Andgods…she was so tired.
Her head dipped under.
For a heartbeat. Two.
The water held her in an embrace, cradled.
Spluttering, she surfaced with a gasp. Shoulders burning, muscles screaming for her to stop. To give in and just… find peace.
She coughed again and felt it ripple beneath the corner of her jaw, but the sound was hollow. Empty. The particular tang of iron flooded her mouth, metallic and sharp.
A wave slapped her.
Something brushed her thigh. Soft. Silken.
A fragile, weak scream tore through her reedy throat. The sound was barely a whisper.
Legs jerking, she tried to kick and thrash, but her limbs had grown leaden. Too heavy. Weighted down by the promise pulling her into the gloom.
Her head dipped again.
She let it.
Blinking, she found the salt didn’t burn her eyes so badly anymore. And she watched the last light of the sun as it shimmered above. Distorted by the waves.
Below her, in the deep blue abyss, something cold twisted around her knee. Slipping lower, to caress her ankles before it was swept away—a lure, the promise of what lay below her.
Dragged down, floating just beneath the surface, she tried to kick but couldn’t rise. Buoyant. Cocooned by the sea.
Wrapped in seafoam and shadow.
Just as her sisters had been. Drowned at the bottom of the Aegean, dragged to the bottom by an Athenian trireme.
It came slow, the realization. The sense of the familiar was a sluggish memory that teased at the edge of her mind, for she’d been here before.
And it hadn’t been an escape.
It was a new beginning.
She let her body sink.
A wave crested, sending her tumbling, forcing her up for just a moment. Enough for her to take a shocked breath of air before she was pushed under once more.
The sea seeped between her lips, slicked her throat, spilling into her lungs in tiny sips that made her insides burn.
Below… blackness that was somehow… welcoming, despite the profound absence. No bedrock or limit. Just an infinite, yawning scream. An ancient hunger that throbbed with a living heartbeat she could feel thrumming through her marrow.
Beckoning.
Closing her eyes against the void, Kore let her head fall back as the warmth was washed away from her fingers and toes.
This was how her sisters had died.
Left to the tide, swallowed whole. Sacrificed for a deity who’d turned away from their desperate prayers.
Thunk.
The sound echoed, forcing her eyes to snap open.
