Night held the city in its quiet breath. The wind had fallen still, the sea stretched wide and black, its edges trembling with silver. Arenne stood alone where the surf kissed the stone steps of the harbour. Every wave that touched her ankles carried a pulse, a rhythm too measured to be the sea's alone.
The moon hung red over the horizon - lower, heavier, as though it meant to fall. The light it cast moved like smoke across the water.Somewhere beneath that glow, something waited.
She set her cloak aside, and walked farther in. The water climbed her legs cold at first, then warm as it deepened, She could smell rain again, thought the sky was clear. The voice had grown stronger.
"Come."
It wasn't sound; it was memory pressing gently against her heart.
When the water reached her waist, the tide pulled once more. Twice. Then she was falling, though the sea did not swallow her as water should. It opened. Light poured up from beneath, soft as breath, and carried her downward in silence.
She did not drown. She drifted.
Around her, the ocean turned too glass. Fish made of starlight moved through the stillness, their fins leaving trails like ribbons in the dark. The deeper she sank, the lighter it became, until she was surrounded by a pale glow, as if she were descending into dawn itself.
At the bottom stood a ruin - arches of silver stone and black coral, columns veined with veins of faint fire. A temple.
And in its centre, seated upon a throne of white roots, was a figure.
The woman's head was bowed, her hair floating like pale smoke. Her wings - broken, translucent - spread around her like the petals of a dead flower. Time itself seemed to pause around her.
Arenne's chest ached. She knew that face before she understood why. The same face from her dreams, her paintings, the whispers in her blood.
She reached out a trembling hand. "Seraphyne."
The eyes opened - slowly, painfully. They burned with light that felt both infinite and exhausted.
"You came.:
Arenne fell to her knees in the glowing sand. "I don't know how i found you."
The goddesses's lips curved faintly. "You never needed to. You were always part of the finding.:
The words made no sense, yet they filled her with warmth and sorrow all at once.
"I've seen you before," Arenne whispered. "In dreams. In the stories. In my hands when i paint."
"You remember what the world forgot."
Arenne shook her head. "No. I can't remember what i never lived."
"Haven't you?"
Seraphyne stood, and when she did, the ocean trembled. The light around her pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. She stepped close, bare feet leaving no mark upon the sand. "Every life the world has born since the first dawn carries a thread of what came before. You are not the first to love me, Arenne. And I am not the first to fall."
Arenne's voice was a whisper. "Then who am I?"
The goddess's hand rose, stopping inches from her cheek. "You are what remains when the world begins again."
For a long moment they stood like that - two souls suspended between the weight of memory and the promise of something new. The sea around them began to stir, the walls of the temple shifting as if awakening.
Above, thunder rolled faintly across the water.
Seraphyne's wings unfolded, still tattered but bright. "The sky remembers us. The dawn is stirring. If it wakes fully, this world will break as the last one did."
Arenne stared up at her, heart pounding. "Then what do we do?"
The goddess looked toward the surface, where the red moon burned through the waves."We choose whether to let it wake... or to teach it to dream."
The water brightened. The throne behind them cracked with a soft, sighing sound. Arenne stepped forward, her hand finding the goddess's.
"Then let's dream," she said.
And together, they rose through the sea of light toward the bleeding moon.