Chapter 2 Stranger in the Cottage

"In the silence between questions and answers, something old listens."

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Rain had become mist by dawn, clothing the cliffs in a silver veil of fog. Sea below murmured low secrets to rocks as if conspiring with wind in a language older than remembrance. Gulls wheeled overhead over surf, their cries distant and muffled in the mist.

Merbel stood at the crooked window of her cliffside cottage, watching the tide crawl like a slumbering monster-slow, vast, incomprehensible. The glass she leaned against was chill and slick with condensation. Behind her, the fire of the hearth crackled softly, sending long shadows across the stone walls and low beams.

And on the couch, wrapped in her thickest woolen blanket, the stranger slept.

Anacobal.

She had not known his name last night when she dragged him in from the sea's pull-halfway to waking, limbs trembling, lips blue-frostbitten. There had been no time for questions, only the instinct in her stomach. Something in his eyes-glittering, mournful, old and otherworldly-had stopped her breathing. He did not look like something washed up on the beach. He looked like something summoned.

Today, in dawn's quiet, she watched him. His features were sharp, too sharp-angular cheekbones, a mouth that was more suited to silence than words. His skin glowed with a soft, dewy sheen, kissed by salt and something less material, as if moonlight had been stamped into flesh. A white scar as long as his fingers crossed his collarbone. Another wrapped up his forearm like ivy sheared in relief. These were not the scars of brawl and skirmish. These were stories written in pain and ritual.

Merbel went down on hands and knees to restart the fire, the fragrance of rosemary and damp cedarwood rising on the smoke. The cottage itself was simple-driftwood beams supporting rough stone walls, thatched roofing she'd put in order the previous spring. It was a building easily forgotten unless you looked for it intentionally. And Merbel had taken care that people didn't.

Until this moment.

He moved. A small gasp, measured. Then opened his eyes.

Silver-blue. Too clear, too steady. They did not flicker with confusion like most waking from near death. Instead, they landed on her with a strange serenity, as if he had always known she would be there.

"Where...?" His voice was raw silk, a low tide scraping the edge of a distant shore.

"You're in Virelle," she answered. "This is my home."

He attempted to sit and winced. She moved across the room automatically, her hand touching his arm as she steadied him. His skin was cool, but not cold-stone washed by rain, perhaps.

"Thank you," he whispered. "You didn't have to."

"I did," she said, flatly. "You would've died otherwise."

Their eyes met. Neither broke away.

"You have a name?" she asked.

He hesitated, a heartbeat too long.

"Anacobal."

She nodded. "Merbel."

The names hung between them like lanterns-unfastened but giving off a low meaning.

The day rolled in easy rhythm. She brewed broth, spiced with sage and marrow root. He drank slowly, his movements slow, ribs wrapped tight in fresh bandages. They spoke in fragments-questions half-asked, answers never finished. And something deeper ran between them in the silences.

He didn't ask her any questions about herself. And in that, she was reassured. Most who came to Virelle wanted to know why a young woman lived alone at the edge of the world, with the eyes of a wolf and the habits of a hermit. But Anacobal just gazed out at the ocean, as if seeking something he'd lost or something he suspected might catch up with him.

She watched the way the fire responded to him-never stuttering, never flaring. As if it were a listener as well.

At twilight, he stood at her window, the hue of the sky beyond striped with ash and purple. Mist clung to cliffs. The tide had gone out, as if in a pause for breath.

"You traveled far?" she asked over his shoulder.

He nodded, not shifting. "More than I can reckon."

"You sound like you weren't meant to get there."

"I wasn't." He glanced over his shoulder, something dark in his expression. "But I saw you. In a dream. I followed it here."

Merbel came to an abrupt stop.

"A dream?"

"Yes. You were between two worlds on a moonlit beach. Standing at the very edge. And you called out to me."

Her pulse beating in her throat accelerated.

He wouldn't even glance at her. "I'm sorry. That sounds lunatic."

"No," she said softly. "It doesn't."

She never confessed to him that she was dreaming too.

That night, while the wind whispered its secrets into the rafters and the fire settled into embers, Merbel's sleep was strange and dense.

She was standing underwater, but breathing as air. Everything shone with colors outside the world-green-gold light without a sun, rich blues carved in by memory. There were coral arches looming above her, carved with sigils that softly shone. She didn't know any of them, but understood all of them. Amidst it all: a throne, shell and obsidian, half buried in sand and time.

A voice rose from the depths-warm, intimate, and aching.

Daughter.

She awoke gasping, drenched with sweat, her body thrumming with some foreign current.

The cottage was still. The sea was still.

Merbel threw a shawl over her shoulders and stepped out. The cliffs were silent. Stars glimmered overhead, but the moon-full, low, and unnaturally bright-hung closer than it should. As if it listened.

A figure stood beside her.

Anacobal.

"You felt it too," he whispered.

She nodded. "The sea's changing."

"No," he replied. "It's waking."

They stood there in the stillness, the salt air enveloping them like memory. Two strangers bound not by time, but something older. Something deeper.

She turned to him.

"What are you?"

He did not respond for a very long time. When he finally did, the truth was heavy.

"I bear a curse," he said. "And a mission. But neither were meant for me alone."

"Then for whom?" she whispered.

"For you."

Her breath hitched. "You're mistaken."

"I'm not."

Their eyes locked. The wind stilled. The sea shimmered with reflected starlight.

And in that silence, Merbel saw him as he truly was-not the wounded man on her couch, but something older, regal, shrouded in seafoam and stormlight. His presence stirred something deep in her-a howl not of warning, but awakening.

She, too, was not what she seemed.

That night, they spoke no further. But the sea did. And somewhere far beyond the cliffs, prophecy stirred-no longer dormant, but listening.

Waiting.

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