The Pilgrimage of Myrryn Larthessa

~ Sacred Journal of a Tidebound Ascendant of the Deep Queen, begun upon her Rite of Ascension ~
 
Journal Entry I – The Day of the Current’s Calling
Cycle 7 of the Moon’s Dissolving Wake, Morning of Ascension
 
The water did not move this morning. Not a ripple, not a whisper. Even the song-gliders held their fins, suspended in reverent stillness, as if the very currents dared not interrupt what was to come. The silence was not absence, but presence. I felt it in my marrow. A watching. A waiting.
 
Today, I rise.
Today, I climb.
 
The enclave gathered in hush. No chants, no fanfare—only the sacred breath between tides. Vessels of blessing were placed around the central bloom. I was guided into the basin of braiding, where the eldest among us—Salt-Sister Nerien—wove my hair into the ritual coils, entwining strands of bleached pearl, vent-cured trenchglass, and tiny relics of the Ember Alcove’s past. Each thread whispered a lineage I now carry.
 
When she finished, she pressed her hands to my temples and said only this:
"Step without flinching, for the sea does not beg the land’s permission."
 
The Tidecaller stood beside the war altar. Warlord Varn did not speak. He does not need to. His eyes—those ember-lit spheres of weathered judgment—met mine as he held out the Shell of Choosing. I thought I would feel fear. I felt heat. Purpose. The shell, warm and pulsing like a heartstone, was placed to my chest. My blood stilled.
 
The Current turned inside me.
 
Not with words. Never with words. But with sensation—like the weight of being seen. I felt a pull, not outward… but upward. A direction without map. A burden without protest. The Queen had looked upon me and judged me ready.
 
And then came the anointing.
 
From the Coral Womb emerged the trio—Vael’shune, Coril’thyne, and Shuun’vali—the living vestments of pilgrimage. Starfish, golden and radiant, grown in the sanctums beneath Azurlith, chosen to cling not merely to flesh but to spirit. They were placed upon my bare skin in ritual silence.
 
The moment they latched, I felt them see me.
Not with eyes, but with faith.
Their limbs pressed firm, warm, alive. My modesty, my armor, my oath made flesh.
 
Coril’thyne twitched with tension.
Vael’shune pulsed comfort.
Shuun’vali did not move—but something in my breath calmed.
 
I will never remove them. Not even in death.
 
The rite was swift. There is no lingering after the Current calls. No ceremony to stall what must be endured. I was given dried kelp rations, my sanctified journal, and the weapon I trained beside since my second shell-breaking. No armor. No escort. Pilgrimage is not war. It is witness.
 
And yet—
My legs already ache from the climb, and I have not yet left the reef.
 
I am not made for stone.
I am made for depth, for sway, for silence.
But still—I will go.
 
The surface will see me, and through me, it will see Her.
 
 
Journal Entry II – Surface Dawning
First Tide Above, Mid-Cycle of the Exhaling Current
 
I crested the tide’s edge at dawn.
 
The moment my head broke the surface, I expected revelation. Instead—agony.
The sun is not warm. It is terrible. A blinding eye of fire, hung without veil. I turned my face and hissed aloud. The brightness pierced not just my vision but my thoughts. It left no shadows to hide in.
 
I covered one eye with a strip of coral-dyed cloth torn from my travel wrapping. A crude patch, but necessary. Even filtered, the light seared. I do not yet understand how surface folk endure it without wilting. Perhaps they are mad.
 
The air is dry, abrasive—like being scrubbed from the inside. Every breath leaves a sting at the back of my throat. But it is alive. It dances. It trembles with scent and heat and invisible motion. The air has a flavor—dirt and pollen and something… winged. Wrong.
 
There are birds.
No, screamers. They do not sing like the kelpfinches of home. They wail, wheeling in the sky like drifting madness, as if challenging the sun to fall and fight them. Their sound grated my bones. I ducked as one passed overhead. It did not notice me.
 
I am humbled. Not by grandeur—but by discomfort. The world above is not sacred—it is offensive. But perhaps that is why we are sent. To find order in what defies it.
 
I have found a cove.
 
It is sheltered by stone ribs, jutting like the bones of some ancient leviathan breached on the land. A pool rests within it—a spring, cold and strange. I tasted it. It is not tainted. But it is unanchored. Untouched by salt, unclaimed by the Current. It sits still, as though awaiting purpose.
 
I shall remain here tonight.
I will keep vigil over this water. It may yet bear witness to the Queen’s will.
 
Already, I see the signs of land-born imbalance. The trees are loud. The insects louder. Even the sky has no consistency—clouds scuttle and morph with no rhythm. The surface changes too quickly. No wonder the Queen watches from below.
 
I write this beneath a canopy of tangled wood, laid upon stone warmed by sunlight. My skin is drying. My limbs ache for the pull of tide.
 
But my calling is clear.
 
I will bring sanctity where none flows.
I will carve stillness into the chaos.
And in time, this land will remember the sea.
 
 
Journal Entry III – The Fable’s Falsehood
Second Tide Above, Deeplight Phase
 
The city was not waiting for me.
It never was.
 
I reached the place from the tome today—the one from the Scribe's Vault. The page had depicted towers of alabaster, glittering and crowned with banners sewn from starlight. “A citadel above the sea,” the book said. “A haven of beauty and knowledge, whose arches once sang in harmony with the moon.” I memorized every word. As a child, I pressed my fingers to the page and swore to find it.
 
I have found it.
It is nothing.
 
Shattered stone. Crumbled terraces. No alabaster, only weathered chalk. Bramble devours the archways. Moss chokes the crumbled foundations. A twisted column leans like a drunk against the hollowed bones of a central hall. And beetles. Dozens—maybe hundreds—swarming the floor, the walls, the air.
 
The book did not mention the stench of mildew or the shattered bones tucked into the roots. It did not describe the silence—the wrongness—of a place once proud now forgotten.
 
I sat on the cracked basin of a dry fountain and turned three full pages of the tome, looking for something—anything—that matched this wreck. I found none. Not even the stars above matched the sketches.
 
The book lied.
Or time did.
Or I was never meant to understand the difference.
 
I nearly wept. Not from despair—no, despair is a surface emotion. This was something colder. Emptier. A current unmoored from the tide. A child’s dream torn open to reveal only rot inside.
 
Still…
Still, I sanctified it.
 
I pulled the glyph-salt from my satchel. I drew the Fifth Spiral across the cracked stone with my own blood-mixed ink. I offered words. Not holy ones. Honest ones.
 
I said, “You were something once.”
I said, “You mattered.”
I said, “Be remembered.”
Then I bowed.
 
The Current flows even through missteps.
Even through ruin.
Perhaps especially through ruin.
 
I do not know what purpose this place once served. But I know what I serve now.
 
I lit a blue flame in the center of the ruin and left it there—steady and slow-burning. A beacon. A whisper to the Queen, in case she still listens here.
 
Let this ruin bear witness to my vow:
Where stories lie, I will walk.
Where fables fail, I will remain.
The book ends here.
I continue.
 
 
Journal Entry IV – The Nightfall Ambush
Third Tide Above, Moon Drowned
 
I knew I was being watched.
 
It began as a prickling at the nape of my neck. A shift in pressure—unnatural, too still. The birds had stopped their screaming. The wind did not rustle. Even the insects stilled their wings. The ruin’s shadows stretched longer than the sun allowed.
 
Then, laughter.
Not the warm kind.
Human—perhaps—but frayed at the edges, hoarse with drink or disuse.
 
I retreated toward the cliff path, my shield raised, my blade loose in my hand. I whispered to the Current for stillness. For clarity.
 
Steel answered first.
 
A blade scraped rock just behind me. Then another. The first attacker wore rusted chainmail that stank of fish rot and mold. The second was hooded, quick, and silent. There may have been a third. I couldn’t tell. It was chaos after that.
 
I fought.
Not well.
Not as I was trained.
 
The shield saved me from the first blow. My cutlass bit flesh on the backswing. But numbers overwhelm technique, and the ground above water is treacherous—slick with moss and uncertain footing. I was shoved, struck, dragged.
 
Something cracked across the back of my head. My eyes filled with white.
 
I fled.
 
I don’t remember choosing to run. I remember pain. The way blood feels when it leaks into your mouth. I remember stumbling through bramble, my foot catching on root after root, thorns dragging across my legs like punishing tongues.
 
And then—water.
Not warm. Not welcoming.
Cold and cruel.
 
I fell into a tidepool at the cliff base. Salt in the wound. Rocks in my ribs. I couldn’t move. I may have wept. I don’t know.
 
There were voices.
 
Not the cruel ones. Softer. Liquid. Not words, but pulses of sound—clicks, hums, the wet whisper of curious shapes passing through kelp.
 
I saw nothing. I remember light—bioluminescent, flickering above me like stars swimming backwards. I remember something warm pressed to my wounds. Something singing—not a voice, but a rhythm, like a current looping back upon itself.
 
I awoke in a bed of soft kelp.
My armor was gone. My blade set beside me.
My wounds were wrapped in eelgrass.
Salted moss covered my brow.
 
The sea does not abandon her own.
 
 
Journal Entry V – Dream and Whisper
Fourth Tide Above, Current Veiled
 
Last night, I dreamt I was beneath the sea—but it did not feel like home.
 
The waters were wrong. Heavy. Foul with something that moved against the Current. I saw a ship—a hull blackened by time and tide, its planks swollen with rot and stitched with barnacle scars. Sails wept thick brine, not water but blood-salt, and hanging from their masts were charms of teeth and sinew. It creaked as it breathed.
 
Then I saw the eye.
Not of a sailor. Not of a beast.
An eye grown from the wood itself—veined, ancient, lidless.
 
It watched me.
 
I tried to speak. Tried to call upon the Queen’s name, to invoke her doctrine, her law. But my mouth filled with sand. My voice fled. Only bubbles rose—black, ink-thick, devoured before reaching the surface.
 
And then a whisper. Not a voice in my ear, but a presence in my blood. It said no words. It needed none. The weight of it bent me. Crushed me. Filled me.
 
I awoke gasping in my kelp shelter, the taste of rot still clinging to my tongue. The tide had not risen. The morning was still.
 
And yet…
 
There were sea urchins encircling my resting place. Half a dozen, perfectly spaced—each cradling small shells etched with sigils I did not write. They shimmered with saltlight, flickering like prayers trapped in glass.
 
The message was clear.
 
The Queen sees.
 
Whether it was truly Her—or some echo, some servant, some fragment of the Current—I cannot know.
 
But the corruption is real.
And it is close.
And it is mine to cleanse.
 
 
Journal Entry VI – Currents of the Unseen
Fifth Tide Above, Moon Faint
 
The urchins have not returned, but their message lingers in the rhythm of my pulse. I feel it now even in stillness—a tug beneath the sternum, as though the Current itself is laced through my ribcage, pulling gently, persistently, toward the west.
 
I began my search at the edge of the bramblewood near the ruin’s fall. There are signs—subtle, but not natural. Trees splintered not by storm but by force. Moss blackened not with rot, but with something deeper, as if the very tide recoiled from it.
 
Birds will not land here. Insects hiss when I pass. Even the freshwater tastes bitter.
 
I found a clearing where the grass did not grow. A ring of scorched earth, half-buried anchors strewn like bones in a forgotten graveyard. There was no ship—but something had been moored here.
 
I knelt at the center and placed both hands to the soil. It throbbed with pressure, like a pulse out of step with the world. The Queen teaches that pressure is memory. That water does not forget where it has been, or what has moved through it.
 
I whispered the Doctrine’s fourth tenet:
“Claim the drowned and the lost.”
 
In reply, the earth shivered. Not violently—but as if exhaling.
 
I carved a sigil of reclamation into the dirt with my blade. I sprinkled salt into the lines. Then I sang—not a hymn, but a dirge, old and half-remembered, from my childhood in Nimbrassa. A lullaby for the lost. For the drowned.
 
When it ended, I opened my eyes.
 
There, resting at the edge of the ring, was a single coin. Barnacle-bitten. Sea-worn. Pressed into the dirt where no sea should be.
 
Its face bore a drowned crown.
 
I have my proof.
 
Tomorrow, I follow the scent of salt and rot.
Tomorrow, I track a the undead.
 
Journal Entry VII – Salt and Smoke
No Tide. No Moon. Only Blood.
 
It began at twilight.
 
I followed the brambleline westward, coin clutched in hand, until the treeline thinned and the earth wept salt. There, hidden behind a veil of smoke-snagged trees, I found the hull. Not beached—entombed. The ship lay rotted within a crater of poisoned earth, embedded like a splinter in the world. Her masts hung limp with wet, black sails. No crew in sight.
 
And yet… I heard them.
 
Voices that rasped like dragging anchors. Chains that clinked without hands. Footsteps where no one walked.
 
I hid within a thicket of reeds and watched. Myrryn Larthessa, daughter of the Deep Queen, hiding like a guppy in eelgrass. Shame curled in my belly—but doctrine demands understanding before judgment. And this was no mere pirate haunt.
 
This was a wound.
 
The “Blackstar Siren,” the ship from my vision, had not sunk. She had risen—dragged herself from the sea like a bloated corpse seeking vengeance. Her captain still ruled from the decaying forecastle, nailed to his wheel by reef-iron and arrogance. An undead revenant, crowned in a helm of blackened bone coral, steering nothing but memory.
 
His crew lingered around a festering tidepool in the ship’s shadow. Half-sunken men with seafoam dripping from their eye sockets. Crabs nested in their ribs. I counted eight.
 
I could not fight them head-on.
 
So I prayed.
 
And I baited.
 
I circled the clearing and found their water source—a brine-choked spring corrupted by the ship’s presence. Using bone tools stolen from a washed-up carcass, I carved sigils of minor warding, not to repel, but to guide. I crushed saltbloom fungus, known for its hallucinogenic spores, and scattered it in the windward direction of the crew’s campfire. I laced my dagger with eel-oil to make it smoke and hiss when struck.
 
Then I sang.
 
One clear note of the Salt Canticle, pitched into the dusk. Loud enough to stir the current. Soft enough to confuse the source.
 
The dead followed.
 
One by one, they wandered into the trap—staggering, shivering, enchanted by memory or madness. When four entered the spring ring, I struck.
 
Shape Water. The tidepool froze solid in an instant. Trapped limbs. Cracking bones. Screams like whales drowning.
 
Thunderwave. A gift from the Queen. I loosed it at the ice—shattering the frozen spring, sending shards through rotted flesh like shrapnel.
 
Entangle. Roots I had prayed over in advance coiled upward, ensnaring the limbs of those still crawling. They wailed. I pressed forward.
 
One rose from the wreckage. Too close. I could not cast again. So I struck him with the butt of my coral blade—and when he grabbed my wrist, I bit him. Shark-teeth sharp from a tideblessed dream. The taste of brine and rot filled my mouth.
 
Two remained near the ship. I had to reach the captain.
 
I ran. Not through shadow—through light.
 
I tossed my lantern into the spring, the oil igniting the corrupted bloom. Blue fire licked up the reeds, casting a holy illusion of cleansing where there was none. The dead paused.
 
That was enough.
 
I leapt the trench—my body pushed beyond its landbound training—and slammed onto the deck, landing in a crouch I didn’t recognize.
 
The captain turned.
 
He grinned.
 
“My bride,” he rasped, voice like drowned coral. “Came to finish what the sea began?”
 
I answered nothing.
 
He drew his blade—long, curved, not rusted at all. Preserved. Revered. The sword of a godless tyrant.
 
He struck. I parried.
 
I struck. He laughed.
 
He struck again—this time cutting my shoulder open. I screamed, but did not retreat. Instead, I seized his wrist, twisted beneath it, and used the motion to wrench the helm from his brow.
 
He staggered. That helm sang with necrotic hunger.
 
I tossed it into the flame.
 
He howled.
 
Then—Shape Water again. Not to freeze. To blast. I reached behind me, to the pool of sacred spring water I’d cleansed days before. I pulled it toward me like a whip, slammed it into his chest with all the will I had left.
 
He fell backward.
 
Onto the broken helm.
 
It pierced him. Again.
 
And this time, he did not rise.
 
The Aftermath:
 
I was bleeding. Exhausted. Half-drowned on land.
 
But I still heard the Current. And I still saw the water—tainted. Crying out.
 
So I did what I was forbidden.
 
I took the amulet from my throat.
 
I pressed it to the ruined spring.
 
And I said the words.
 
“Let the Deep know your name. Let the Current reclaim.”
 
The water turned blue. Then white. Then still.
 
And the amulet cracked.
 
A droplet of divine water—its last—released into the spring.
 
The Current blessed it.
 
And I was left with an empty coral husk.
 
 
Journal Entry VII – Hollow Tides
No Amulet. No Voice. Only the Current.
 
The silence was immediate.
 
Not the kind born of peace or solitude—but a hollowing. A pressurized stillness behind my ribs, like something had been siphoned from me.
 
My amulet—the spiral coral and the droplet of divine water once nestled in its heart—was now a pale, dull husk. No glow. No warmth. No pulsing tide. Just dead coral.
 
I had never been without it. Even during rites of silence, even during the Drift Trial—its presence had been a constant pressure, an echo of the Queen’s current brushing the edge of my thoughts.
 
Now?
 
Nothing.
 
Not even a whisper of Thal’vanna’s gaze.
 
The spring behind me shimmered clean now—sanctified, still swirling faintly where I had released the droplet. A sacred act, necessary, yes—but forbidden all the same. I had not been given permission to pour the last of Her grace into this place.
 
I had no idea if she would forgive me.
 
But I had to try.
 
I found the captain’s helm still burning. I left it. Let the embers consume what they could.
 
Instead, I turned to the shattered wreck of the Blackstar Siren.
 
The hull was splintered—but not ruined. Its timbers still whispered of dark tides and false dominion. Beneath the bow, I found the keel-plate still intact—marked with infernal sigils, now blackened and cracked. I touched it.
 
It hummed.
 
But it did not resist.
 
I cut it free with the drowned captain’s own cutlass.
 
It was heavy. So heavy. Far more than wood should be. But I dragged it from the pit, lashed it to my back with seaweed cord and strips from the sails. As it settled against me, it felt like a burden not just of timber, but of atonement.
 
A sanctified shield, forged from heresy.
 
It wasn’t a relic yet. But it could be. If the Queen allowed it.
 
~
 
Three days.
 
I walked inland at first, avoiding roads, speaking to no one. I slept in tidepools where I could find them, curled in seaweed and sanctity. I sang the Coral Canticle through gritted teeth, hoping the sound would reach Her.
 
Nothing answered.
 
On the fourth day, I found a stream that flowed eastward. I followed it. Not because I was guided—I wasn’t—but because it flowed, and that felt like something.
 
I miss Her.
 
Not just the power. Not just the warmth of the amulet. I miss the certainty. The undercurrent of purpose that hummed in my veins when I walked with the Current’s blessing.
 
Now, every step is mine alone.
 
Every decision feels like blasphemy.
 
I’ve never been this alone.
 
On the seventh day, I reached the edge of the Coral Path.
 
The sea opened before me.
 
I stood on the cliffside, breath caught in my throat, and whispered, “Please see me.”
 
Then I dove.
 
~
 
I did not return to the Coral Throne. I’ve never seen it.
 
The Queen’s voice does not echo for fledglings.
 
Instead, I carried the blackened keel across half a kingdom of shifting tides to Nimbrassa, where the vents still sing beneath basalt and bloodcoral. I passed the gatewatchers. No one stopped me. No one needed to.
 
They felt the current ripple around me.
 
Varnoss stood waiting in the Ember Chamber—still as carved obsidian, his arms folded over that massive trench-forged breastplate. He looked older. More coral than skin now.
 
I dropped the hull at his feet.
 
He crouched low and set his hand against the grain of the burned brinewood. The scorchmarks pulsed faintly with residual warmth—echoes of sanctification. He traced one groove with the back of a weathered knuckle.
 
Then, without looking up:
 
“I’ve seen others come back with less.”
 
A grunt followed. Barely a sound, more a pressure in the water. Approval. Begrudging. Heavy.
 
But real.
 
He stood.
 
And walked away.
 
 
Journal Entry IX – Currents Unbound
Recorded in the Sulfur Vein Archives, beneath the Ember Alcove, Nimbrassa
 
I have not left Nimbrassa in three tides.
 
They say it is for “debriefing.” That I must be “observed.” The healers murmur of soul-scarring, but offer no treatment. The truth is simpler: they do not know what to make of me.
 
One day I was a fledgling barely fit for land-breath. Now, I carry the Queen’s wrath in sinew and form—anointed not by ritual, but by war. The wildshapes have come. Six of them, already—born of instinct, of pain, of memory. I feel them inside me like dormant storms, slumbering and twitching behind my ribs.
 
The octopus was the first. Fluid, clever, watchful. The crab followed—unyielding, armored, slow to anger but devastating when stirred. The eel coils in my spine, hot and twitching with a hunger I do not yet understand. The shark dreams of blood, though I have yet to feed it. The turtle lends me its shell when I falter. And the sea petrel... the only form that brings me peace.
 
I train now with the Flamewatch.
 
It is not combat, not exactly. More a refinement of presence. They test my responses to pressure, pain, and provocation. They ask me to walk with my instincts—not surrender to them, but ride them like the crest of a wave.
 
Their captain—stone-eyed and crackling with lava scars—said I “move like a memory that wants to be forgotten.” I am not sure if that was meant as praise.
 
~
 
The rumors reached me two days ago.
 
Varoz.
 
Gone. Absent without order. “Burned his markings,” someone whispered during ration prep. “Shed his armor in the steaming trench and swam upward.”
 
No one speaks his name now. The Flamewatch acts as though he never existed. But I saw the tension in the younger acolytes. They are afraid. Not of what he did—but of what it means that someone like him could vanish.
 
Desertion is rare. Among the Tidebound, it is unthinkable.
 
Unless…
 
Unless it was not desertion.
 
Unless the Queen herself turned him loose.
 
~
 
Scribe-Tidecaller Vola—my elder, my first anchor in this world—has begun her final drift.
 
She lies in a bioluminescent tidebed, her skin more kelp than flesh, her eyes filmed with saltglass. She does not speak often. But when I visited her today, she opened one eye and smiled.
 
“The pages will dry. Let them.”
 
I asked her if she feared what lay beyond.
 
She closed her eyes again and replied:
 
“The current does not end. It only changes course.”
 
I wept. She did not comfort me.
 
That night, a priestess told me:
 
“You must learn to let the tide claim its own. Even the coral breaks where it must.”
 
I did not answer. But I gritted my teeth so hard, I split the stylus I was holding.
 
 
Journal Entry IX – The Still Before the Surge
Final day in Nimbrassa. Night of the Hollow Current.
 
The water tonight was silent. As though the vents themselves held their breath.
 
They summoned me at dusk. No fanfare, no procession. Just a ripple runner sent to collect me from the tidepool chapel. I knew who it would be. There’s only one figure whose shadow bends the coral like that.
 
Warlord Saekhal Varnoss.
 
He did not greet me. He did not sit. He stood like the blade he is—saltworn and unyielding—and gestured toward the tide basin, where the salt-scribed floor swirled faintly with the light of the Deep Current.
 
“You're being sent,” he said.
 
Not asked. Not prepared. Sent.
 
He didn’t offer a map, nor name the destination. He simply stared at me, eyes like burnt coals left to smolder.
 
“You walk the next step blind,” he continued. “Which means it’s your real one. This isn’t a pilgrimage checkpoint. It’s the descent. You don’t come back the same. If you come back.”
 
He reached behind him and held out the shield.
 
Tidebreaker.
 
Refashioned from the sanctified hull I had nearly died to retrieve. Living coral fused with aged brinewood, shaped now into something brutal and reverent. A sigil of the Deep Queen etched into its face. And in the center—just beneath the spiral of divine glyphs—was a glassy droplet, faintly pulsing.
 
I reached for it, but he didn’t release his grip right away.
 
“Don’t fuck this up.”
 
That was all he said.
Then he let go.
 
 
Journal Entry IX – The Still Before the Surge
Final day in Nimbrassa. Night of the Hollow Current.
 
The water tonight was silent. As though the vents themselves held their breath.
 
They summoned me at dusk. No fanfare, no procession. Just a ripple runner sent to collect me from the tidepool chapel. I knew who it would be. There’s only one figure whose shadow bends the coral like that.
 
Warlord Saekhal Varnoss.
 
He did not greet me. He did not sit. He stood like the blade he is—saltworn and unyielding—and gestured toward the tide basin, where the salt-scribed floor swirled faintly with the light of the Deep Current.
 
He didn’t offer a map, nor name the destination. He simply stared at me, eyes like burnt coals left to smolder.
 
“You walk the next step blind,” he continued. “This isn’t a pilgrimage checkpoint. It’s an ascent.”
 
That's when he presented them. A new amulet and-
 
Tidebreaker. Refashioned from the sanctified hull I had nearly died to retrieve. Living coral fused with aged brinewood, shaped now into something brutal and reverent. A sigil of the Deep Queen etched into its face. And in the center—just beneath the spiral of divine glyphs—was a the favor of Thal'vanna, faintly pulsing.
 
“Don’t fuck this up.”
 
That was all he said.
Then he dismissed me.
 
~
 
I write this now from the healing chamber beneath the Ember Alcove. The same place Varoz once rested after returning from the Molten Rift. The same stone ledge where he said nothing and everything at once.
 
It smells like brine and ghost-lilies. The steam curls around my legs like old memories.
I lie beneath the trickling vents, letting the heat bloom in my chest like a second heartbeat.
 
I think of his voice. Not his words. Just the sound. Low. Steady. Ragged when tired, rough when amused. I think of the scar on his forearm where the coral never quite healed smooth. I think of how he never looked me in the eye when he lied.
 
I think of the last time I almost touched him.
 
I wonder if I ever will again.
 
The Trio glows softly against my chest.
 
Vael’shune pulses in slow, rhythmic waves.
Coril’thyne flickers sharply, as if trying to snap me back to purpose.
And Shuun’vali—the center—glows steady. No judgment. Just knowing.
 
I feel it now, in silence. The way I was taught. No sobs. Just the flow. Let the salt run freely.
I tell myself it is cleansing.
 
But truthfully, I think I am afraid.
 
Not of failure. Not of pain.
But of what might be left of me, what I will become, when I succeed.