The words struck her with the force of a physical blow. Return. Leave her. The marble floor felt like ice beneath her bare feet. This beautiful house, this safety, this life - it was all temporary. He would be gone, and she would be alone again. The thought was a black chasm opening up beneath her.
“No,” she said, the word a raw, ragged sound. “There has to be a way. Another ritual? More blood?” Her own blood, she meant. She would give anything.
He rose to his full, intimidating height, a monolith of shadow against the sea and sky. He watched her, his head tilted slightly, as if observing a fascinating, predictable specimen.
“My stay can be extended,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, careful murmur. “The anchor can be renewed. But not with your blood. Your judgment has been rendered.” He took a slow step toward her. “Unless,” he paused, letting the word hang in the air between them, heavy with unspoken meaning, “another judgment is rendered.”
She looked at his beautiful, inhuman face, and she understood. The full, monstrous weight of his words crashed down on her. To keep him, to keep this life, the cycle had to continue. Another desperate woman. Another abusive man. Another sacrifice. Another soul erased from the world. She had to become a conduit for this dark justice. She had to choose a target.
A wave of nausea washed over her. The taste of bile rose in her throat. She stumbled backward, her hand flying to her mouth.
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. The single word was all she could manage. She backed away from him until her shouldershit the cold marble wall. She saw not her protector, her lover, but a predator dangling the ultimate temptation. “I won’t. I can’t become that. I won’t be a monster.”
She expected him to press, to threaten, to unleash the terrifying power she knew he possessed. Instead, his expression softened. The cold, calculating light in his eyes was replaced by something that looked, impossibly, like respect. He took a single step toward her, then stopped when he saw her flinch away, a deeper shadow crossing his face. He held up a hand, not to command her, but in a gesture of peace, honoring the chasm she had just opened between them.
The days that followed her refusal were steeped in a strange and aching tenderness. The charged, electric current of physical desire that had defined their interactions was gone, replaced by something quieter, deeper, and infinitely more dangerous to her resolve. Maruz became a devoted, gentle curator of her new existence. He no longer touched her with possessive heat, but with a reverence that felt far more intimate. He would leave a single, perfect nautilus shell on her pillow, its inner chambers still whispering the secrets of the deep. He conjured a garden behind the house where impossible flowers bloomed, their petals the color of twilight, their scent a memory of a world before men.
He began to teach her to see beyond the veil of the mortal world. Each evening, as the sun bled into the horizon, he would lead her down to the shoreline. “The borders between worlds are thin at this hour,”he told her, his voice a low murmur against the sigh of the surf. “Don’t look directly. Look from the corner of your eye. See the world’s echo.”
At first, she saw nothing but the waves turning from sapphire to liquid bronze. But she trusted him. She relaxed her gaze, letting the world soften at its edges as he instructed. And then she saw it. A shimmer in the air over the water, a faint, pearlescent overlay on reality. Ghostly, phosphorescent shapes of immense sea creatures, long extinct, swam through the air as if the ocean levels were hundreds of feet higher. The wet sand at her feet held not just her footprints, but the faint, glowing impressions of things that had walked this shore a thousand years before. The experience was breathtaking, terrifying, and profoundly beautiful. It felt like being let in on the universe’s most guarded secret.
These moments bound her to him more tightly than any embrace. They were shared conspiracies against a mundane world, their reality a private language no one else could ever understand.
Sometimes, as dusk gathered around them, he would speak in a voice like ancient wood of his time as Siklab, before foreign ships breached the horizon and changed everything. “They built their stone churches on our sacred ground. They taught the people to fear the night, to fear the forests, to fear themselves. A spirit cannot live without faith, Lina. To be forgotten is a death of a thousand cuts. The prayers stopped. The offerings rotted. I was... unmade. Wounded by their blades and their iron faith. I became a vessel for all the rage and pain of a dying world. I was not born a demon. I was made one.”
His story settled over her, not as a myth, but as a shared history of violation. The same forces that had twisted him from a god into a monster had created the world she was born into, a world where men like her husband used the same foreign god’s name to justify theircruelty. He was not an evil entity she had summoned from a pit; he was a casualty of the same war, a brother in a centuries-long line of victims.
An agonizing empathy bloomed in her chest. All at once, her moral clarity felt like a luxury, a petty righteousness in the face of his monumental suffering. What was the soul of one more worthless man against the slow extinction of a being like him?
The thought was a venomous snake, and she recoiled from it. But it was too late. The seed had been planted.
That night, she couldn’t sleep. The moon was a sliver short of full, a swollen, pregnant orb in the sky. One more day. Panic was a physical thing, a cold pressure building behind her sternum. She turned on her side and watched him. He stood by the vast window, a motionless silhouette against the moonlight on the water. He was pretending not to notice her watching him, and she was pretending to be asleep.
His form was less stable than ever. At the edges of his silhouette, the air shimmered, his outline blurring and resolving like a faulty projection. He looked like a memory fighting to hold its shape. And in the oppressive silence of their beautiful, conjured room, all Lina could hear was the frantic, desperate ticking of a clock that only she could hear, counting down the last hours of her salvation.
The sun bled into the sea, painting the horizon with violent streaks of orange and purple. They walked in silence along the water’s edge, where each wave surrendered to the shore with a sound like someoneletting go their final breath. Lina couldn’t stop counting the hours. By the night of the full moon, everything would end.
“The house will remain,” Maruz said, his voice the low rumble of distant thunder. “It is a part of the bargain. Your safety is guaranteed.”
“My safety from what?” Lina asked, her voice quiet. “When the thing I’m afraid of is you leaving.” She kept her eyes fixed on the horizon, not daring to look at him. To look at him was to see the shimmering at his edges, the constant, heartbreaking reminder that he was becoming a ghost before her eyes.
“You are stronger than you were, Lina. You have tasted power. You will not be a victim again.”
“I don’t want to be strong,” she whispered, the words stolen by the wind. “I want to be with you.”
The confession hung in the air, fragile and final. Before he could respond, a movement down the beach caught her eye. A man was setting up a tripod, his back to them, a large camera with a telephoto lens pointed at the dramatic cloud formations over the water. He was tall, white, dressed in expensive-looking technical clothing that marked him as a tourist as surely as a brand. The sight of him was a jarring intrusion on their sacred, finite time.
He must have felt their presence, for he turned, and a wide, friendly smile spread across his face. He packed up his gear with an easy efficiency and walked toward them, his long strides eating up the distance on the sand.
“Sorry to intrude,” he said as he drew near, his English tinged with a distinct American accent. He shifted his expensive camera in his hands. “Mind if I snap a few shots from this vantage point? It’s for a little book I’m putting together.” His eyes, a surprising shade of green, landed on Lina and stayed there, his smile brightening with anentirely different kind of interest. “My name’s Michael Richardson by the way.”
“Lina,” she replied, her voice barely audible. Beside her, Maruz went rigid. Only Lina could detect the subtle shift in his posture, the way power gathered around him like an electrical charge before lightning strikes. Michael’s gaze passed over where Maruz stood without a flicker of recognition - the man was utterly blind to the presence looming at her side.
“Lina,” Michael repeated, tasting the name. “That’s beautiful. I’m a writer, sort of an anthropologist. I’m researching the folklore of the region. Utterly fascinating.” His hands moved with practiced efficiency over the tripod’s joints as he kept his eyes on Lina, words flowing without pause. “I’ve been hearing the most incredible stories about the old spirits, the guardians of the islands.Engkato, they call them. This very spot was supposedly home to one of the most powerful ones, according to the locals. That’s why I’m getting these shots. I bet you’ve heard all the stories growing up here.” His eyes darted to the house visible on the cliff above. “Beautiful place. Must get lonely though, all the way out here by yourself?”
Lina’s breath caught in her throat. She could feel the pressure in the air changing, the atmospheric pressure dropping as if a typhoon was about to make landfall. Maruz was utterly still beside her, a statue carved from gathering shadow.
The word “Engkato” landed like a stone in still water, ripples of alarm spreading through her body.
