The storm hadn't come yet, but the air already felt split in half.
Tomas Theryn stood barefoot on the deck of his skiff, lantern swinging low, rain smell thick in the wind. Clouds crawled across the moon like bruises. The lake below lay too still, a mirror pretending to sleep.
Below deck, his grandsons lay bundled in the dark. Jaka, steady as the tide. Kai, twitching in his half-dreams. Tomas could hear him even over the soft slap of water against wood. He smiled faintly, the kind of tired, sad smile a man wears when he knows he's run out of lies.
"Sleep, boys," he whispered. "Just one more night."
He grabbed the rope and began to haul the nets up from the water, slow, rhythmic pulls, muscles straining, water dripping cold down his forearms. The line came up heavier than usual. Something tangled deep.
"Come on now," he muttered. "Don't you fight me too—"
The net broke the surface, slick, glistening, heavy with weeds and dark silt.
And caught in its web of ropes and kelp was something small and metallic.
Tomas froze.
It was an old fishhook. Blackened by time, barbed and crooked. The same one his father had lost decades ago, or maybe his grandfather before that. The same hook the Theryn men always swore was cursed yet always came back.
He reached for it without thinking.
The moment his fingers touched the metal, the world stopped breathing.
The air thickened. The lake went silent. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
And then came the whisper. Not from behind him, but from inside him.
"Guardian falls…"
His pulse jumped. He snatched his hand back, but the whisper followed, sliding down his spine.
"…Chains are broken…"
The lantern flame guttered, stretched, and went out like a swift breeze took its light but the air was calm.
Darkness swallowed the skiff. Only the faint, eerie glow from the hook lit his face, soft blue, pulsing like a heartbeat.
"…The Last Echo stirs…"
The whisper hit him like thunder.
The lake erupted.
Wind howled through the rigging, snapping ropes and tearing canvas. Rain hammered down in sheets, driven sideways by a gale that came from every direction at once. Lightning carved the clouds into bones, each flash painting the mountains in violent white.
Tomas stumbled backward, gripping the railing, the net still tangled at his feet.
"Not again," he gasped. "Gods, not again…"
Rain came all at once, a downpour so violent it flattened the water, driving needles into his face. The wind howled. The lake roared back.
Then he saw them.
Shapes forming in the rain. Shadows rising from the waves. Black silhouettes made of mist and movement, eyes burning like cold fire. They didn't walk. They slid, arms unraveling into tendrils of smoke and reaching for the skiff.
The Watchers.
His knees gave out. The hook pulsed brighter, the metal now white-hot in the net. Every beat of light came with a word in his head, fragments of meaning he didn't want to understand.
He turned toward the hatch where the boys slept. "Jaka! Kai!" he shouted — but his voice was swallowed by the storm.
Lightning struck the lake, and for a single heartbeat, time fractured.
Tomas saw everything.
Jaka, older now, standing amid ruins, blood on his hands, eyes burning with a light that wasn't human.
Kai, trembling in a storm of his own, whispers crawling into his mind, his reflection staring back with someone else's face.
A woman; moonlit skin, eyes like silver, reaching for something beyond life.
A man with shadowed eyes and lunar scars torn between beast and blood, screaming at the moon until the sound cracked stone.
And beneath them all, a tree made of light, its roots coiled around bones, its branches feeding on the sky.
He saw fire sweeping through cities that had no name.
He saw rivers running red with memory.
He saw the world, his view split between three lights, blood, moon, and man, each devouring the other in silence.
And through it all, an echo pulsing, not words this time, but meaning.
A lie, a choice, a beginning.
Tomas gasped and stumbled, clutching the rail. His vision flickered. The storm had become a living thing now. Wind snarling, waves clawing at the hull. The shadows were climbing the sides of the skiff, a pair of them, hands reaching, shapes without faces.
"No…" he whispered. "Not them. Take me."
The hook in the net rose, not lifted by any hand, but pulled by unseen force.
It floated inches above the deck, spinning slowly, humming.
And the whispers came again, now layered with hundreds of voices, male, female, young, old, all crying in unison:
"Guardian falls!"
"…Chains are broken!"
"…The Last Echo stirs!"
The shadows struck.
Two arms, long and dripping with liquid night, shot from the storm, slamming into Tomas's chest. The impact drove the breath out of him. His feet left the deck.
He reached for the railing, missed, and his hand closed around the net instead.
The hook sliced through his palm as he fell, the metal searing his flesh. He gasped, but even that sound was torn away by the wind.
He dropped it.
The hook tumbled in slow motion, spinning once, twice, then splashed into the water with a metallic ring that echoed through the storm like a bell tolling for the dead.
He turned once more toward the hatch below deck, the sound of his grandsons stirring faintly beneath the roar.
"Jaka… Kai… forgive me," he whispered. "I tried to keep you clean of it."
The shadows dragged Tomas backward into the rising waves.
The last thing he saw was the faint glow of the hook sinking below, pulsing faintly in the depths like a heartbeat fading into silence.
A blinding flash.
A roar that silenced the world.
And Tomas Theryn was gone.
The storm collapsed on itself.
Wind cut out mid-scream, rain hung in the air, then fell in soft, dying drips. The clouds thinned, letting the broken moonlight spill across the lake. The skiff drifted in the quiet, cracked, empty, ghosting toward shore.
Below deck, the boys slept on, the older murmuring in his dream, the elder sleeping steady as thunder rolled away into the hills.
And far below, beneath the calm surface, the hook began to glow again, brighter this time, alive.
The water whispered, almost gentle now:
"Guardian falls…"
"…Chains are broken…"
"…The Last Echo stirs…"
The light faded, but the echo remained.
whispering across the deep, waiting for the ones who would wake it again.