Don't Look Back - Crystal

Crystal has always felt safe on the sea. Even when storms raise waves that tower over the ship, even when they sail north into freezing gales and treacherous ice, she knows none of it can touch her.
She has watched three generations of humans live and die on these waters, and barring catastrophe, she will see three more.
Or so she believed. But this journey, she fears, will be her last.
She can feel it…him. Hidden away, a sickening, deathly presence between her and the water below. When she lays on her berth she can feel it, the way the death and decay and rot of his nature bars her from her element.
And she knows he intends to take them all to their graves with him.
She’s tried to speak reason to the captain, but the payment he was given has blinded him to the danger. And she knows, in the end, it will be his doom.
The Yōsei are destroyed by iron. The monster in the hold would be doomed by silver. And humans are corrupted by gold.
It was true of those who forced her to leave her homeland, who would have captured and enslaved her and all her kind. And it is true even of those she has chosen, here, to trust.
In the end, when the ship is bathed in blood, when there is nothing between her and the monster but the protection spell given to her, marked out on her skin by someone long since dead and buried, it is her memory of the past, of the last time she was betrayed by humans enchanted by the glitter of gold, that saves her.
Her mother’s voice, the words that sent her from the mountain rivers to the sea, away from the land she had known to a place she would make her own.
“Run, my child. And do not look back.”