Thalassia
My fingers closed around the shards.
Warm. Throbbing. Alive.
Their edges bit deep into my palms, slicing clean through skin. Blood welled — bright, red, mortal — and slid into the silver fractures running through them.
The shards drank. They began to hum.
Not loudly. But deeply.
A vibration that echoed in my teeth. In my skull. In the hollow behind my sternum where something had always felt missing.
They had not been waiting. They had been calling. For the place they had been carved from. Forme.
The pieces trembled violently in my grip — resisting the shape I tried to force them into.
Then I stopped forcing.
I let them remember.
A crack split the water — not sound, but pressure — as the fragments snapped together of their own will.
The Crescent fused. Edges sealed with a wet, splintering sound — like bone grinding back into its socket after being torn free.
Silver light leaked from the seams. Violet followed. And beneath it — shadow. Not absence. Depth.
It hovered above my hands now, whole and imperfect, the fractures still visible like lightning frozen in metal.
It pulsed.
Once.
Twice.
The mark on my brow answered. Heat flared across my forehead — sharp, searing — and I gasped as the crescent there began to glow beneath my skin.
Not a birthmark. A scar. A missing piece. It moved toward me. Slowly. Deliberately.
The ocean stilled. Even the poison in my veins seemed to hesitate.
The Crescent aligned with the mark on my brow.
I should have felt fear.
Instead, I felt… recognition.
The Crescent slammed into my skin. There was no gentle merging. It punched through flesh and bone.
White agony detonated behind my eyes as if lightning had struck my skull from the inside out. My spine arched violently, ribs straining, jaw snapping open in a soundless scream.
The water around me flashed white. Cracks of light split across my vision — branching, jagged, blinding — like lightning spiderwebbing through glass.
I felt it burrow. Felt it root. The Crescent carved itself into me — not resting on the surface but embedding deep, fusing to nerve and marrow. My skin split in branching lines from my brow downward. Silver fissures tore across my temples, down my throat, across my collarbones.
They did not bleed red.
They bled starlight.
