Silence.
At first, that was all there was — not absence, but weight. A silence so vast it seemed to cradle her heart. Lyrielle drifted in it, eyes closed, her breath dissolved into a rhythm that was no longer hers alone.
When she opened her eyes, she found herself suspended in a world of light and shadow. The water glowed faintly from within, as if the sea possessed its own dawn. All around her floated ribbons of luminescent mist — threads of memory, alive and shifting.
For a moment, she felt fear. The body she wore was no longer the one she had known. Her skin shimmered with faint silver light; her hair drifted as if part of the current itself. When she touched her chest, she found her heartbeat soft but steady — slower, deeper, as though in harmony with the sea's own pulse.
"You see now," came the voice she knew best.
Seloria.
She appeared not as the ghostly shimmer of dreams, but wholly — her form bright and fluid, her gown flowing like the motion of the tide. Her eyes held both sorrow and serenity, and her hands, when they reached for Lyrielle's, were warm.
Lyrielle stared, trembling. "You're real."
Seloria smiled faintly. "We are both real — though not as we were. The sea does not kill, my love. It remembers."
Lyrielle looked around them. Shadows drifted in the distance — not menacing, but familiar. Faces, fragments, remnants of lives once lost to the tide: sailors, lovers, dreamers. They floated in silence, each one surrounded by the faint glow of their own memory.
"Are they…?"
"The remembered," Seloria said softly. "Those whom the sea could not bear to forget. When their names were lost to the world above, they became part of the deep."
Lyrielle's gaze softened. "Then we are among them."
"No," Seloria murmured. "You are different. You were chosen. The sea heard your vow — it gave you what mortals are never meant to hold: the bridge between forgetting and remembrance."
Lyrielle's chest ached. "And what am I now?"
Seloria touched her cheek. "The heart of its memory."
Time flowed differently there.
Sometimes Lyrielle would walk along what seemed a vast seabed of light, where coral towers rose like cathedrals and the currents sang hymns of lives once lived. Sometimes she would drift beside Seloria, hand in hand, through veils of luminescence that whispered fragments of forgotten songs.
But there were other moments, too — moments when she would glimpse above, through the shifting ceiling of light, and see shadows of the world that once was.
A ruined spire half-buried in sand. The curve of the castle's highest tower, now home to glowing anemones. The faint toll of a bell long rusted to silence.
Elaria slept beneath her feet, its memory preserved in the folds of the sea.
One night — or whatever night meant beneath the waves — Lyrielle found Seloria sitting upon a coral ledge, her gaze turned upward. The light from her skin shimmered against the vast dark.
Lyrielle sat beside her. "Do you miss it?"
Seloria smiled faintly. "Sometimes. The air. The scent of rain before a storm. The sound of your voice carried on wind rather than water."
Lyrielle took her hand. "Then speak to me now."
"You would not hear it as before," Seloria said gently. "Here, words do not move — they become."
Lyrielle tilted her head, unsure, until Seloria leaned forward and kissed her.
The touch sent ripples of light cascading outward, illuminating the sea like dawn breaking through water. In that instant, Lyrielle understood — beneath the sea, language had no need of sound. Their love spoke in current and motion, in pulse and radiance.
They were no longer bound by mortality, nor untouched by sorrow. They had become something both living and eternal — memory made flesh, heart made tide.
But even eternity has a rhythm.
As Lyrielle drifted that night, a strange tremor moved through the water. The glowing mists around her dimmed for a moment, then brightened again, faster, like quickened breath.
When she turned to Seloria, she saw worry flicker across her face for the first time.
"The sea is stirring," Seloria whispered. "Something new has awakened — something that remembers differently."
Lyrielle frowned. "What do you mean?"
"Not all memories are kind, Lyrielle. Some return with hunger."
The water around them rippled, and from the farthest depths, a shadow began to rise — vast and slow, as if the ocean itself were exhaling something long forgotten.
Lyrielle's fingers tightened around Seloria's. "What is it?"
Seloria's voice was barely a whisper. "The cost of what we became."