Then another passage caught my eye—one different from the rest, marked only by two simple words:
I Promised.
She warned me—power taken from the sea demands a price. I thought I was ready to pay it. I was wrong.
He had lost something—or perhaps he had been losing himself over the years.
The words underneath were unlike any other. The ink was darker, the pressure of the pen tearing slightly through the parchment, as though the weight of what he was writing had made his hand unsteady.
I never wanted to be like him. I swore I wouldn’t. He chased myths until they hollowed him. I chased salvation—and instead, I cursed us all. The sea doesn’t care for promises. It only knows hunger—and now, it has her scent.
I swallowed hard, pulse quickening. The ambiguity gnawed at me. Was he speaking of me? The idea lodged in my chest like a hook. If the sea had my scent—if it was me the hunger had latched onto—then I was part of whatever darkness haunted him.
My fingers trembled. Nausea coiled low in my stomach. His pain was woven into every line, but it wasn’t just grief.
It was guilt.
I reached for the decanter on the desk. The water pitcher was empty. My throat still felt parched, my body still ached with an emptiness I couldn’t explain. I poured a glass of rum anddowned it in a single gulp, relishing the burn as it slid down my throat.
But it did nothing to quench the thirst. I poured another.
And another. And another.
The journal blurred. My thoughts floated like driftwood—unmoored, drifting. The thirst clawed at me, insistent and unyielding, but beneath it came something worse: a burning deep in my chest, magic turning restless beneath my skin, as though it wanted out. My vision sparked with spots of light.
The decanter was empty.
Frustration twisted in my gut. I needed more—water, rum, anything to silence the hollow ache inside before it consumed me.
Pushing myself upright, a cold sweat broke across my skin. The floor rolled beneath me like an unsteady deck, walls warping and stretching with each blink. My knees buckled, muscles shaking with effort as I staggered toward the door, the air thick in my lungs. My fingers curled around the handle just as my vision swam, darkness creeping in at the edges.
Then the world tilted—my body too dry to sweat, too empty to hold me upright. The thirst eclipsed everything. My limbs went weightless, vision narrowing to a pinprick of light—
20
Alaric
The Black Marrow
I barely had time to register what was happening before Garen was on his knees beside Nerina, his hands hovering over her unmoving form. Her skin, once luminous and smooth, now cracked beneath my touch—dry as coral, brittle as a shell left too long in the sun. Her glow, once a steady pulse beneath her skin, had dimmed to a flicker—weak, fading. Her lips—cracked and bleeding—parted slightly; she had been trying to speak before she lost consciousness.
I fell beside him, reaching for her hand. Too cold. Too still.
My jaw clenched, an uneasy weight settling in my gut. A knot twisted in my chest—raw, unfamiliar, something dangerously close to fear. I’d seen bodies break, seen men torn apart by sea and sword, but this? This felt personal.
Intimate. Like the sea had reached through me to take her. And the thought of losing her—of watching her wither away under my watch—left a bitter taste in my mouth.
"She’s needin’ water," Garen muttered, voice strained.
I barely heard him over the dull roar in my ears. The tang of salt and sweat clung to the air, thick and suffocating. My hands curled into fists.
How had I let this happen?
I am the captain. I should have known. Should have seen the signs before she reached this point. She’d been aboard for weeks—long enough for the signs to show. The exhaustion in her movements. The slow fade of her brilliance. The way her breaths had grown shallower each day. But there’s no damned handbook for this—no How to Care For Your Mermaidguide tucked away in the captain’s quarters.
"Get me water. All of it," I barked, my voice slicing through the tense silence. "Buckets, barrels—I don’t care if you drain the damn sea. Move!"
The crew, for once, moved without question. Heavy boots hammered the deck. Seawater sloshed in buckets. It all blurred together as someone hauled up the old wooden soaking basin we used for salting rope coils. It wasn’t meant for this, but it was large, watertight, and the only thing big enough to hold a mermaid.
