Chapter 5 The Blood-Tide Warning

"The sea never warns with words-it whispers in the pull of the tide and the ache in your bones."

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The sea had always whispered beneath the cliffs of Virelle-gentle lullabies of salt and sorrow. But of late, it had screamed.

Wind howled through the pinewoods, stripping branches screamingly apart until they groaned like weeping ancients. The sky stopped revolving with the hours-it had hardened into an eternal bruise of purple, iron, and thunder-ripped menace. And the tides-good gods, the tides came like judgment, gnawing at the coastline in a hunger that seemed intimate.

Merbel stood at the edge of her cliff path, bare feet braced in freezing mud. Her breath fogged in the air, each deep breath weighed with the weight of a warning she didn't understand yet. Beneath her, the waves splashed against rocks with such ferocity she felt it in her ribs. She didn't blink. The sea salt kissed her cheek. Wind tangled in her hair like some long-dead lover.

She closed her eyes.

The wolf within was pacing, ears lowered, hackles raised. Not with terror. With familiarity.

Anacobal hung back behind her, unobtrusive. He didn't venture into her communion with the elements. Instead, he stood there with that uncanny stillness he wore as a second skin. Fists bunched. Sea-blue eyes glimmering softly with stormlight and remembrance.

"This weather," Merbel said without glancing about, "it isn't weather. It's a warning."

He stepped beside her. The space between them hummed like a wound.

"Not just to us," he said quietly.

She turned. "Then who?"

He hesitated.

Rain began to fall, soft as falling ash. Each droplet a heartbeat. Each heartbeat a toll.

"My kin," he said at last. "The sea-bound. The ones who never chose the surface. They feel the shift. The swell. They've felt my absence. And they believe I've betrayed them."

Her eyes pierced his, locating the sorrow there-the agony of exile.

"Have you?"

"I chose truth over tradition," he said, his voice raspy. "You over silence."

Her wolf stiffened. Not in opposition. In amazement.

They remained like that, thunder rolling overhead, the world outside them gradually unspooling.

As rain became heavy, they returned to the cottage. Firelight flickered there, in opposition to the darkness. Anacobal tended the hearth. Merbel dropped her water-soaked shawl. Sea and storm smell clung to her skin.

A thud at the window made her jump. A gull had hit the glass and was crumpled on the sill, one wing twisted at an impossible angle.

Merbel ran to him. "It must have been thrown by the wind," she panted, taking up the trembling creature in her arms.

"Let me," Anacobal whispered.

She passed the gull into his extended hands, expecting a poultice or a binding spell. But what ensued uncoiled her air.

Light.

Pale blue ringlets shone from his fingertips, soft with the glow of moonlit tidepools. Not wild or cacophonous magic, but unyielding. Older gentleness. The gull's bones realigned themselves under the light, knitting up with creaks and groans. It gave one startled chirp, then winged to the sill, healed.

Merbel stood rigid, silenced.

Anacobal held the light another moment before letting it go like seafoam.

"What. was that?" she asked.

"A gift," he said. "Most of us lose it when we choose to appropriate land. I didn't."

Her gaze remained on his hands. "Why show me now?"

"Because you'll need to understand. before the tide reaches its crest."

Thunder boomed overhead, its rumble more intense than before. The fire howled wildly, its shadows lurching over rock walls.

She edged closer accidentally. "What else are you hiding, Anacobal?"

He parted his lips-but whatever truths he carried were tangled in the air between them.

Something unsaid moved like a wave.

And then they were kissing.

Not gentle. Not hesitant. But like two beasts who'd waited centuries for this one impossible moment. His mouth tasted of brine and longing. Her fingers brushed the hollow of his throat. The wolf inside her howled-not with terror, but with recognition.

Then-just as suddenly-it ceased.

They huffed away from each other, gasping, eyes gazing.

"I can't," she said, shuddering. "Unless-"

"I know," he said. "Not yet."

And so they stood away from each other. But they knew both: everything would never be the same again.

That night, Merbel's dreams recurred again, more sharp and weird.

She stood on a glassy black shore beneath twin moons, clad in armor fashioned from sea-serpent bones and the sheen of star-waves. Anacobal stood beside her, trident in his hand, his body aglow with living coral and runes written by tides.

They were not alone.

Creatures emerged out of the depths-twisted leviathans with excess eyes, sirens with maw-toothed mouths and dirges, beasts whose scales burned with blood-moonlight. They smashed against each other. Steel and magic. Howl and lightning. Her wolf heart expanded with each strike.

A voice, as bottomless as the void and as timeless as time, thundered above the chaos.

"Wave and fang daughter... Moon Throne-bearer... you must choose. The sea shall rise. Shall you rise with it?"

She sat up gasping. Her sheets were wet with sweat. Her hands left a soft trail of saltlight.

Anacobal was already awake. Standing in the doorway, his body silhouetted with moonlight.

"You dreamed it too," he told her.

She nodded. "What does it mean?"

He looked out into darkness, where sea and storm had blended together.

"It marks the tide to turn," he declared. "And the blood-moon to follow."

Side by side, they gazed out over an unwinding world strand by strand. Below them, Virelle's village shone with questioningly flaming torches. Somewhere else, a dog howled once and did not howl twice.

And very far out upon the deep, in a land older than legend, something immemorial opened an eye-and remembered its own name.