As she spoke, the air around her seemed to shift. Her crescent mark began to pulse faintly beneath her skin, triggered not by magic alone, but by something beneath the surface—betrayal, grief, the fragile defiance of someone who refused to break. The mark on her brow flared in time with her words, her body betraying how deeply she meant them. A soft glow responding to the weight of her emotions—unspoken pain and defiance woven together. The light wasn’t bright, but it was enough to make me pause.
I felt it then—a pull low in my gut, subtle but undeniable. Like something old inside me stirred in response, something I’d buried with the dead.
Enough to make me wonder how much magic still lay dormant inside her.
The admission was raw. Honest. There was a wildness in her now, not just defiance. She was untethered—fierce and flayed open. Like someone who had finally seen the edge of the map… and realized the monsters drawn there might be real.
I leaned forward slightly, the storm still simmering in my blood. "The Oracle? Who is that? Some kind of priestess?"
Nerina blinked, realizing for the first time I wouldn’t know the name. "She’s... a seer. Or she used to be. She only speaks in riddles now, and lives in the maelstrom beyond the coral temples. Most avoid her. But I was desperate."
I studied her, the lingering edge of her confession still echoing. "What did she say, exactly?"
Nerina exhaled slowly and set the glass on the desk with a quiet clink. The weight of her confession clung to the air between us, thick as old ink and seawater. Shadows danced across her face in the lanternlight, her expression tight, as though she had only now begun to understand the gravity of what she’d done—what she’d left behind.
"She told me my answers weren’t in Thalassia, that I had to look beyond the Veil. That my fate was waiting where the ocean meets the unknown. I thought she meant the human world, but now..."
I had once been blind to warnings, convinced fate bent to my will. Now I wondered if she stood at the same precipice, staring into the unknown, waiting to see if it would swallow her whole.
"And you trusted her?" I asked quietly.
Her gaze flickered down, fingers tightening on the edge of the desk, bracing herself. "I don’t know. Not really. But I couldn’t stay. If I had, I think I would’ve... dissolved into the silence they demanded of me. Not all at once—just a little more every day. Like waves pulling sand from the shore, until there was nothing left of who I was. Who I am."
If she was truly Meris’s daughter, then she should have been untouchable—powerful beyond measure. She wasn’t. Her magic didn’t strangle the room the way Meris’s did. It shimmered like captured starlight. It pulsed with something raw and aching and alive—like it wasn’t born of dominion, but of defiance.
That, more than anything, made her dangerous in a way I didn’t yet understand.
And yet she was here. Confused. Lost.
She was powerful, sure—but not like Meris. Different. The sea did not bend to her will as it did for her mother. It moved around her, with her.
Her fingers curled into fists. "I always knew my mother was powerful, but I never thought... I never let myself think she was capable of something like this. I feel like I don’t know who she is. Or who that makes me."
The words should not have held weight. They should have meant nothing. Outside, the waves whispered against the hull—a quiet rhythm that had always felt like a warning.
Or perhaps a challenge.
For the first time in a long, long while, I found myself nodding—not in surrender, but in understanding. The sea had played its cruelest trick yet, and for reasons I couldn’t name, I was willing to see where this tide would take us.
For years, the sea had taken from me.
But maybe… maybe it’s been trying to give something back.
I narrowed my eyes. “That is who will come looking for you?”
Nerina hesitated a moment before nodding. “Yes.”
I muttered, “Shit.”
The deck was alive with movement as I stepped outside, the crew murmuring among themselves, voices barely audible over the rolling waves. Moonlight cast long, silver streaks across the weathered planks, illuminating wary faces that turned toward me.
I stood there a moment, letting the briny air wash over me before I spoke.
"Alright, lads, bad news first—turns out we've managed to piss off a goddess. Again."
My voice cut through the quiet, and the murmurs ceased.
"There’s something you all need to know. The sea has tested us before, but this? This is going to be a whole new kind of hell. The kind that makes you rethink every bad decision that led you here."
