{"Some things sleep not because they are dead, but because the world has forgotten how to fear them."}
We left before the sun dared touch the spires, and the air was sharp with salt and the cold bite of sea-bound wind. Mist clung to the marble paths like breath, too afraid to speak. I stood in the lower courtyard, my boots silent on the frost-veined stone, watching as the royal guard assembled with the precision only fear and tradition could produce.
Ardanis was already mounted, high on a shadow mane that shifted colours beneath him, from dark slate to smoke to moonlight. Fitting, I thought. Everything about him was meticulously chosen, even his silences. Ellowen approached from my left, quiet as memory. Her sea-green cloak whipped in the wind, and her eyes caught the dim light like a polished shell. "You're late," she said, though her voice lacked bite.
"I am not late. I am avoiding unnecessary pleasantries." I responded.
She arched her brow. "Still allergic to protocol, I see."
"Still pretending you're not?" I gave her a sideways glance. "You used to laugh at all this. Now look at you. Trimmed and gilded."
"War changes things." She huffed.
"Is that what this is?" I asked. "War?"
She did not answer, just adjusted the clasp at her throat. I did not miss the way her hand brushed the hilt of the blade. She wore a slender crescent-forged thing, ceremonial and deadly both.
"Mount up," Ardanis called without turning. His voice cut through the courtyard like frost breaking glass. "We're riding now."
We rode in silence for the first hour, and the forest outside the Crescent Court gave way to open hills, then cliffs that dove steeply toward the sea. The path was old, half-swallowed by saltbush and time. Fae stone marked the way, weathered runes etched into pale rocks that pulsed faintly as we passed.
The guards whispered among themselves when they thought no one could hear.
Old magic stirs. The sea's singing in dreams again. It knows.
I said nothing and let them wonder if I was the reason birds no longer flew above the shore and the waves refused to break like they should. I felt Elwen's gaze flick toward me more than once, like she was waiting for me to speak. But I was not ready to share the weigh,t I did not understand.
By midday, the wind had shifted, and it no longer smelled like pine or clean sea spray but brine, deep and ancient. The kind of scent that clung to your bones. The tide's breath, Ellowen once called it.
"Open it," the Lord Ardanis commanded, and I stepped forward before the guards could protest. My hand hovered over the entrance. The air pulsed, and there was no lock, no physical barrier, just an old enchantment bound in salt and shadow.
"Why do I have to do this when the guards can?" I murmured.
Ellowen tensed. "Caelen—"
But the moment I touched it, the doorway bloomed open like a wound. Inside, it was cool and damp. The ceiling vaulted like the belly of a ship, the stone black with age, veins of blue glowing faintly in the dark. We moved as one, our footsteps swallowed in the hush. There were sigils carved into the floor wards, I remembered, meant to keep the sea's will at bay. But several of them were cracked. Not shattered. Just…fractured. Like something beneath had stirred and stretched too far.
Ardanis knelt beside one.
"This was intact last time we came here," he said. Quiet. Troubled.
Ellowen turned to me. "Caelen… did you—"
"No," I responded.
Ardanis looked up sharply. "Explain."
I walked deeper into the chamber. The altar still stood, crusted with old coral and shimmering tears of salt glass. I remembered the last time I was here during the event, and the place was not the same.
The silence after that was brutal for the first minutes that we stood there, and then we heard a sound, and we all froze.
The light in the runes flickered, and Ellowen's blade slid halfway free, and the guards moved instinctively into a circle, backs to one another.
Ardanis stood slowly. "Something's listening."
"I feel it," I whispered more to myself. Because it had said something. Not aloud, not to my ear,s but somewhere deeper. A voice that sounded like a tide over bone: "You heard me. "The voice whispered, and I turned to everyone, hoping they had heard the same, but much to my surprise I was the only one who heard the voice.
The echo of the voice still rang through me like the tail end of thunder. But I did not let it show.
I stood straighter, forcing my heartbeat to slow. My skin prickled with salt-cold sweat. Every instinct screamed to run, to flee this place that now pulsed with something old and unkind, but instead, I turned away from the altar.
Ardanis's gaze was already on me, sharp as ever. "What did you hear?" he asked.
I blinked slowly, letting the silence stretch just a moment too long. "Nothing," I said, calm, even.
His eyes narrowed. "You flinched."
"So did the walls." I retorted.
He took a step closer, but it was Ellowen who watched me with real concern, brows knit. "Caelen," she said softly. "Don't lie."
"I'm not." I offered a shrug I did not feel. "There are echoes in places like this. That is all. The sea remembers too much."
They did not believe me. Of course, they did not, but they have not pressed it yet. Instead, while they turned back toward the broken sigils, I closed my eyes and reached out.
Slowly and carefully. Magic bloomed behind my ribcage, a tide rising from beneath my skin. Cold, old, raw. I sent it forward in thin tendrils, pressing it outward through the cracks in the Sanctuary floor, threading it between the runes, along the water-seeped stone. The deeper I reached, the less it felt like listening. And more like... knocking and something answered. Not with words this time but with pressure.
A weight, slow and massive, like the thought of a leviathan stirring from the bottom of the world. It pressed against my mind, oily and vast, not curious but aware. Ancient hate and hunger tangled together. I could not breathe, and my knees buckled, and the floor came up to meet me, hard, cold, and salt-slick. Hands caught me before I hit Ellowen's fully, I knew by the grip and the smell of wind and rosemary.
"Caelen!" she gasped.
Her voice sounded distant, like it had to cross an ocean to reach me. I tried to speak, to tell her I was fine, but the thing beneath the Sanctuary was not just awake, it was watching. I shuddered and pushed myself up, panting, heart racing like it was trying to outrun something inside me.
"What did you see?" Ardanis's voice cut through the haze. I looked up and he stood over me, face cold, eyes pale with fury or fear. It was always hard to talk to him. "I told you not to use magic."
"I didn't—" I began, but even I could hear the lie.
He took a step forward. "Then what was it?"
Ellowen helped me to my feet, but she was watching me carefully now. As if I might break open.
Ardanis's expression hardened. "What did you see, Caelen?"
I met his gaze, jaw tight. "Just darkness, deep-rooted and corroded darkness, ancient and its stirring. "
He stared at me in silence, the guards behind him shifting uneasily.
"And it's not trapped anymore," I added." It's rising."
A long moment passed. Then he turned away, jaw clenched. "We leave," he said. "Now."
Ellowen did not let go of me until the air outside the Sanctuary touched our skin again. Even then, she lingered a second too long. "You heard something, didn't you?" she asked softly, not as a soldier. As a friend. I looked out over the cliffs, the sea stretched out beneath the grey sky like a wound stitched shut with salt.
"Yes," I said finally. "And it heard me and even reached out. Ellowen, I am afraid the peaceful times are over."