Page 55 of The Dark Sea Calls

I felt the hundreds of Undine soldiers pulled from the training camps outside the city, and the troops returned from the front line. The palace barracks buckled like a sack of squirming salamanders waiting to erupt. So many Troid Sídhe, their magic subtle, like a sharpened knife—the kind that made you bleed without even noticing a cut.

The abyss surrounding Cruinn had always been there. A gloom that clung to the city walls.

I swam over it during the migration. It was cold. Absent of life.

All I had to do was think about it, and the next moment I was in my uncle’s room. I was the water filling every inch of his space, rushing inside his lungs.

King Irvine held something in his hands, a material I had never seen before, as if he was pulling a thread from under his skin. Dark as night strands that looked like veins on his wrists, his fingers looping them into a tight knotted pattern as he wove his intent into the shadows.

I watched, unable to take my eyes off the blanket in his lap. Made of smoke, held together by his magic.

King Irvine finished his finger loop and stood up, carrying his wispy creation to the railing. He snapped the fabric once before blowing it like a spent candle. It dissolved in the water and drifted before joining the rest of the abyss.

When my mother had died almost fifteen years before, the abyss had been a funeral shroud over the city that had never dissolved.

No one knew what it did, as people traveled over the ominous darkness all the time, and no one questioned it.

Was it for protection?

I didn’t know.

As I watched King Irvine sit down and stare proudly at his abyss, blocking Cruinn from anyone looking at the city from a distance, I wondered why he had never claimed the abyss—allowing its presence to remain one of the great mysteries of the Twilight Lake.

My dream took me across the water. To the depths of the Whispering Pass and the lines of Mer that formed a road leading to the front line. Burdened by weapons, armor, and blood lust that made the water taste like metal.

Cormac Illfin wasn’t far from the Reeds. Less than a day at a fast pace.

Despite the warnings clattering in my skull, telling me to turn back, I pressed on, scouring the soldiers past their camp. Past the front line, barren, as the battle pulled closer to Cruinn.

Seeing the Mer and their forces in all their glory did something to me. Filling me with guilt.

How many people would die because of me?

So many of my kin had died on the Frosted Sands because of me, and now, Tarsainn was marching on Cruinn. And it was my fault.

I felt Cormac, like a glowing spark, amongst the soldiers at the camp. I drifted down, weaving through the tents, invisible to all. I was the water, and I was everywhere.

Cormac’s tent was Hidden by a jagged wall of coral with an entrance that had been knocked away years. Cormac must have been upset with the placement of his tent, away from his men, as the Mer-king had chosen to stand away from the coral. His arms crossed, displaying the black scar on his chest from my uncle’s blade. His red tail was a splash of color in a sea of dead white coral and the same white tents as far as the eye could see.

Cormac’s brow furrowed as I drew closer. His green eyes flashed to me and then away, sensing something.

That wasn’t possible.

I was the water.

No longer Maeve, but every drop in the Twilight Lake. From the droplets sprinkled from a shorebird's wing to the watery breath in his lungs.

Cormac’s face darkened. A frightening storm. His green eyes flashed like lightning across the undulating clouds.

I looked behind me to try and gauge what had made him so angry when his tail snapped, pushing him forward, and he reached for the trident on his back.

“Treacherous wretch,” Cormac snarled.

He was talking to me.

But I wasn’t there.

He jabbed his trident forward, the sharp blades running through the water as he attacked me.

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