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The small conch shell fell into my palm as I reached around. The absence of it on her was immediate; her power stirred beneath the surface like something vast turning over in its sleep. The water at her feet began to move differently, as if the tide came from her. As she turned around, the remnants of her former life radiated from her gaze. An intensity that I hope never leaves her, for it’s what I have longed for since I first entered the ocean.

"You'll feel me," she said, unblinking. "And when it's done, when the borders are held, and the gods have made their peace, I’ll come back."

I didn’t answer her.

She touched my face. Her fingers traced the line of my jaw, the gesture so familiar that my body responded to it the way the shore responds to the tide.

“What changed your mind to release me?” she asked, almost with sarcasm, as if I should have known I could never fully bottle the storm.

I held her gaze. “Because last time you left, I was faced with the truth.” The corner of my mouth moved. Not quite a smile. "I am stubborn, Nara. But I am not without my mind.” My hand grazes against her shoulders, completely entranced by what she radiates. It’s something I can never feel with the necklace on. There’s reverence in my touch… “I cannot stand to think of the unnatural ways the Godless could take you from me.”

She kissed me, so unhurried. So much like the gentle days on a ship, knowing the night could destroy your existence, but the waters choose to give you grace.

Then she turned and walked into the ocean, and I grabbed her arm. I pressed my forehead to hers. “Let me come with you.”

“I’m safer with the bind, my love, but not impervious. What if death greets us both?”

“Then consume me.”

Her eyes had softened, and she kissed me once more before pulling away. The water recognized her before she was knee-deep. The waves stilled around her legs, then gathered, rising to meet her like hands reaching up from the deep. The entire shoreline seemed to exhale, the rhythm of the waves changing from their mechanical crash-and-retreat into something musical. Something with intention, and the water rose around her until it swelled back down into nothing.

Gone.

Empty.

I stood at the water's edge and watched the place where she disappeared, the conch shell in my fist, and I did not move.

Time passes differently when you are waiting for the ocean to give something back.

I know this because I have done it before. After she initiated a mortal’s reincarnation cycle, I came to this same shore, stood in this same place, and watched the waves for three days as they stormed with a fury. As if she might wash up on the tide like driftwood. As if the ocean might take pity on the demon who loved its goddess and return her, salt-crusted and gasping, to the sand at my feet.

It didn't.

Except, she did return. Not to the ocean. To me. As a human with a tangerine in her hand and no memory of my name. She walked right into my Devotion and offered me a piece of fruit, and the bind—broken and barely functional—lit up like a signal fire after years of dark.

I think about it all as I sit on the black sand, the conch shell resting in my open palm. My clothes are damp with sea spray, and I have barely moved.

A demon does not hope. Hope is a human affliction. A weakness of the mortal soul, clinging to outcomes it cannot control. My kind knows what we want, and we take it, and we do not sit on beaches holding jewelry and praying to oceans.

But she is worth the devotion, returning me to my mortal ways of bending to a power I had once chosen to consume me. I recall the mortal death, of plummeting down into the abyss below, to let her saturate my lungs.

The fucking hope that bloomed inside me when I saw Naramere, broken and in need, feeling the connection our souls had but was not yet acted on…

The conch is warm as I clench it.

I could have followed, utilized the bastardization of travel that the Godless invented. There’s no guarantee that I’d make it, but if she is determined to help assist her deities in their transition, then I want the choice, too, in possibly dying alongside the only creature that I’ve ever loved.

I’ve done it once before.

Her presence still permeates in my chest, where the bind lives, and it’s the only solace I have. For a pantheon to dissolve, all the deities need to be together, slowly transforming over time as they forget. As they weaken, so they may mold to something else. The Godless broke Naramere, forcing her to flee. To leave her companions, with Moriganna watching over her. If done properly, they wouldn’t need much time to gather and accept the transition as a whole. To unify their energy, to let it dissolve as they all filter away…

So why has it been weeks?

I’ve left her offerings every day at the foot of a statue carved in her image, just outside the small fortress. To give her power and strength.

If she dissolves, I’d rather she just take me with her⁠—

I narrow my eyes slightly as the water seems to go flat ahead of me, almost like an untouched pond.