Around us, the guards are forming defensive positions, blocking entrances, preparing for the assault that must be coming. Thorne moves among them, issuing orders, keeping discipline. My people. My responsibility.
And in the harbor below, visible through the shattered windows, Oreth’s fleet waits. Four ghost ships anchored in the churning water, their decks empty now because their crews are already inside our walls.
“We need to evacuate.” The words taste like surrender. “Get to the boats, make for the mainland?—”
“And leave him with the hoard?” Aviora’s voice sharpens. “With access to every coastal village between here and Saltmere?”
“Better that than dying here for nothing.”
“It won’t be nothing.” She grabs my arm again, harder this time. Forces me to look at her instead of the devastation around us. “We stick to the plan. Get to the caves, overload the curse, end this.”
“The caves are flooded.”
“Then we swim.”
She says it like it’s simple. Like diving into cursed water, surrounded by the drowned, is just another obstacle to overcome. Like the woman in front of me hasn’t already survived more than anyone should have to.
“Zoric.” Her voice softens. Her hand moves from my arm to my face, palm rough against my jaw. “If we run, he follows. If we fight here, we lose. The only chance is in the water.”
“His territory.”
“But also where the hoard is. Where we can hurt him.” Her eyes hold mine. Fierce. Resolute. Unwavering. “You know I’m right.”
I do know. That’s the worst part. Every tactical instinct tells me to run, to preserve what forces we have, to fight another day. But there won’t be another day. Oreth has been building toward this for years. If we flee now, he’ll hunt us across the coast. He’ll take village after village, growing stronger with every soul he claims.
The only way to stop him is to end him in the waters where I made him.
“The underwater passages.” The words come out slowly. “There’s a route from the harbor to the deep caves—takes you past most of the reefs. I used it when I sealed the hoard.”
“Can you find it again?”
“In the dark? In flooded tunnels full of the dead?” I let out a breath. “Maybe. If we’re fast enough.”
“Then we’re fast enough.”
She makes it sound so certain. So simple. And standing here, with her hand on my face and her body close enough to feel her heat, I almost believe it.
“The coins in the vault,” I say. “We’ll need to retrieve them first. And we’ll need?—”
Glass explodes inward.
The windows behind me shatter in a spray of shards and spray, something massive crashing through them with force that sends guards flying. I’m moving before I think, shoving Aviora behind me, blade coming up to face whatever?—
It lands in a crouch. Water streams from its form, pooling on the flagstones in a spreading stain. Bigger than a man. Bigger than me. Shaped wrong, limbs too long, proportions twisted by the curse that animates it.
When it rises, I see the face.
Young. Human. Features preserved with the same terrible clarity as Oreth’s, though this one shows different signs of time in the deep. Barnacles cluster at his temples. Seaweed tangles in hair that might once have been brown. His eyes glow with that cold curse-light, empty of everything except hunger.
I don’t recognize him. But Aviora does.
“Finn.” Her voice cracks. The name comes out broken, raw, the sound of something shattering behind her composure.
The thing wearing Finn’s face turns toward her. Its empty eyes find hers across the chaos. And it smiles.
“Hello, love.” The voice is wrong—wet and resonant, carrying harmonics no human throat should produce. But the words are tender. Intimate. The words of a lover greeting someone he’s missed. “You cut your hair shorter after the voyage. I liked it longer.”
Aviora doesn’t move. Doesn’t breathe. I can feel her behind me, frozen in a way I’ve never seen—the survivor who escaped the drowned reduced to stillness by a face from her past.
