“Look at the sea,” I yelped as the dark, swirling waters ignited with bioluminescence. Whooshes and flickers of light hissed through the cave, dancing across the stone.
“Just keep moving.” Finn’s shaky voice came from beside me. The murky water shifted, becoming crystalline, the calm surface reflecting our likeness.
“Finn.” I froze as my reflection warped and a vision twisted to life around me. A version of myself appeared in the mirrorlike waters. My eyes glowed silver, arms outstretched, and I unleashed a torrent of magic across Drowned, Sirens, and Mer alike, turning them all to dust.
Fear rooted me in place as Skye and Edward disintegrated before my eyes. Edward’s maroon uniform was all that remained after they’d dissolved into salt and sea. I had killed my friends... turned them to dust.
“No,” I choked. “No!”
Then my grandmother emerged from the water before me, her once-beautiful eyes hollow and her face gaunt and gray. My chest tightened as I met the empty gaze of her lifeless sockets. The air caught in my throat. I couldn’t breathe—
“It’s not real,” Finn whispered, shaking his head. “Don’t let it consume you.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pushed forward through the water. When I opened them, my grandmother’s face had vanished and we were once again moving through the dark cave, the churning ocean lapping at our sides.
I jolted as Finn cried out, recoiling as the waves around him shifted, swirling into the same reflective mirror that had taunted me. There he floated in his father’s crown, a sinister smile curving his lips as bloodied Mer were dragged before him. His eyes were empty, his jaw set. When I appeared in chains at his feet, he didn’t flinch as he commanded my death.
Finn lost his composure and shot water magic at the vision. “I will never become my father,” he snarled, his beastly form overtaking his face and claws shooting from his hands.
The sighing tides swelled as more visions slammed into us like breakers.
My pulse hammered in my ears, and the ocean blackened before me, rot threading through coral and kelp. The Captain rose from the seafloor, his face mutilated by the Fisherman’s mark. One eye socket gaped empty, the sea snake that had once filled it now gone. Whispers wound around me.The girl who failed us all.
I screwed my eyes shut and pushed through the treacherous waters. When I opened them, the vision had faded, but a new one was unfurling.
Finn, just a boy, tending to a menagerie in a seaweed glade. He’d patched a dolphin’s eye, wrapped kelp bandages around an injured seahorse, and healed turtles, fish, and starfish in soft sponge beds. His expression held none of the darkness it carried now; it was alight with happiness as he sent a now-healthy stingray on its way.
A lump rose in my throat as King Neptunus appeared. “What is this?” he thundered, lightning flashing in his eyes as he surveyed the glade.
“They were dying. I saved them,” young Finn stammered. His boyish face was hopeful for a minute, as if his father might have been proud.
“You’re a pathetic excuse for a son,” the king spat. Lightning licked his arms, and with a sweeping motion, the glade ignited in white radiance. When the magic cleared, Finn’s healing work floated lifelessly, belly-up in the current.
Finn was trembling now in the waters beside me as the vision morphed into the limp body of a purple-haired mermaid brought into the palace in his father’s arms.
Abalone.Her throat had been slit, and silvery crimson blood drifted into the water from the wound.
“No,” Finn rasped. “Mother.”
The lifeless Abalone sat up, blood still streaming from her severed neck. “You failed me, son,” she rasped.
Finn dry retched, his body convulsing in the water beside me. Tears ran down his cheeks as he summoned another surge of water magic to shatter the vision.
The more Finn fought the visions, the fiercer they became.
They were breaking him.
The imagery shifted to a new scene. Finn, a bit older now, was chained to the wall in a dungeon. I recognized it as the same one Edward and I had suffered in. His body was covered in welts—lightning welts. His father emerged in the doorway, a dark figure.
“You’re weak, boy,” he snarled, moving further into the chamber, surveying his son, his golden tail rippling in the lamplight. “You’re the reason your mother is dead. You’re always reading books, tending to your animals. If you’d been stronger, you might have protected her.” Lighting erupted from the king, and fern-like red marks ruptured on Finn’s body, opening into raw wounds as his father struck him again and again.
Finn roared at the vision. He was weeping now, his muscular chestshaking with each breath. The cave trembled as he sent lightning skittering across its walls.
My stomach tightened. I had to do something.
I grasped Finn’s clawed hand beneath the dark water. “This isn’t real,” I whispered, but my voice cracked.
Finn couldn’t hear me. He continued to cry out, lashing at the water around him.
