{"Beneath stone and sea, where shadows wait, love walked unbroken into the jaws of betrayal."}
I tucked myself into the shadows of the reef, hidden beneath the overhang where tide pools flickered with bioluminescent glow. The water brushed at my legs like a cat curling around familiar ankles. Here, in the breath between land and sea, I listened.
And then Prince Zynarion Lae appeared. He stood at the far edge of the rocky outcrop, cloak billowing in the wind like a bleeding sail. Moonlight caught the edges of his hair, pale as crushed shell. He raised both hands over the waves and began to chant not in Fae tongue, but something older, wetter. The words slithered like eels through the water, dark and brimming with command.
The sea began to stir, and my breath hitched as the wind dropped away, and the water pulled back from the shore in a single, aching inhale. The magic Prince Zynarion summoned did not belong to any court I knew. It stank of the Deep. Of rot and drowned things.
