“Explain.” His voice carries the command of someone used to being obeyed. “You know what’s happening out there. You’ve known from the beginning. So tell us.”
Thalira’s laugh is like waves breaking on rocks—harsh, rhythmic, devoid of humor.
“From the beginning. You want to know the beginning?” She moves to the great table at the hall’s center, her kelp robes dragging across the flagstones. “Then sit. Listen. And pray towhatever gods you haven’t abandoned that you can survive what you’ve set in motion.”
THIRTY
AVIORA
Thalira speaks of ages before orcs walked these shores. Before humans sailed these waters. Before the Wrecktide earned its name or Dreadhaven rose from the cliffs. She speaks of a thing that existed when the world was young—a hunger born from the emptiness between stars, drawn to this coast by forces no mortal has ever understood.
“It fed on want.” Her voice is almost hypnotic, carrying us through millennia with the cadence of waves against stone. “Not flesh, not blood—want. The desire for things beyond reach. The ache for what could have been. Every sailor who looked at the horizon and yearned to know what lay beyond, every merchant who dreamed of wealth they’d never possess, every lover who mourned someone they’d lost—the hunger tasted them all. Drew them to these waters. Drank deep of their longing.”
Zoric’s fingers dig into my hip. I feel the tension radiating through him—the warrior’s instinct to fight, struggling against an enemy that can’t be cut or beaten.
“The shipwrecks.” I understand before she finishes. “The Wrecktide wasn’t natural.”
“Nothing about this coast is natural.” Thalira’s finger traces patterns on the table—sigils I don’t recognize, symbols that seemto writhe. “The hunger made it. Shaped the reefs to break ships. Called the storms that drove sailors onto rocks. Created the perfect trap for the perfect prey. For centuries, it fed freely. Grew stronger. Until it became so powerful that even the land began to warp around its appetite.”
“The guardians?—”
“Were the solution.” She meets my gaze with something that might be approval. “Centuries ago, when the coastal peoples finally understood what they faced, they found a way to bind it. Not destroy—the hunger is older than destruction, older than the concept of ending. But contain. Imprison. Lock it in the deep and feed it just enough to keep it sleeping.”
“TheSilver Fortune,”Zoric says. “The tribute ships.”
“Every thirty years.” Thalira nods. “A ship loaded with gold—the metal that carries want better than any other substance, sails over the deepest point of the Wrecktide and sunk deliberately. An offering. A pacifier. The hunger fed on the concentrated desire in that gold and slept another generation.”
“But Oreth?—”
“Stole from the hunger. And for years, the ancient thing stirred in its prison, growing angrier, growing more restless.” Thalira’s expression hardens. “Your destruction of Oreth should have helped. Should have freed the stolen gold, let the hunger feed, let it sleep again. Instead?—”
“Instead, we fed it hundreds of people.” I finish her sentence, my voice hollow. “We gave it more than gold. We gave it lives. Souls. And now?—”
“Now it’s awake.” Thalira’s confirmation falls like a hammer. “Truly awake, for the first time in centuries. The guardians you saw were its prison keepers—bound spirits tasked with containing it, keeping it dormant. Your sailors were the key that unlocked the door. And now the hunger walks free.”
The quiet that follows is absolute. I can hear my own heartbeat, too fast, too loud. Can hear Zoric’s breathing beside me, carefully controlled. Can hear, if I strain, the distant crash of waves against cliffs—waves that no longer sound like water. That sound like something else. Something hungry.
“What does it want?” Brek’s voice breaks the stillness—young, scared, but brave enough to ask what no one else will.
Thalira’s smile is terrible.
“Everything. It wants everything, young one. Every ship that sails these waters. Every village along this coast. Every heart that beats with longing within reach of its influence.” Her storm-cloud eyes sweep the hall. “The Wrecktide was its cage. Now the cage is open. And unless someone closes it again?—”
“We’re all dead.” Margit’s weathered voice carries the flat acceptance of someone who’s lived too long to be surprised by disaster.
“Worse than dead.” Thalira corrects. “The hunger doesn’t kill. It consumes. Takes your wanting and makes it part of itself. You’d spend eternity as a fragment of its appetite, longing for things you can never have, feeding its emptiness with your own.” She pauses. “Death would be mercy. The hunger doesn’t deal in mercy.”
I findmyself on the cliff’s edge.
I don’t remember leaving the Great Hall. Don’t remember climbing the wall walk or crossing the crumbling battlements to this spot where the stone drops away into darkness. One moment, I was listening to Thalira describe horrors, the next I’m here—standing at the precipice, watching the Wrecktide churn with light that shouldn’t exist.
The water is wrong now. Even from this height, I can see it. The phosphorescence that used to hint at supernatural presence now blazes openly, pulsing in waves that spread outward from the deep channel where theSilver Fortunelies. Where Gyla’s fleet died. Where hundreds of souls became fuel for something that should have stayed sleeping.
Ships are sinking.
I count three—maybe four—beyond the normal reef line. Merchant vessels, from their silhouettes. Fishing boats, from their size. All of them listing, taking on water, their crews visible as tiny figures scrambling for lifeboats that won’t save them. The hunger is already spreading, reaching beyond its old hunting grounds, claiming waters that were safe yesterday.
How far will it go?
