This was different. I felt it to the marrow. Not salvation, exactly. But something real. Something meant.
Why?
That question pulsed louder than the artifact itself.
Something this old, this alive, might be strong enough to break a curse. My curse.
Or maybe the sea wasn’t offering reprieve.
Maybe it was offering judgment. More torment. A cruel joke. I didn’t just believe it would save me.
I needed it to.
I was chasing an end—to the hunger, to the leash, to the slow erosion of whatever humanity I had left.
“Plot a course,” I ordered. “The Forgotten Trench.”
They called it the place where time drowned. Where even gods refused to look. Sailors swore the pressure crushed more than bone—it crushed memory. Identity. Will.
Those who returned were never whole. Garen gave me a look. “Captain?”
“Again.”
The crew would think I was chasing ghosts. One whispered a prayer under his breath. Another wouldn’t meet my eye. The Forgotten Trench wasn’t a destination.
It was a dare the sea didn’t expect you to take.
But something in that vision—the crescent, the girl, the sea itself—told me I wasn’t wrong. The artifact didn’t just call to me.
It pointed me somewhere.
Back to the place where it all began. The place where we were cursed. Where the ocean stopped whispering and started screaming.
The Forgotten Trench wasn’t just memory—it was the key. That scar in the ocean, so deep even light refused to enter, was more than the site of our damnation.
It was a graveyard of secrets.
A place where magic pooled and twisted, where the veil between the living and the drowned thinned. I’d felt something shift there once, in the moment before the curse—a crack in the sea’s silence.
Something else had been watching. Waiting.
This wasn’t just a fragment of power. It was a map.
A sign.
A reckoning.
The trench had swallowed my humanity once—ripped it from me like a tide pulling flesh from bone. But this time, I wasn’t returning empty-handed.
Now, I will take something back. Answers.
Power.
Redemption—or ruin. Something.
Anything.
3
