Sera's POV
The world snapped back into light.
Sera gasped so hard her chest hurt. She was alive. She was on the ground. She was alive.
Wait.
She pushed herself up on shaking arms and looked around. The rocks. The dark water. The ruins of the fortress wall above her. Everything looked exactly the same as before the Leviathan opened its enormous mouth.
Except the Leviathan was gone.
Morgantha was gone.
And Kadrin was lying face-down on the rocks, completely still.
"Kadrin!" Sera scrambled to her knees and rolled him over.
His eyes were closed. His skin was the gray-white color of ash. The wound on his shoulder had stopped bleeding, but not because it was healing. It had stopped because his whole body looked like it had simply... shut down.
"Kadrin, wake up. Wake up right now." She shook his shoulders. Nothing. "Don't you dare. Don't you dare do this to me after everything we just"
She pressed her ear to his chest.
A heartbeat. Faint. Slow. But there.
She sat back on her heels and tried to breathe.
"Okay," she whispered to herself. "Okay. Think."
She was a Tidecaller. The ocean pressed at the edges of her mind, wanting to be used. The same power Valerius had tried to steal. The same power that had apparently just helped wake up the most terrifying creature in existence.
Wonderful.
"What did you do to him?"
The voice came from behind her.
Sera spun around. Magnus stood ten feet away, sword drawn, his eyes moving between her and the unconscious king with equal parts suspicion and grief.
"I didn't do anything," Sera said, keeping her voice steady. "He collapsed after Morgantha disappeared. I don't know why."
"You're the reason the Leviathan rose." Magnus didn't sheathe his sword. "You're the reason those monsters attacked in the first place. Every bad thing that's happened tonight leads back to you."
Sera couldn't argue with that. She'd known it since the first tentacle crashed through the wall.
"You're right," she said quietly. "And I'm sorry. But right now, none of that matters, because your king needs help, and I don't know how to give it to him."
Magnus stared at her for a long moment. Then he sheathed his sword.
"Get away from him," he said. But his voice had shifted. Less like an accusation. More like a command. "Our healers will take him inside."
"And me?"
Magnus looked at her the way a man looks at a problem he doesn't have a solution for.
"Inside too," he said finally. "But you'll be watched."
They gave her a room in one of the upper towers. Small. Cold. A window with no glass, just iron bars and a view of the frozen ocean below.
Sera sat on the edge of the bed and stared through those bars for a long time.
She could hear activity below, healers moving quickly, guards calling orders, people working through the aftermath. The eastern wall had half collapsed. The great hall smelled like smoke and salt.
And somewhere down the hall, behind a heavy door, Kadrin lay unconscious, and the healers didn't know why.
She'd walked into his ceremony, grabbed his life with both hands, and dragged him into something catastrophic. His fortress was broken. His people had been terrified. The man who hadn't felt anything in three hundred years had woken up just in time to feel all of it: pain, fear, the impossible weight of leading people through a monster attack.
And now he might not wake up.
A sound stopped her cold.
Scraping. From inside the wall.
Sera sat up slowly. The sound came again, a slow, deliberate scrape, like something with long nails dragging them across stone. Coming from behind the fireplace.
She stood. Crossed the room. Put her hand against the wall beside the cold hearth.
The scraping stopped.
Silence.
Then a voice, so soft she almost thought she imagined it, floated out from between the stones.
"Tidecaller."
Sera's blood went ice.
"Who's there?" she whispered.
"A friend." The voice was smooth. Like water over glass. Like the sound the ocean makes just before a wave breaks. "Someone who can answer the questions you haven't thought to ask yet."
"Friends use doors."
A sound like a low laugh. "I can't use doors. Not anymore. He made sure of that." A pause. "Ask me about the prophecy, Tidecaller. Ask me what Valerius left out."
Every instinct Sera had screamed at her to back away, to call for Magnus, to do anything other than stand here talking to a voice in the wall.
But Valerius had mentioned a prophecy. Morgantha had mentioned a prophecy. And no one had told her what it actually said.
"What did he leave out?" she asked.
"The second half." The voice moved along the wall, slow and careful. "Valerius told the king that the more he feels, the more the ocean wakes. That part is true. But he did not tell him the rest."
"And the rest is what?"
The voice dropped lower.
"The rest is that there is one way to put the Leviathan back to sleep. One way to close the door that your touch opened. One act that will end the awakening sequence before it becomes unstoppable." Another pause, longer this time. "But you won't like it."
Sera's hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the wall to make them stop.
"Tell me."
"The bond must be broken," the voice said. "Completely. Kadrin's heart must go back to what it was. Frozen. Closed. Empty." A sound almost like sadness crept into those smooth tones. "He must forget what it felt like to feel again. He must return to the cursed state Morgantha designed for him. And you must be the one to do it."
The room felt very cold suddenly.
"How?" Sera said. Not a question. More like someone watching a wall fall toward them and not having time to move.
"You know how." The voice was barely a whisper now. "You felt it when you touched him at the ceremony. That golden light. That connection. The same power that woke him up can put him back to sleep. But only if you choose it. Only if you mean it."
"You're asking me to destroy him."
"I'm asking you to save everyone else."
Sera stepped back from the wall. The scraping sound faded, then stopped. Whatever had been on the other side was gone.
She sat back down on the bed and stared at her own hands.
These hands. They'd touched a cursed king and started something neither of them understood. Now, according to a voice she couldn't explain, those same hands could end it.
But ending it meant taking away the only warmth Kadrin had known in three hundred years.
She thought about the way he'd looked when he kissed her forehead. Confused and clumsy and completely sincere. Like someone learning to walk and discovering it was worth every stumble.
She thought about what he'd said.
I'm glad I felt something before the end.
He'd been ready to die. He hadn't been ready to go back to emptiness.
And she might not have a choice but to give him exactly that.
The frozen ocean roared far below. Somewhere deep in the water, something massive and ancient stirred in its sleep and waited.
Waited for her to decide.
Sera pressed her face into her hands.
In the morning, she would go to his room. She would look at the man who'd protected her at the cost of everything and figure out if she was brave enough to do the one thing that might save them all.
She already knew she didn't want to be that brave.