Edmonds’s gaze snapped to me one last time. And in it, I saw the final lesson the sea had carved into flesh: obsession didn’t make a man powerful.
It made him alone.
His knees hit the dock.
Rain hit his face like a baptism he didn’t deserve.
His hand loosened around the conch. It slipped from his grip and fell, clacking against the wood—unbroken only because it had already been broken.
Edmonds looked at it as if he expected it to speak now out of pity.
It didn’t.
His lips trembled. Not with fear.
With the realization that the sea didn’t care.
That the deep didn’t reward devotion.
That Atlantis had knelt, and he had spent his entire life worshipping the thing that they died for.
His gaze drifted toward the end of the dock—toward where Morwenna had vanished into the rain.
For the first time, his voice softened. “Mother…”
But Morwenna wasn’t there anymore. She was free.
Edmonds swallowed, blood bubbling at his lips.
Then he exhaled, and it sounded like surrender.
His eyes went glassy.
And Captain Edmonds—clinical, brilliant, obsessive—fell forward into the wet wood and did not move again.
For several seconds, no one spoke.
The rain was the only sound.
It hit the dock, hit the sea, hit our shoulders, sliding down our faces so no one could tell whose wetness was weather and whose was grief.
Bash’s arm slid around me, strong and steady. He didn’t say anything—he simply held me upright when I realized my legs had gone numb.
Oscar lowered the pistol.
His face didn’t change.
But his eyes did something—flickered, just once, with the crack of pain.
He looked at Edmonds’s body and whispered, “That’s for Inu.”
Then he turned and went back onto the Wraith.
My heart broke all over again because I’d never seen him so broken. He was a walking corpse with only his memories to both torture and comfort him.
I was learning, slowly, what the sea taught without mercy: there were monsters in the deep, and there were monsters in men, and sometimes grief made you both.
My gaze fell to the conch lying in the rain.
