R1 Fantasy

The storm arrived in the hollow hours before dawn, when even the gulls had tucked their heads beneath salt-crusted wings. Arin Thalnor woke to the taste of copper, his throat raw from the scream he’d bitten back. For a heartbeat, he lay still, fingers clawing at the sweat-dampened wool of his blanket, as though the dream might still have him by the ankles. It was always the same: a woman’s voice, frayed at the edges like old rope, hissing a word he could never quite catch. And water—black, endless, filling his lungs until he jolted upright, gasping.

He swung his legs over the pallet’s edge, the shack’s plank floor biting into his bare feet. Through the cracked shutters, he could see the harbor’s lanterns swaying like drunken fireflies, their light smeared by rain. The air smelled of kelp and iron. Low tide, he thought. The nets will be snarled with driftwood again.

A fist pounded the door. “You alive in there?”

Arin didn’t answer. He knew the graveled voice—Kael, the old net-mender who’d let him squat in this rotting shed for three moons. The man had a nose for misery, and Arin’s silence seemed to draw him like a gull to offal.

“Suit yourself,” Kael grunted. “But if you’re skipping the boats again, the foreman’ll toss your scrawny hide to the eels.”

Arin waited until the man’s footsteps crunched away over the shingle. His hands found the loose floorboard beneath the pallet, pried it up, and closed around the blade hidden there. The dagger was unremarkable—plain leather hilt, pitted steel—but it hummed faintly against his palm, a vibration that made his teeth ache. He’d found it two summers ago, half-buried in the dunes north of the village, its edge still sharp enough to draw blood from the wind.

He slipped it into his boot.

Outside, the rain needled his face. The village of Veyr clung to the cliffs like a barnacle, its crooked houses leaning into the wind. Fishing skiffs huddled in the cove, their masts stripped bare, while the merchant cogs from the southern isles loomed farther out, their hulls groaning against the swell. Arin kept to the shadows, ducking beneath lines of drying cod and the sodden banners of traders hawking spices and rusted swords. The docks were already thick with lanterns and curses, fishermen muttering about the storm’s timing.

“Bad omen,” a wizened crone croaked from her perch on a barrel, her hair tangled with gull feathers. “The sea’s angry. She’ll swallow a soul tonight, mark me.”

Arin quickened his pace. He didn’t believe in omens. But as he reached the harbor’s edge, the horizon flickered—not with lightning, but a sickly green pulse, deep beneath the waves.

It was gone before he could blink.

The green lingered behind his eyelids, a phantom stain. Arin blinked, saltwater lashes stinging, and told himself it was exhaustion. Three nights without proper sleep. Three nights of that voice, sharpening its hooks in his ribs. He turned away from the water, shoulders hunched against the rain, and joined the shuffle of bodies heading toward the docks.

The foreman, a bull-necked man with a scar cleaving his brow, stood at the gangplank of the Gray Morn, a weathered trawler listing in the chop. His gaze locked onto Arin. “Thalnor.” The name sounded like an accusation. “You’re on bait duty. And if I catch you napping in the barrels again, I’ll use your guts for chum.”

Arin nodded, avoiding the man’s eyes. Bait duty meant hours knee-deep in the hold, threading rotting squid onto hooks while the crew laughed at the stench. Better than the alternative—being up top, where the storm’s fury would turn the deck into a bucking slate. He’d take the reek of decay over the sea’s whims any day.

The crew shoved past him, their oilskins slick and reeking of fish guts. A boy no older than twelve, his cheeks pocked with sea-sores, tossed Arin a rusted bucket. “Don’t faint before you fill it,” he sneered, parroting the older sailors.

Arin caught the bucket but said nothing. Words were currency here, and he’d learned to hoard them.

Below deck, the air thickened with the musk of brine and mildew. Lanterns swayed, casting leviathan shadows on the walls. Arin settled onto a crate, the dagger’s hilt pressing against his calf like a secret. He worked mechanically, fingers numb, the squid’s tentacles cold and slimy as eels. The crew’s shouts blurred overhead, swallowed by the groan of timbers and the drumbeat of rain.

But the silence didn’t last.

A tremor ran through the hull—not the storm’s doing. Deeper. Slower. Like the heartbeat of something vast uncoiling beneath the ship. The lanterns flickered.

Arin froze.

The voice from his dream slithered into his skull.

“Tahl’varas.”

This time, he heard it clearly.

The bucket clattered to the floor. Squid hooks scattered like bones. Above, the crew’s laughter died mid-breath, replaced by shouts. The Gray Morn shuddered, lurching starboard as waves slammed against its flank. Arin stumbled, grabbing a beam to steady himself. The dagger’s hum sharpened, vibrating up his leg like a warning.

He climbed the ladder, the hold’s trapdoor slamming open with a crack of wind. Rain blinded him. Crewmen scrambled, hauling lines as the trawler pitched into a trough. The horizon was gone, swallowed by a wall of black water.

And there, in the maelstrom—a flicker of green.

Closer now.

Rising.

The crew’s shouts fragmented into screams. A wave, taller than the mast, loomed—a black jaw lined with foam. Arin gripped the rail, the dagger’s hum now a shriek in his bones. The green light swelled beneath the surface, illuminating the wave’s underbelly like veins of rot.

“Breach to port!” someone howled.

Too late.

The wave struck. Cold swallowed Arin whole, tearing his grip from the rail. The world inverted: saltwater in his nostrils, the ship’s hull groaning overhead, lantern light snuffed to nothing. He kicked wildly, limbs leaden, until his head breached the surface. The Gray Morn was capsizing, men clinging to its keel like ants on a carcass.

Another tremor.

Not the storm. Not the sea.

Something moved beneath him.

Arin treaded water, lungs burning. The green glow pulsed, closer now, and for a heartbeat, he glimpsed a shape—a lattice of shadows, vast and jagged, sliding beneath the waves. It made no sense. A reef? A sunken city? But reefs didn’t move.

A hand seized his collar. Kael, the net-mender, spat a stream of curses as he hauled Arin toward a drifting barrel. “You’ve got the luck of a drowned cat, boy,” he rasped. “Now kick!”

Arin obeyed, though his legs felt flayed by the cold. The green light bloomed brighter, painting the rain in corpse hues. Kael saw it too. His grip tightened. “Don’t look,” he hissed. “Don’t you damn look—”

The sea erupted.

A tendril of black water, thick as a siege tower, shot skyward. It wasn’t water. It was alive—a coil of serrated scales, glinting green from within. The crew’s screams curdled as it slammed down, shearing the Gray Morn in two. Arin tasted bile. The thing had no head, no eyes, just an endless, thrashing body that defied the storm’s logic.

Kael’s prayers turned to gibberish. The barrel flipped. Arin plunged under, the dagger’s vibration now a fever in his blood. The voice returned, louder, angrier, threading through the chaos:

“Tahl’varas. Tahl’varas!”

He opened his mouth to scream. Water flooded in.

But the green light found him.

It wrapped around his ribs, gentle as a noose, and pulled.