Even three years after leaving the palace, Thalassa still woke with seawater in her throat.

Not real, of course. Just the echo of it—the phantom memory of tides that once obeyed her whisper. She had traded the throne for silence, the crown for freedom. Or so she told herself.

The coastal cliffs where she lived now were dry and wind-worn, far from Atlantis and its golden halls. Here, her days passed slowly, and no one bowed when she walked by.

But the sea had not forgotten her.

And tonight, it called.

Thalassa stood barefoot on the edge of the crag, her white robe flaring in the wind. The moon hung low and red above the waves. The water below churned unnaturally, though there was no storm.

She closed her eyes and extended her senses—not just physically, but magically.

And felt it.

A pulse, deep beneath the ocean floor.

Old. Wrong. Hungry.

Her fingers twitched.

“Not possible,” she whispered to the night. “The seals were made to last forever.”

But forever, she knew too well, was only a promise made by fools and kings.

She reached for the tide with her mind. The magic met her like a wounded animal—panicked, limping, bleeding from an unseen wound. And then, just as she touched the memory in the current, she heard it.

A voice.

Not in her ears. In her blood.

“She wakes.”

Thalassa staggered backward, the vision breaking.

A figure of black coral rising from the seabed. Chains unraveling like kelp. Eyes—too many eyes—opening all at once.

Her pulse raced.

She hadn’t felt this presence since before Triton wore the crown.

Since before Medusa vanished from the courts.

Thalassa’s gaze narrowed. “So that’s what this is,” she murmured. “This isn’t a rebellion.”

She turned from the cliff, already heading toward the hidden grotto where she kept the last relic of her power—a circlet of tideglass that still shimmered with the authority of a queen.

“This is a reckoning.”

Thalassa descended the jagged path into the grotto without hesitation.

Few knew of it. Fewer still could enter. It had been carved long ago by the first sea queens, bound with protective glyphs only her blood could unlock. As she pressed her palm to the tide-worn stone, the air around her shimmered. A soft groan echoed, and the wall dissolved like mist.

Inside, bioluminescent algae pulsed along the walls, revealing the chamber’s center: a circular pool of mirrored water, untouched by tide or time. Suspended above it on a coral pedestal was the circlet of tideglass—once a symbol of her rule, now a relic of everything she had left behind.

Thalassa stepped forward.

The water in the pool stirred at her presence, rippling in slow spirals.

She reached for the circlet but didn’t put it on. Not yet.

Instead, she dipped her fingers into the pool.

“I seek the old current,” she said softly.

The water answered—rising in a column, clear and cold. Images flickered within it: a trench, cloaked in darkness. A boy with his mother’s eyes and a shadow that curled around him like a crown. And Triton—alone beneath the Moon Pool, unaware of the weight above his head.

And then came the image that stole her breath.

Chains. Breaking.

A scream in a voice that had not touched the world in centuries.

Thalassa pulled back, her expression grim. She knew what she had seen.

Ceto.

The name itself was dangerous. One of the Deep-Bound, a primordial sea titan buried and sealed in the abyss before the age of thrones. Forgotten by most. Feared by the few who still remembered.

And now… awakening.

She turned to the circlet, picked it up, and slowly, deliberately, placed it atop her brow.

The tideglass shimmered, and the grotto came alive. Glyphs glowed. The pool stilled. Her heart slowed into rhythm with the ancient magic.

Thalassa spoke aloud, her voice steady.

“Send word to the Oracle’s Mirror.”

The chamber responded. A thin ribbon of silver light snaked across the water’s surface, stretching outward like a signal into the deep.

“Tell them the sea stirs in its sleep. Tell them the witch has returned to the king’s sight. And tell them…”

She paused.

“…Ceto breathes.”

The Moon Pool was silent, save for the sound of falling water—a soft trickle from the high channels carved through the stone ceiling. Triton stood waist-deep in its sacred center, crown laid beside him, trident planted in the sand.

But there was no peace in him.

He hadn’t slept since seeing her.

Medusa.

Even her name stirred the waters around him. Not with fear. With memory.

Triton ran a hand through his damp hair, his brow furrowed. When she had appeared on the edge of the reef, for a heartbeat he’d believed she was a dream. But dreams didn’t carry that same look—part warning, part longing.

He’d said nothing when she approached. Just watched. Like a boy again, stunned into silence by the witch with the eyes that knew too much.

He had thought her dead. Or at least buried in some far current, away from the affairs of the courts.

But now she was near.

And the sea… it was different.

Triton closed his eyes and reached out with the part of him that wasn’t bone and flesh but salt and current. The king’s blood allowed for more than rule—it connected him to the very rhythm of the deep.

And that rhythm had begun to change.

There it was again: the pulse.

Soft, like a heartbeat under miles of stone.

Wrong.

This isn’t just her return, he thought. This is something older.

Suddenly, the water shifted beside him—rippled without cause. A figure emerged from the shadows of the arch: High Advisor Neridos, pale and stern as ever, robes swirling like smoke.

“Sire,” Neridos said, bowing. “The Council requests your presence. There are… whispers.”

Triton didn’t turn. “About her?”

“About her. About the sky turning red over the northern kelp. About shadows moving without current.”

“And you think they’re connected.”

Neridos hesitated. “We fear they are.”

Triton finally turned to face him. “I need more than fear.”

The advisor stepped forward. “Then perhaps you need the truth. She was seen near the Trench of Moirakos. The place sealed by your ancestors. The place where the Old One sleeps.”

Triton stiffened. The name wasn’t spoken aloud. But he knew what Neridos meant.

Ceto.

His gaze hardened. “She would not go there by accident.”

“No,” said Neridos. “Which means this was no accident.”

Triton’s eyes moved back to the rippling surface of the Moon Pool.

Something was rising.

And Medusa had returned not just to haunt his past—but to stand at the edge of something no one was ready to face.

Medusa floated just beneath the shelf of a ruined reef, her body still and half-curled like a drifting kelp strand. The water here was cold, untouched by light. She had chosen this place for its silence—no fish, no coral hum, no voices of the world she no longer trusted.

Only her heartbeat. And the whisper that echoed inside it.

“She wakes.”

Ceto.

That name had haunted the deepest trenches of her memory. Long before Erebus was born. Long before she’d chosen exile.

Medusa had felt the first stirrings weeks ago—currents bending where they should not, tides hesitating as if the ocean itself was holding its breath. But tonight, the truth had become undeniable.

And Erebus had heard it too.

That terrified her more than the name itself.

She looked down at her palms—calloused and scarred, magic-laced. So much of her life had been spent restraining her power, holding it back like a tide behind a crumbling dam. But now?

Now she wasn’t sure holding back was enough.

She had wanted only to survive. To raise her son. To forget what the sea had taken from her.

But the sea didn’t forget.

And neither, it seemed, did fate.

She tilted her head toward the surface above, where faint light shimmered in the distance.

Triton was up there.

And if the deep was stirring, if Ceto was truly waking, then their time of watching from opposite shores was over.

They would have to stand together—or drown apart.