The tide had grown quiet.
Not still—muted, like a song half-swallowed. The village no longer sang to the sea. The spiral stones at the shore lay cold, their carvings faded beneath layers of salt and forgetting. Children played without rhythm. Elders spoke without echo.
But the sea remembered.
It whispered in the tidepools, in the hush between waves, in the way the wind curled around the broken shells. And now, it had begun to hum again.
Nara walked the shoreline with the pearl tucked beneath her collarbone, its rhythm pulsing faintly against her skin. She traced spirals into the sand with her heel, not knowing why. The tide responded—curling inward, then blooming outward, like breath.
The village watched.
They did not speak of the old rituals. Not since the last pearl failed to sing. Not since the drowned queen's vow was broken. But they remembered the shape of silence. They remembered the way the sea used to listen.
An elder approached Nara.
She held a shell in one hand, worn smooth by time, its spiral barely visible. She placed it in Nara's palm and whispered:
"It used to sing."
Nara nodded.
She pressed the shell to her chest, beside the pearl, and the spiral flared. A single note bloomed in the air—soft, trembling, familiar. The elder wept.
The tide shimmered.
And the village began to hum.
Not a song. A remembering.