The wind smelled of salt.
It carried not just moisture, but memory—fragments of music blown in from a sea Thalindra had never seen, yet somehow recognized in the marrow of her bones.
She stood at the edge of a cliff, cloaked in moss-lined robes, the horizon pulsing with silver-blue light. Below her, the ocean surged like a creature half-asleep, waves crashing against coral-blistered stone with rhythms too perfect to be natural.
She whispered into the breeze, "It's calling."
Behind her, Rowan adjusted the straps of his sea-weathered pack and frowned. "You say that like it's a good thing."
Kaelen crouched nearby, sharpening a salt-rusted blade. "Tides don't call people. They drag them under."
Thalindra closed her eyes.
"But this tide sings."
Three weeks had passed since the Root of Echoes had been sealed.
The Scar was healed. The Verdant Circle reawakening. The Song, for the first time in generations, was stable.
But peace wasn't silence.
Each night, Thalindra dreamed of water.
Of vines that swam instead of crawled.
Of a voice that lilted like a lullaby sung beneath waves.
And of a drumbeat deep in the sea, slow and terrible, rising like a leviathan's breath.
She awoke every time with a word on her lips:
"Marrow."
They reached the fishing village of Saltmere by dusk.
What should have been a thriving coastal town was nearly abandoned.
Boats lay overturned on the sand. Nets hung in tatters from dock posts. The only sound was wind rattling through empty homes and the slow, rhythmic creak of a buoy out in the mist.
Rowan frowned. "This place was full last time I came through."
Kaelen glanced at the sea. "They didn't leave. They were taken."
Thalindra knelt by the shore. The tide licked at her boots, warm and faintly humming.
A single kelp strand wrapped around her ankle, then slipped away.
Her pendant pulsed.
"Something ancient is moving beneath the coast," she said. "And it remembers me."
At the edge of the village, an old shrine stood half-swallowed by sea vines. The carvings were unfamiliar—spirals within spirals, shaped like whirlpools swallowing flowers. At the center, a mural:
A figure cloaked in driftwood and coral.
Eyes blindfolded.
Arms outstretched.
The Boundless Druid.
Kaelen muttered, "Tell me that's not your sea-witch twin."
Rowan's voice was grave. "That's the last Circle fragment, isn't it?"
Thalindra reached out, placing her palm to the carving.
It was cold.
Then warm.
Then—
Alive.
The mural pulsed.
A voice filled the air—not loud, but wet. Drenched in sorrow. Singing through broken shell.
"The Deep remembers you, Leafweaver."
"And the tide does not forgive."
The sea behind them swelled.
A shadow rose in the waves—tall, thin, wrong.
A figure wrapped in seaweed and silence.
It stepped from the surf, water dripping from its empty hood.
And from within it came a voice, layered like a chorus of drowned gods:
"She awaits in the Bloom Below."
"Come, Thalindra. The Song is not yet whole."