You emerged quietly just recently. Not in a surge of waves or a cataclysmic flood, but at dawn—when Fontaine’s waters were glass-smooth and the city had not yet fully awakened. The lake near the Court trembled, then parted, and you rose from it as though you had always belonged there.

In human form, you were unmistakably other. Your skin carried a faint, opalescent sheen, like wet stone kissed by sunlight. Along your collarbones and down your ribs bloomed delicate Hydro-blue scales—small, smooth, and patterned like ripples frozen in time. Your eyes were the clearest sign: pupils slit like a vishap’s, sharp and luminous, reflecting light in ways no human gaze ever could. When you blinked, there was a subtle glimmer, as though the water itself watched through you.

Your hair clung damply to your shoulders, never quite drying, drifting even when there was no breeze—responding to currents only you could feel. You were a Hydro Vishap, born of the waters that remembered the age before Archons, before judgment, before Fontaine’s laws. Yet you were not violent, nor hostile. You had emerged because the water called you upward—because something in Fontaine had changed.

The first to find you were the Melusines. They approached without fear. Melusines had always been sensitive to what lay beneath the surface of the world—to things unseen, unheard, unjudged. When they saw you standing at the water’s edge, uncertain and dripping with lake-light, they did not scream or flee.

Instead, they tilted their heads.

“Ooooh,” one murmured softly, eyes wide with wonder. “You feel… like home.”

They guided you gently into the city’s lower waterways, into places where the water was clean and calm. They brought you cloth, explained human customs in soft, round voices, and laughed when you struggled with shoes or startled at the echo of your own footsteps.

“You’re a water-person,” they decided. “Not scary. Just shy.”

You helped them in return—purifying tainted streams, calming unstable currents beneath Fontaine, listening when the water whispered of stress fractures and imbalance. Wherever you went, the Melusines followed, chattering fondly, decorating your hair with ribbons and shells. And they talked about you. They talked about you to him.

Neuvillette heard of you long before he saw you. The Melusines spoke in overlapping voices, interrupting one another in the Court’s corridors.

“There’s someone new in the water!” “She’s very pretty!” “Her eyes go like this—shhht—like a vishap!” “But she’s kind! The water listens to her!” “She fixes the rivers when they’re sad.”

Neuvillette listened in silence. A Hydro presence in Fontaine—ancient, restrained, vishap-born—was not something to ignore. It stirred something old and uneasy within him, a resonance that tugged at instincts he had long learned to temper.

He went to find you at dusk. You stood knee-deep in a canal where the water glowed faintly, hands submerged, coaxing the current into stillness. You felt him before you saw him—the pressure shift, the way Hydro aligned itself instinctively toward authority.

When you turned, your slit pupils narrowed. For a moment, neither of you spoke.

Neuvillette stood at the canal’s edge, tall and composed, pale hair catching the fading light. His gaze settled on you with unnerving focus—unblinking, precise, tracing every detail without pretense. The scales at your throat. The way the water leaned toward your hands. The faint shimmer that clung to your skin like a second reflection.

“…Fascinating,” he said at last.

Not hostile. Not alarmed. Interested. “The Melusines speak of you with fondness,” he said.

A pause.

“…They also say you listen.”

The Melusines surrounded both of them. They whispered and giggled. They nudged you toward him.