The next morning brought no sunrise—only a dim, grey smear in the east where the sun should have been. Elise woke with the taste of salt on her tongue, as though she'd spent the night breathing in the sea. Her dreams had been fragments: a rocking cradle, water lapping at her ankles, a whisper in the dark saying, Count to seven.
The fog was so thick outside her window it might as well have been a wall. From somewhere in it came a slow, metallic clang, distant yet deliberate. She knew it was the same bell from yesterday—the one that didn't belong to any church in Briarwall.
She made her way to the harbor. The town was quieter than she'd ever known it, as though every inhabitant had been instructed to keep their voices low. Even the gulls seemed subdued, perched in rows along the rooftops like pale sentinels.
Maris was waiting at the end of the pier, her feet dangling above the black water. She didn't look up when Elise approached.
"It started with my mother," Maris said suddenly. "She was one of them."
"One of who?" Elise asked.
"The ones who heard the Watchman."
The water beneath them shifted, not from the tide, but from something deeper moving below. Elise's stomach knotted.
"When she was young," Maris continued, "she fell in love with a fisherman. He drowned one night in a storm. Everyone thought it was an accident. But she told me later… it was the Watchman. He comes for the ones marked by the sea."
Elise tried to keep her voice steady. "And you promised him something?"
Maris finally turned to her, and in her pale eyes was something almost feverish. "I promised him a life in exchange for my own. One drowning, to keep me breathing."
The metallic bell rang again, closer now, and Elise swore she felt the pier shift under her feet.
"You've given him no one yet," Elise said.
"Not yet," Maris agreed. "But the fog doesn't stay forever. When it leaves, so must he. And before he goes, he'll collect."
The water between them rippled. Elise leaned forward just enough to see a shadow gliding beneath the surface—too large, too slow to be a fish.
"Who?" Elise whispered.
Maris smiled faintly. "I haven't decided."
That night, the fog did not thin. And somewhere beyond the pier, the Watchman's bell tolled a number Elise didn't want to count.