The creature stood motionless at the edge of the tide.
Seaweed clung to its limbs. Its cloak trailed back into the ocean like a tether. It had no face, no weapon—just that hollow voice that echoed like whale-song through stone.
"She waits in the Bloom Below."
Rowan stepped between it and Thalindra, both spears ready. "You'll be waiting in pieces if you come closer."
The creature didn't flinch.
It didn't move.
But something behind it did.
Beneath the surf, dozens of smaller shapes stirred—figures submerged just under the waves, their heads bowed, their arms swaying gently in rhythm. Not swimming.
Not living.
Just… listening.
Kaelen cursed. "Tideborn."
Thalindra's eyes narrowed. "What do you know?"
Kaelen didn't look away from the figure. "They used to be sailors. Villagers. Anyone pulled under during a moonlit current who heard something first. When they came back, they weren't them anymore."
The figure lifted its head slowly.
No eyes.
Just coral growing from where a face should be.
"The Song is broken in the deep," it whispered.
"She will sing it whole."
And then it sank backward into the tide without a splash.
The others beneath the water vanished with it.
Silence.
Just the rhythmic breath of waves.
Rowan's shoulders tightened. "Whatever's calling from the sea… it has the last of our Circle."
Thalindra turned back to the shrine.
Her fingers brushed the spiral again.
A vision cracked open behind her eyes—
A stone city beneath the sea.
A woman with glowing eyes and a crown of anemone thorns.
Chains made of kelp and memory.
And at the center of it all: a giant bloom, pulsing with Song.
She staggered back.
"They're not just singing from the sea floor."
"They're binding it."
That night, they camped on the cliffs above Saltmere.
The stars were drowned by fog, and the waves sang strange lullabies none of them had ever heard.
Thalindra sat apart from the others, her fingers tracing the wooden curve of her totem.
She could feel it again—that slow, rising pull of something unfinished.
Another verse in the Song.
Another piece of herself waiting to be remembered.
Not in root or stone this time.
But in salt and bloom.
And far beneath the surface, in the black halls of the drowned city of Tir Kalthis, a figure watched a pool ripple with green-gold light.
Her voice was soft.
Sharp.
Heavy with power.
"Leafweaver approaches."
She turned to a chained figure slumped beneath coral.
"She'll come for you."
"And she'll drown for it."