trapped below, faces illuminated by the flicker of the glowinglanterns, stuck in the same expressions they had when their soul was claimed.
Mira and I wrap our cloths tight around our mouths and noses, a thin barrier between us and the thick, toxic fog clinging to everything. It burns the lungs if you’re not careful. “Are you ready?” she asks, her voice muffled but steady as we approach the vine-draped hut ahead, small, crooked, half-swallowed by moss.
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” I answer. “But if anything goes wrong, anything, you run. You get back to the ship. Don’t look back.”
“I won’t leave you,” she says firmly. “You know better than to ask that of me.”
I stop walking. Turn to her, stepping in front of her. Her eyes shine even in this dim, sickly light, those impossible emerald eyes that always see more than I want them to. “You will,” I say, sharper now. “You’ll go back. I won’t watch you die at the hands of my mother.” She doesn’t argue, just turns her head and keeps walking. Her silence says everything.
The stench hits me first: rot, damp earth, the sour tang of blood. It clings to the back of my throat, thick and unrelenting. Her hut smells like death.
As we draw closer, the fog thins just enough to see the outline of the crooked doorway. Mira and I pull the cloths from our faces, eyes watering from the fumes. I pause with my hand on the doorframe, forcing myself to breathe through the dread knotting in my chest. Then I open it.
There she is, sitting in a chair as if she’s been waiting for me, like I was late coming home and she was ready to scold me, like she is a real mother. As if she’d ever earned the right to call herself that. The room is worse than I imagined.
Withered animals hang in rusted cages, twitching and groaning, trapped in something that wasn’t life but wasn’t deatheither. Glass jars line the far wall, filled with floating limbs and body parts of creatures I can’t name. A parrot perched overhead keeps muttering the same three words, “Death, ruin, and run.” A warning.
Black magic soaks this place, thick and pulsing. I can feel it in my bones. Taika sits upon a throne of bone and moss, likely the remains of those she’s claimed. Her lips and teeth are stained black. Her skin, though pale, is smeared with blood and dirt. She smells like the earth after a storm, but hungrier and rotten.
She’s not beautiful, but she’s powerful. For all she could’ve done, all the good she might’ve wielded, she chose this. She turned purity into violence. Innocence into ruin. And I’m the blood she left behind.
“Son, how nice of you to finally pay me a visit. Here to kill me, are you?”Son. How fucking dare she. She says it so casually, like she hadn’t abandoned me to rot in a world without her. Her voice is gravel, like she’s spent centuries screaming into the void or smoking her lungs to ash.
I don’t speak, refusing to give her the satisfaction. But Mira steps forward, her voice steady and clear. “Taika, what do you want to wish for?”
That catches her off guard. The change in her body language is instant. Her posture softens and her gaze shifts, trying to become someone gentler. A mask. “Girl,” she says with faux sweetness, “I told you, this wish is for your ears only.”
Mira doesn’t budge or blink. “Whatever you say to me goes straight to him, and you know that. Now answer the question, what is it you want to wish for?” Her stance is unshakable. Eyes narrowing, her chin lifts. She stands there like she belongs in this cursed room more than Taika does.
Taika steps forward, her movements deliberate. I move without thinking, placing my body between her and Mira. My arm is instinctively outstretched, ready to block, to burn, to killif I have to. But Mira gently nudges me aside out of defiance. She doesn’t fear Taika, not anymore.
“I wish to be freed,” Taika says at last. Freed? She wants death? I can grant that gladly, just as I did with my father.
“You wish to be freed?” Mira echoes. “Then why have you fought for so long to survive?” Taika doesn’t answer at first. She turns, her fingers tracing along the clutter of chaos of one of her tables, bones, feathers, rusted blades, glass jars filled with trinkets of torment.
“You think this is living, girl? This hut? This prison?” She gestures around her, the vines curling in like claws. “I was locked in here years ago. Let out only when she decides it’s convenient.”She?
She moves toward the wall, her hand trailing across its damp, rotting wood. “I haven’t seen the ocean,” she mutters, “haven’t felt the sea breeze on my face since…” Her beady dark eyes find mine. And her voice, raw and almost human, lowers. “Since you were born.” She says it like a confession. Her bony, dirt-caked finger lifts, pointing directly at me.
“Why did you leave?” I ask, my voice low. If she’s been trapped in here, then whatever caged her must have been more powerful than her. The thought makes my blood run cold. Taika nods slowly, her gaze falling to the floor, where mold creeps between rotting wood and earth. “I made a deal,” she whispers.
Her posture changes, shoulders hunching inward. Her eyes dull, the memory draining her. “With who?” I ask. She doesn’t answer. She begins to pace, lips moving with words I can’t catch, murmurs slipping from her mouth. I reach out, grabbing her arm. It is like touching a corpse, cold and stiff. Taika’s eyes widen, startled by my touch, like a ghost’s hand has found her in the flesh.
“Tell me who,” I growl.
Her head snaps up. Her eyes, once pale and murky, are now pitch black, a void where a soul should be. “There are things we don’t name, boy,” she hisses, her voice not entirely her own. “Things more deadly than I. More twisted than the kappas. Old things… things that don’t need to touch you to kill you, but poison your mind instead.” She leans in closer, her whisper brushing against my skin.
My heart feels like it stopped beating. My father had a similar curse put upon him. Mira must sense the shift in me. Her fingers brush the back of my arm, soft and steady. I swallow hard. “So you didn’t poison my father?”
Her eyes snap to mine, wounded. “I would never hurt him,” she says, her voice cracking. “He was the only thing I ever truly loved. I’d trade every ounce of magic, every drop of power I have, just to hear his heart beating in my ears again.” Their souls were tied. That’s the only way she could have heard her other half's heartbeat.
She looks away, but I can see how her gaze softens, lost in a memory. For the briefest moment, she doesn’t look like the monster I’ve built her up to be in my mind. She looks like someone mourning the one thing that made her human. “It was mercy,” she adds quietly, voice raw. “What you saw, that wasn’t the worst of it. It was only the beginning. You saved him from what was coming.”
My eyes narrow. “You knew?” I ask.
She meets my stare with a gaze that pierces straight through me. “I knew the moment I felt cold. The human in me, or whatever was left, died when his heart stopped beating. I’m what remains, because of my curse,” she whispers. “And I knew you’d be the one to take his life. I saw it in a vision.”
Guilt twists through me, but I hold my ground. “I did what I had to do,” I say, “to protect Mira.”
