The Riverside Kingdom
The palace corridors whispered secrets in the language of silk and shadow. Princess Angelina Wang moved through them like moonlight through water—graceful, ethereal, and utterly confined. Her slippered feet made no sound against the polished stone as she tiptoed past the sleeping quarters of her handmaidens, past the ornate screens painted with cranes and lotuses, past the life she had known for twenty years that felt more like a gilded cage with each passing day.
Tonight, the Harvest Festival painted the world beyond her prison in shades of amber and gold. She could hear it—the distant laughter of common folk, the splash of lanterns being set upon the lake, carrying wishes to the heavens like prayers made of paper and flame. How she longed to see them float, those delicate vessels of hope, rising into the indigo sky until they became indistinguishable from stars.
But the King would never allow it.
"For your protection," he always said, his weathered hands trembling as they cupped her face. "You are my only daughter, my precious jewel. The assassins—"
The assassins. Always the assassins.
Nana had heard the rumors, of course. The servants whispered them when they thought she wasn't listening, their voices dropping to frightened murmurs. The most terrifying killer in all the kingdoms, they said. A shadow that moved like smoke, who could command the very elements themselves. They spoke of a monster—something with scarred flesh and a voice like grinding stone, something that haunted nightmares and left no witnesses.
What they didn't know—what no one seemed to understand—was that the most dangerous predators rarely looked like monsters at all.
She sighed, turning back toward her chambers, her elaborate hanfu rustling like disappointed wings. The festival would continue without her. It always did. Tomorrow, she would try again. Tomorrow, perhaps, she would find a way.
The princess pushed open the carved doors to her room, moonlight spilling across the threshold like spilled mercury. She pouted—a gesture unbefitting of royalty but entirely appropriate for a girl who had spent her entire life being told where she could and could not exist.
Outside her window, the world continued to spin. Inside, she remained still.
But she would not always be still.
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---🐚🐚🐚
In the Shadows
Rafayel watched from the rooftop, perched like a hunting bird against the curved tiles of the palace's eastern wing. The sunset bled across the horizon—pomegranate and persimmon, slowly surrendering to the embrace of dusk. It was the same sunset that had witnessed a promise made a lifetime ago. The same sunset that had become a vigil. The same sunset that now mocked him with its constancy while everything else had turned to ash.
His fingers traced the edge of his blade—a weapon forged from Lemurian steel that gleamed like captured starlight.
The metal was cool against his palm, a grounding sensation that kept him tethered to purpose when memory threatened to drown him.
*Make her love you*, he reminded himself. *Make her love you deeply enough that she willingly offers her heart. Then take it. Altar her. Save your people.*
Simple. Clinical. Necessary.
Then why did his chest feel like it was being crushed beneath the weight of an ocean that no longer existed?
The fishtail mark on his forearm pulsed—a phantom pain that had become his constant companion. Red light flickered beneath his skin like dying embers, tracing the elegant shape of scales and fins.
Their bond. Their *curse*. The thing that should have been beautiful but had become a shackle forged from broken promises and a century of silence.
He could see her through the window of her chambers, pacing like a caged songbird. Even from this distance, even cloaked in shadow and bitterness, he could trace the familiar lines of her face.
The way she moved—fluid and unconscious, like water finding its path downhill. The way she tilted her head when she was thinking, a small furrow appearing between her brows.
She looked exactly the same.
She looked nothing like the girl who had saved him.
*She doesn't remember.*
The thought was a blade between his ribs, twisting with each heartbeat. She had forgotten. Forgotten the boy trapped beneath the fallen coconut tree, his tail crushed and bleeding, certain he would die on a foreign shore far from home. Forgotten the promise made with small, earnest hands covered in sand. Forgotten the pearls he had collected, each one a testament to hope that she would return.
Forgotten *him*.
Rafayel's grip tightened on his blade until his knuckles went white. The metal groaned softly in protest, but he didn't loosen his hold. Pain was good. Pain reminded him why he was here.
*She abandoned you*, the bitter voice in his heart whispered. *She left you waiting. Every sunset. Every day. While you stood at the shore like a fool, believing she would come back. Believing she cared.*
One hundred years.
One hundred years of waiting, not knowing she was dead. Not knowing she had been dying even as he surfaced each evening with another gift, another piece of his heart wrapped in mother-of-pearl.
He had been twenty-five when he finally learned the truth—learned that she had perished from disease in some distant village while he stood vigil at an empty beach.
The anger had been... clarifying.
But it hadn't erased what he felt. That was the true curse of the Lemurian people. They were creatures of love, bound to it as surely as they were bound to the sea. One heart, one soul, one devotion that transcended death and memory and even betrayal. Other species could move on, could heal, could learn to love again.
But not them.
Never them.
Rafayel had tried. In the decades following his discovery, he had tried to imagine choosing another. Had forced himself to attend the mating ceremonies in Lemuria, to watch other young mer find their partners with joy written across their faces like bioluminescence. He had even allowed himself to be courted once—a beautiful mermaid with silver scales and kind eyes who had looked at him like he hung the moon.
He couldn't do it.
The mere thought of her touch made his skin crawl, made his very soul recoil in revulsion. Not because she was unworthy. But because she wasn't *her*. Wasn't the girl with sand in her hair and determination in her eyes who had refused to leave him to die. Wasn't the one who had smiled at him like he was something precious instead of something dangerous.
It was a sickness. A beautiful, terrible sickness that his people called devotion but felt more like damnation.
*Faithful unto death*, the old Lemurian saying went. *Faithful beyond it.*
"I want to hate this fate," he whispered to the indifferent sky, his voice carrying the weight of a century of longing and loss. "I want to hate *her*."
But the words rang hollow even in his own ears.
Because beneath the anger, beneath the carefully constructed walls of bitterness and betrayal, the truth remained: he loved her. Loved her with a desperation that had not diminished in a hundred years. Loved her so deeply that the thought of harming her made something vital inside him crack and splinter.
And yet, he would do it anyway.
He had to.
The dark secret of Lemurian succession pulsed in his mind like a second heartbeat. Every new Sea God faced the same trial, the same impossible choice that separated mortals from deities. The ultimate sacrifice—proof that duty outweighed desire, that the needs of thousands eclipsed the wants of one heart, no matter how desperately it beat.
Find your soulmate. Make them love you until that love is absolute, unwavering, a force of nature unto itself. Make them willing to give you their very heart. Then take that heart to the stone altar deep beneath the waves, and offer it to the sea.
Only through such sacrifice could a Sea God's power fully manifest. Only through proving they could prioritize their people over love could they gain the strength to control the tides, to keep the waters flowing, to maintain the delicate balance that kept Lemuria alive.
And if they failed?
Rafayel closed his eyes, but he couldn't shut out the visions that haunted him.
The Lemurian Sea, slowly draining away like blood from a dying body. His people, suffocating in the shallow pools, their scales losing their luster as they gasped for water that no longer came. The great city of Lemuria—with its coral towers and pearl streets and gardens of sea-glass flowers—crumbling into nothing but sediment and forgotten dreams.
They would die. All of them.
Because he wasn't strong enough to control the cycle without completing the ritual. Because he had left his kingdom behind to chase a ghost across a hundred years, and now that ghost wore a new face and answered to a different name and knew nothing of the boy who had loved her beyond reason.
The sun finally disappeared below the horizon, leaving only its aftermath—streaks of color bleeding across darkening silk. Sunset had always been their time. Their sacred hour. When sea and land met in perfect balance, when two worlds touched for just a moment before drawing apart again.
Now it was just another reminder of everything he'd lost.
Rafayel opened his eyes, and they had changed. No longer the warm purple-blue of deep ocean waters, but something harder. Colder. The eyes of a man who had made his choice and would see it through, no matter the cost.
*She forgot you anyway*, he told himself, the words a familiar litany. *She abandoned you a century ago. She left you waiting like a fool while she lived and died and was reborn without you. This time, you will be the one who leaves. This time, you will take what you need and save your people.*
*This time, you will not be the one left broken on the shore.*
The plan was elegant in its cruelty. Infiltrate her life. Become her protector, her confidant, her escape from the golden cage she so desperately wanted to flee. Be everything she needed, everything she dreamed of, until her heart was irrevocably his. Until she loved him with the same consuming devotion he had once felt—*still felt*, despite everything—for her.
Make her willing to give him anything. Everything.
Then take it to the altar and end this.
He had already secured the assassination contract—the perfect cover for his presence in the palace. The King believed him to be the greatest threat to his daughter's life. How beautifully ironic that he would become her greatest protector instead. At least, until the end.
The fishtail mark pulsed again, hot and insistent against his skin. A reminder of the bond that still tied them together across lifetimes, across death itself. She couldn't feel it—not yet, not without her memories. But he felt it constantly, a connection that pulled at him like the tide, inexorable and inescapable.
*I could have moved on if not for this*, he thought bitterly. *I could have let you go if the bond had broken with your death. But it didn't. It never does. So here we are, bound together for eternity, and you don't even remember my name.*
Rafayel rose fluidly from his perch, his dark robes rippling around him like water given form. The hood shadowed his features—that beautiful face that made his targets hesitate, that made them question whether someone so lovely could truly be dangerous. They always learned the truth too late.
Beauty and death were not opposites. Sometimes, they were the same thing wearing different masks.
He moved across the rooftops like wind over waves, silent and inexorable. Around him, he could feel the elements responding to his call—the way they always did, even here so far from the sea. Fire waiting to ignite at his command. Air currents shifting at his whim. The water in the palace fountains singing to him in voices only he could hear. The lightning that slept in the storm clouds, ready to wake at his summons.
A Sea God's power, incomplete but still formidable. Still enough to make him the most feared assassin in five kingdoms.
Still not enough to save his people.
*Not yet.*
Below him, in her chambers, the princess finally stilled her pacing. She stood by her window, silhouetted against the soft glow of lanterns, looking out at a world she couldn't reach. Her hand pressed against the lattice screen, fingers curling around the carved wood like it was prison bars.
She looked so small. So lonely.
So unbearably familiar.
*Don't*, he warned himself. *Don't let her sadness move you. Don't remember how she looked at you that first day on the beach, like you were worth saving. Don't think about how her laugh sounded when you told her about the underwater gardens, or how her eyes widened when you gave her that first pearl. Don't remember that she was a child who lost her parents and still chose to help a stranger. Don't—*
But memory was not something he could command, not like fire or water or wind. Memory moved with its own tide, pulling him under whether he wanted to drown or not.
*"I promise I'll come back!" Young Nana's voice echoed across a century, bright with conviction. "Same time, same place! I promise!"*
*"I'll wait for you," young Rafayel had said, not knowing he was sealing his fate with those words. "I'll bring you something special. A pink pearl—the rarest kind. And I'll wait every sunset until you return."*
She never had.
Until now.
Rafayel's jaw clenched, his teeth grinding together hard enough that the pain grounded him back in the present. Back to what needed to be done.
*This is mercy*, he told himself. *A quick death at the altar, surrounded by sacred waters. Better than the slow withering his people face. Better than condemning thousands to death because one girl forgot a promise.*
*Better than admitting you're still the same fool who waited a hundred years for someone who never came back.*
The festival lanterns were beginning to rise in the distance, dozens of them, then hundreds. Golden lights ascending into the darkness like reverse stars, each one carrying a wish to the heavens. The sight was breathtaking—a river of light flowing upward, defying gravity with nothing but hope and paper and flame.
Rafayel wondered what they wished for. Prosperity, probably. Good harvests. Health for their families. Small, mortal concerns that would be answered or ignored by whatever gods bothered to listen.
What would he wish for, if he released a lantern of his own?
*To forget her*, maybe. *To be free of this bond that chains me to someone who doesn't even know I exist.*
Or perhaps: *For her to remember. Just once, to look at me and know who I am. To know what she meant. To know that someone waited.*
But wishes were for people who still believed in hope, and Rafayel had left hope behind on a beach a lifetime ago.
He turned away from the window, from the girl who wore a familiar face, from the sunset that had become a monument to abandonment. The night was falling properly now, darkness claiming its territory from the defeated day. Soon, he would make his move. Soon, the game would begin.
Soon, he would have her heart in his hands—literally and metaphorically both.
And when that moment came, when she looked at him with love shining in her eyes, when she offered him everything with the same innocent trust she had once shown a trapped boy on a beach...
*I will do what must be done*, he promised himself, the words sharp and certain. *I will save my people. I will complete the ritual. I will become the Sea God they need me to be.*
*Even if it kills whatever's left of my heart in the process.*
The fishtail mark pulsed one more time, as if in protest. As if the bond itself could sense his intentions and recoiled from them. But bonds didn't break just because they hurt. That was the cruelest joke of all.
Rafayel disappeared into the shadows between heartbeats, a ghost made of longing and loss and a love that had curdled into something darker. Behind him, the festival continued. The lanterns rose. The sunset faded.
And in her tower, the princess dreamed of freedom while her death drew closer with every passing moment.
Neither of them knew that fate had already made its choice. That some bonds, once forged, could never truly break—even when breaking them would be kinder.
That sometimes, the greatest tragedy wasn't dying for love.
It was living in spite of it, century after century, while the person you loved learned to breathe without you.
And that the most dangerous lies were the ones you told yourself.
*I can do this*, Rafayel thought as he vanished into the night, his heart a stone in his chest.
*I have to do this.*
*I will do this.*
Even if it destroyed them both.
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---🐚🐚🐚
*To be continued...*