I surface briefly at one of the bioluminescent marker stones, checking its glow. The blue-green light pulses steadily—territory claimed, boundary enforced. The blockade holds. No surface vessels have passed in three days, and the Sky-dwellers’ settlements downstream must be feeling the pressure by now.
Good. Let them feel it.
The thought should bring satisfaction. Instead, it sits heavy in my chest like a stone I can’t quite swallow.
I believe in protecting our waters. I believe in the borders that have kept us safe for generations. But Caspian’s aggression lately... it troubles me in ways I can’t quite name. We’ve always been isolationists, not conquerors. We hide from the surface world because contact brings contamination, brings sickness, brings death.
I know this better than most.
The current shifts, and I let it carry me deeper into the delta, toward a place I visit too often and not often enough.
The underwater cairnrises from the riverbed like a small mountain of grief.
River stones, carefully stacked and weighted with enchantments to keep them in place against the current. Mira’s resting place. My sister’s grave.
I shift to my more human form as I approach, needing hands to touch the stones, needing a throat that can speak her name. The water is cold here, deep enough that the sun barely penetrates, but I welcome the chill. It keeps me sharp. Keeps me remembering.
“Mira.”
The name leaves my lips in a stream of bubbles that rise toward the distant light. She always wanted to follow them, those bubbles. Always wanted to see what waited above the surface.
“What’s the sky like, Torin? Is it really as big as they say? Do the birds truly fly without water to hold them up?”
I close my eyes against the memory. She was twelve when she started asking. Fourteen when she started sneaking to the surface. Fifteen when she got sick.
Surface sickness, the healers called it. Contamination from the world above—their air, their water, their poison seeping into her blood. She wasted away over six months, her scales losing their luster, her gills struggling to process even the cleanest water we could find. I held her hand at the end, when she was too weak to squeeze back.
“I just wanted to see,” she’d whispered, her voice barely a ripple. “I just wanted to know.”
She died reaching for a world that killed her.
I press my palm against the cairn’s highest stone, feeling the cold weight of it. This is why I guard the borders. This is why I became a Sentinel. The surface world is poison, and my sister is proof. Every Sky-dweller who crosses our territory is a threat, whether they know it or not. They carry death in their wake.
But lately, a voice I can’t silence has started to wonder.
Was it the surface that killed her? Or was it our isolation that kept our healers from seeking help?
I shove the thought down deep, where I keep all the things I can’t afford to feel. It doesn’t matter now. Mira is dead, and nothing—not doubt, not questions, not the ache in my chest that never quite fades—will bring her back.
A vibration pulses through the water. Summons. Caspian wants me.
I touch the cairn one last time, then push off toward the surface.
The hidden grottois one of Caspian’s favorite meeting places—a pocket of air trapped behind a waterfall, invisible from the surface, accessible only to those who know where to look.
I pull myself onto the slick stones and shift fully human, water streaming from my hair and skin. Caspian is already here, pacing the narrow strip of rock like a caged predator. His silver hair catches the dim light filtering through the waterfall, and his eyes—once kind, before grief hollowed them out—burn with something I’ve learned to recognize as dangerous certainty.
“Sentinel.” He doesn’t turn to face me. “Report.”
“The blockade holds. No vessels have passed. The marker stones are stable.” I hesitate. “The downstream settlements will be suffering. Their water supply depends on the river.”
“Good.” The word is sharp as a blade. “Let them suffer. Let them remember what they’ve taken from us.”
“Elder, with respect—they haven’t taken anything. The settlements downstream have never?—”
“Haven’t they?” Now he turns, and the rage in his face makes me take an involuntary step back. “Their dams. Their pollution. Their endless expansion into waters that were ours for a thousand years. My children drowned when their dam burst, Sentinel. My son. My daughter. Swept away in a wall of water released because the surface-dwellers couldn’t be bothered to maintain their structures properly.”
I say nothing. What can I say? His grief is real, even if his conclusions are... extreme.
