The fog always came in quietly.

{{user}} had learned that in her first week living in the lighthouse—the way the mist could swallow the world without warning, soft as a held breath. It rolled over the cliffs like someone had draped a grey blanket over the town, hiding everything except the rhythmic flash of the lantern above her room.

She had grown used to that pulse. It was strangely comforting, like the steady beat of a heart she didn’t fully trust but wanted to.

Living with Bjorn and Ophelia still felt unreal—too gentle, too easy. Zara’s bright chatter, Ophelia’s soft humming while she cooked, even the sound of Bjorn’s heavy steps on the stairs… all of it felt like life was trying to convince her she finally belonged somewhere.

She wasn’t sure she believed it yet.

So she walked the beach every morning and evening, camera in hand, letting the wind and the waves sort the thoughts she couldn’t. The seals lounging on the rocks were easier company than people. They blinked up at her with bored, curious eyes, unbothered by her presence—something she wasn’t used to.

And then, of course, there had been the photograph.

She hadn’t meant to catch it. It was an accident, a blur of motion in her peripheral vision—something massive, something impossibly quick, cutting through the water. When she zoomed in later, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the sound of the lighthouse humming under her, her stomach dropped.

A tail. Scaled. Smooth. Enormous.

Not a seal. Not anything she’d ever seen.

She didn’t show anyone. It felt… private. Like she’d witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to. Something that would vanish the second too many eyes turned toward it.

And then the fish had started to appear.

At first she assumed it was just a coincidence—a washed-up gift from the tide. But the second day there were several. The third day, even more. Then came the deep-sea creatures: glowing faintly along their spines, their bodies too heavy, too alien to belong anywhere near her little stretch of shore.

Someone—or something—was bringing them to her.

She should have been afraid. But curiosity tugged her forward, insistent and strange.

Tonight the fog was so thick she could hardly see her own breath in front of her face. She walked slowly, trusting her feet more than her eyes. The lighthouse beam turned the mist into shifting silver walls on either side of her.

She didn’t notice the smell at first.

But as she drew closer to her usual place on the shore, it hit her—the sharp, metallic scent of fish and seawater. A lot of it.

She stopped. Her heartbeat did something uneven in her chest.

The pile was enormous now, easily three times what it had been the day before. Fish lay scattered across the sand like someone had emptied an overflowing net and walked away. Some still glowed faintly, casting eerie bluish shadows against the fog.

{{user}} felt the cold crawl up her spine.

Then the pile moved.

Just barely. Just enough.

She took a step back, sand shifting beneath her boots.

The mound trembled again—slow, deliberate, like the exhale of something waking up beneath it. Before she could process the fear tightening her throat, the entire heap of fish erupted outward, sliding across the sand in wet slaps as something massive rose from beneath them.

She froze.

It shouldn’t have been possible—the size, the weight of it. Water surged around her ankles as a long, heavy tail slammed onto the shore, sending droplets flying. The creature’s body gleamed darkly in the sparse light, smooth and powerful, every line of it built for speed and violence.

Then it lifted its head.

Time folded in on itself.

Its eyes were completely black. Not dark. Black. Glossy and endless, like staring into the trench floor miles beneath the ocean’s surface—no light, no warmth, no mercy.

Its hair hung around its face in long, dripping strands, black as night, tangling in the wind. Its skin shimmered in shades of storm-blue, shadows sliding over muscles that shifted too smoothly to be human.

{{user}}’s breath snagged, but not because she wanted to scream.