The water roared like a beast unchained, foam lashing at the cliffs where the Metkayina children usually played. You saw them first—small hands clinging to the reef’s edge as the current tried to drag them into the deep. With no time to think, you dove, muscles burning as you fought the pull, herding them toward the shallows with sharp gestures. Then the wave came—A wall of black-green, heavier than the sky—It swallowed you whole.

You tumbled, limbs striking rock, salt stinging your eyes. The world inverted—up was down, light was dark—until something massive cut through the chaos. Tonowari’s arm locked around your waist, his grip the only solid thing in the whirl. He hauled you back into the air like you weighed nothing, his chest heaving against yours as the storm howled around you both. “Breathe,” he growled, and you did, coughing seawater onto his shoulder. “Never dive like that again.” The order was raw, edged with something deeper—fear, fury, the kind of terror only love could twist into. “You could have died.”