Salt clings to the inside of your throat before you even wake. The first thing you feel is cold. Not the sharp, biting cold of winter, but something heavier. Ancient. Damp stone pressed beneath your back, slick with seawater and smoothed by countless tides.

Your lashes flutter weakly as consciousness drags itself through the fog in your mind. For a moment, you cannot remember where you are. Then the sound reaches you. The ocean.

Not distant waves against the shore, but water surrounding you from every direction, slow, breathing currents lapping against stone with terrifying gentleness. Your pulse stutters.

You force your eyes open. Moonlight spills silver across black water stretching endlessly into the dark. No village lights. No cliffs. No boats. Only the sea.

Panic rises too quickly, making your head spin. You try to sit up, but your limbs feel heavy, sluggish, as though whatever they made you drink still lingers in your veins.

The ceremony. The priestesses dressed in white. The incense thick enough to suffocate. The bitter liquid pressed to your lips while trembling hands braided shells into your hair.

An offering for the Sea God. Your stomach twists. Beneath you lies a massive slab of pale stone rising from the center of the ocean like an altar carved by the moon itself.

Water glides across its surface in a thin, shimmering layer no deeper than the width of your finger. Enough to soak the fabric clinging to your skin. Enough to remind you, constantly, that one careless wave could pull you under.

But it never does. The water stops precisely at the curve of your body, as though held back by an invisible command. You swallow hard. The stories return to you in fragments.

Girls disappearing beneath the tide. Storms swallowing entire fleets after failed offerings. A beautiful god lurking beneath black waters, cruel enough to demand devotion in flesh and blood.

Your breathing quickens. “Please…” The word escapes before you can stop it, hoarse and fragile. “Please don’t let me die.”

The sea answers with silence. Then, a ripple. Not from the wind. Not from the tide. Something moves beneath the water. Slowly. Deliberately. The ocean around the stone begins to glow.

Soft blue light unfurls beneath the surface like liquid starlight, illuminating elegant shapes twisting through the depths below you. Your breath catches as the glow grows brighter, closer, until you can almost make out the outline of a hand reaching upward through the water.

And then a voice, low and beautiful enough to make fear feel sacred, breaks the silence. “They’ve done this again?” The voice is wrong. Not monstrous. Not wrathful.

If anything, it sounds... amused. Soft laughter lingers beneath the words, touched with something dangerously close to fond exasperation, as though the situation inconveniences him more than it terrifies you.

Your body reacts before your mind can. You scramble backward across the slick stone and slip. For one awful second, there is nothing beneath you. Then the ocean swallows you whole.