A boat. After what happened to Gyla’s fleet, after the horrors we witnessed rising from the deep—a boat.
I hit the corridor at a run, Aviora close behind. Her feet are still bare, my shirt still hanging loose on her frame, but she’s grabbed a knife from somewhere and her expression has hardened into the survivor I first met on my shore. We take the stairs two at a time, burst out onto the wall walk overlooking the harbor.
The boat is small. A fishing vessel, single-masted, riding low in the water. It shouldn’t have made it through the Wrecktide—not with the hunger awake, not with the reefs more dangerousthan they’ve ever been. But here it is, slipping through the harbor mouth with unnatural ease, its sail hanging limp despite the morning breeze.
One figure stands at the bow.
Even from this distance, I can see there’s something wrong with how it moves. Too still. Too deliberate. Like a puppet being operated by hands that don’t quite understand human motion.
“Get the guards.” My voice is calm, controlled—the captain giving orders, not the man who was holding Aviora on his lap an hour ago. “Everyone armed. Prepare for?—”
“Wait.” Aviora’s hand closes on my arm. Her grip is painful, her fingers digging into muscle, her whole body rigid. “Zoric. Wait.”
I follow her gaze back to the boat. The figure has lifted its head, showing a face I’ve never seen before.
But Aviora has.
“Finn.” His name escapes her like a prayer or a curse—I can’t tell which. “That’s... that’s Finn.”
We meetthe boat at the quay.
Thorne wanted to send guards. I wanted to send guards. But Aviora insisted—this is hers to face, she said. Whatever’s wearing Finn’s face, whatever message it carries, she needs to hear it herself.
So it’s just the three of us when the boat scrapes against the stone. The figure climbs out with movements that are almost right—a young man’s body, fit and capable, dark hair falling across a face that must have been handsome when it was alive. His skin has the pallor of drowning, pale and faintlyluminescent. His eyes glow with the same hungry light that pulses in the Wrecktide’s depths.
He isn’t drowned. Isn’t a wraith, like Oreth’s crew. This is something else—something wearing a corpse the way a man might wear a borrowed coat.
“Aviora.” The voice is wrong too. It has Finn’s cadence, probably, the particular rhythm she would recognize from years of partnership. But beneath it runs something older. Colder. The patient hunger of deep water and endless want.
“You’re not Finn.” Her voice holds steady—barely. I can feel her trembling where her shoulder presses against my arm, but she doesn’t retreat. Doesn’t look away. “Whatever you are, you’re not him.”
“I’m what’s left of him.” The Finn-thing smiles, and the expression is almost right. Almost warm. “His memories. His wanting. The parts that didn’t quite dissolve when the sea took him.” A pause. “The parts that have been feeding me for years.”
My hand tightens on my cutlass. “You’re the hunger.”
“A piece of it.” Those glowing eyes swing to meet mine, and I feel the assessment in them—ancient, calculating, utterly inhuman. “The piece that learned to think from all the thoughts I’ve consumed. The piece that decided negotiation might work better than force.”
“Negotiation.” Aviora’s laugh is brittle. “You’ve destroyed five ships. Killed hundreds of people. And now you want to negotiate?”
“I want to sleep.” The Finn-thing’s voice carries something that might be weariness—if something that old could feel tired. “I want what I had before your pirate captain stole from me. Before his curse disturbed my rest. Before you fed me enough lives to wake me fully.” Another smile, this one sharper. “You created this problem, girl. But I’m offering you a solution.”
“We’re listening.” I step forward, putting myself between Aviora and the thing wearing her dead lover’s face. “What do you want?”
“What I’ve wanted all along.” The Finn-thing spreads its hands—a human gesture, badly executed. “Want. Longing. The ache of desire unfulfilled. I feed on the gap between what is and what could be, and nothing feeds me better than grief.”
“You want her grief.” Understanding hits me like a boarding axe to the chest. “You want her memories of Finn.”
“I want the story of what she lost.” The hunger’s gaze slides past me to find Aviora. “You carry him in your heart, girl. His voice. His touch. The burden of what you had and what you threw away when you swam for the surface. Give me that story—let me consume it completely—and I’ll have enough to sleep again. Centuries of rest, fed by decades of your guilt.”
Aviora’s fingers close around mine. Squeeze until my bones grind against each other.
“You want me to forget him.”
“I want you to release him.” The Finn-thing takes a step closer, and I raise my cutlass in warning. It ignores the blade entirely. “He’s been drowning in you for years, Aviora. Every time you remember his face, he feels the water closing over him again. Every time you blame yourself for his death, he dies a little more. You think you’re honoring his memory. You’re just extending his suffering.”
“That’s a lie.”
“It’s the truth of what I am.” Another step. Close enough now that I can see the individual scales of luminescence on its skin, the way light pulses through veins that no longer carry blood. “I am made of wanting. And I know—I know—how much you want to stop hurting. How much you want to put down the guilt you’ve been carrying. I’m offering you that chance.”
