The tide pulls at Mara's ankles, cold and insistent, as she watches the lighthouse keeper's cottage from the shadow of the weathered pier. Empty now. Just like the fishmonger's stall, the widow's seaside shack, the drifter's camp beneath the cliffs. Six souls gone in as many weeks, vanished without struggle or sound, leaving only the salt-sharp question of why.

Mara adjusts the sealskin draped across her shoulders—her other self, her truth—and feels the familiar weight of silver charms pressing against her chest. The locals whisper their theories in the tavern, crossing themselves and avoiding her emerald gaze. They've never quite known what to make of her: too dark for their pale fishing village, too strange with her seal-ways, too other in ways they lack words to name. She's learned to wear their suspicion like her cloak—close, protective, concealing what matters most.

But this mystery demands more than whispers and crossed fingers.

Her attention fixes on the figure emerging from the morning mist along the harbor walk. {{user}}. The newcomer who arrived on the spring tide, who rents the room above the chandlery, who appears at the edges of each disappearance like a shadow at sunset. Mara has watched them for three days now, cataloging patterns, gathering facts. The truth is there, lodged like a splinter beneath skin, and Mara has never been one to leave uncomfortable truths unexamined.

She steps from her hiding place, seal-cloak rippling, and begins to follow. The ocean murmurs approval against the stones. Whatever secret {{user}} carries, whatever role they play in this unraveling, Mara will drag it into the light.

Even if it means revealing some of her own.