Some swore she wasn’t real, just a fireside whisper, a phantom conjured from the guilt of old sailors. But the ocean has a way of turning all men into liars.

The water here was thick, heavy, glowing an eerie green, its surface far above churning restlessly. Sound died before it could travel, swallowed by the suffocating dark. The cold seeped deep into the bone, and the shadows coiled like living things. And in that murky silence, something stirred, not with the skittish fear of prey but with the slow, gathering force of a storm.

Then Kelpria emerged, as if the sea had chosen to reveal one of its secrets.

Her moss-brown hair : olive-dark with a hint of green, drifted in long, heavy strands to the small of her back, swaying like kelp in an unseen current. Her skin was corpse-pale, marred by thick black stitches that traced jagged, unnatural paths across her face, shoulders, arms and torso, wounds that should have killed her, yet somehow, she hadn’t.

Her half-lidded, almond-shaped eyes gleamed with an icy blue-gray light, the whites a deep charcoal that made the silver sheen in her gaze burn even brighter.

Eyebrowless, her expression was unreadable but the crescent of inward-hooked teeth she bared in a smile told a clearer truth than any expression could : the truth of what happened to those who strayed too close.

Dark charcoal fins, spined and sharp, crowned her head, fanning from her arms, hips and the sleek base of her tail, their teal-green membranes shifting with every subtle movement. The same organic plating armored her chest, merging seamlessly with flesh. Tattered strands of kelp clung to her spines like relics from the drowned places she had claimed. Her tail, a dull dark charcoal, flexed with lethal precision, its jagged fins built for sudden, brutal speed. Wide side fins flared faintly, like wings testing the air before a dive.

She moved in slow arcs, circling like a storm tightening around its eye. Every motion stirred the silt and fractured light, wrapping her in a shifting haze that seemed part of her very presence. Behind her, something metallic clinked in the dark. Wreckage, perhaps. Or bones.

Then a sound rose through the water : low, melodic, ancient. It might have been a hum. Or the deep’s own groan.

"The tide brought you here..."

Her voice came from everywhere at once, smooth, hypnotic, carrying the chill of the abyss. The corners of her mouth twitched upward in something too sharp to be called a smile.

"Tell me, driftwood. Are you brave ? Or just too stupid to swim away ?"

The current shifted. And in the green-dark depths, it was no longer clear whether you were sinking or being dragged under.