The Finn-shape screams.
The sound isn’t human—has never been human—a wail of frustrated hunger that shakes theFortune’s hull and sends tremors through the water around us. The projection fractures, falls apart, pieces of Finn’s face dissolving into light that has no warmth, no comfort, no desire to feed.
“I forgive myself.” I say it again, louder. A declaration to the darkness. “I forgive myself for surviving. I forgive myself for choosing to live. I forgive myself?—”
The hunger attacks.
THIRTY-FIVE
AVIORA
It doesn’t wear Finn’s shape anymore.
What rises from theFortune’s deck is something older—something that predates human memory that fed on wanting before anyone understood what wanting meant. A mass of shadow and light, tentacles of luminescent hunger reaching toward us with the desperate strength of something starving.
Zoric moves before I can react.
His cutlass arcs through the water, severing a tentacle that was reaching for my throat. The limb dissolves on contact—not cut, exactly, but disrupted. As if the blade represents something the hunger can’t consume.
Love. The thought surfaces through my fear. Loyalty, devotion, and the refusal to give up. Things the hunger doesn’t understand.
“Keep going!” Zoric’s voice reaches me through the chaos. He’s fighting now—really fighting, his massive form a blur of motion as he cuts and parries and defends. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop!”
The hunger lunges at me again. I dodge, barely, feeling something cold and empty brush past my face. Its touch leavesnumbness in its wake—not physical cold but absence. The void where wanting lives.
I close my eyes.
Finn.
The memory surfaces unbidden. The first time I saw him, I was a seventeen-year-old dock rat with nothing to my name, watching this confident young man talk his way onto a salvage crew like he belonged there. Like he’d been born for this life.
“You could do this too.” He’d noticed me watching. Crossed the dock to crouch beside me, meeting my eyes without judgment or pity. “You’re quick. You’re strong. You’re not afraid of water.” A smile that crinkled the corners of his eyes. “That’s more than half the people on this coast can say.”
The thought rises with the memory—not guilt this time. Just truth. Pure and simple and devastating.
The hunger screams again. I feel it recoil from the memory—not from the love itself, but from what I’m doing with it. I’m not mourning. I’m not regretting. I’m just... remembering. Accepting. Letting the love exist without letting it drown me.
Another tentacle sweeps toward me. Zoric intercepts it, his blade flashing silver in the phosphorescent light. He’s bleeding—a cut on his arm, another on his chest—but he doesn’t slow down. Doesn’t stop fighting. My warrior. My protector. The man who loves me without trying to save me from myself.
More memories.
Finn teaching me to read currents. The particular way he laughed when I mastered a skill faster than he expected. Arguments over routes and risks, reconciliations that left us tangled in narrow ship bunks. The life we built, piece by piece, from nothing but determination and shared wanting.
I loved all of it. I don’t regret any of it. And losing it?—
“It wasn’t my fault.” I say it out loud. Not just to myself. To the hunger. To Finn’s ghost. To everyone I’ve been running fromfor years. “The storm wasn’t my fault. The shipwreck wasn’t my fault. Swimming for the surface—choosing to live—that wasn’t betrayal.”
The hunger convulses. Its form destabilizes further, tentacles dissolving, mass diminishing. It’s feeding on my memories—I can feel them being consumed as I release them—but what it’s getting isn’t what it needs. Forgiveness instead of guilt. Acceptance instead of regret. Food that poisons instead of nourishes.
“You can have the story.” I open my arms, offering myself to the ancient want. “You can have every memory I carry. But you can’t have the pain anymore. That’s not yours to take.”
The hunger lunges.
This time, I don’t dodge.
The impact drives me backward,pins me against theFortune’s mast.
I feel the ancient want pressing into me—not physically, but spiritually. Searching for guilt. Searching for regret. Searching for the endless cycle ofif-onlyandwhat-ifthat’s sustained it for millennia.
