Page 95 of Tethered In Blood

“They look like us,” he rasped. “Like the ones we’ve lost.”

A slow, creeping chill slid along my spine. “Lost?” I echoed, my voice quieter now, just above the lapping of the tide.

The fisher swallowed hard, his throat working as he nodded toward the sea. “The ones taken by the water.”

I blinked. “You mean drowned?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “Some drowned,” he said. “Others… they just vanished. Went out on their boats and never came back.” His voice turned brittle. Each word was heavier than the last. “But sometimes—” His voice dropped to a whisper, as if the mist curling at our feet was listening. “Sometimes they do come back.”

Oberon’s tension coiled tighter beside. “What do you mean?” I asked, keeping my voice even despite the chill in my veins.

The older man met my eyes. His were dark and glassy, hollowed by things he had seen and wished he hadn’t. “They come back wrong.”

The other fishers had fallen silent, their gazes flickering, hands flexing over nets and knives. The younger man approaching us slowed, but the old fisher didn’t acknowledge him. His attention remained fixed on me, his fingers curling against his palms as if anchoring himself.

“They don’t speak,” he muttered at last. “Not at first. They… stand there at the edge of the docks, starin’ at us.” A sharp prick of unease crawled along my arms. I could see it in my mind—the unmoving, silent figures lingering at the shoreline. “Like they don’t know where they are,” the fisher continued, his voice low and heavy. “Like they’re tryin’ to remember something.”

“And then?”

The fisher’s throat bobbed as he shook his head. “Then they start mimickin’”

My charcoal stilled mid-stroke.

“Mimicking?” Oberon pressed, his voice unreadable, the sharp edge of a blade hidden beneath the surface.

The fisher’s weathered face paled. His breath came shallow, his fingers twitching at his sides. “They copy the way we move. The way we talk.” He shook his head. “But it’s never right.”

“What do you mean?”

“The speech—it’s delayed,” the fisher said, his voice rough as if he were dragging each word through gravel. “Like they have to think about it. Like they’re relearnin’ somethin’ they shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place.”

His eyes darkened, his gaze growing distant.

“And their voices…” He trailed off, his jaw tightening as if the words were dangerous.

A gust of wind rippled through the mist, shifting it in slow, curling tendrils around the docks.

He shook his head. “They don’t sound human no more.”

A shuffling sound broke through the thick silence, and my attention flicked toward the younger man who had dropped something earlier. He crouched, fingers brushing the damp wood as he retrieved whatever had slipped from his grasp. When he straightened, he turned to face us, his movements strangely deliberate.

My eyes locked onto his.

A polite smile curved his lips, but its form was wrong. His pointed ears caught the dim light as he squared his shoulders, mirroring the confident posture that Garrick often had. His gaze lingered too long, assessing me with an intensity that raised the fine hairs on my arms.

I redirected my attention to the fishers.

The older man’s expression darkened. His eyes hardened. He stared at the dock planks beneath his feet as if the words he intended to say were ones he wished he could bury there. “They remember just enough to fool you,” he mumbled. “But they aren’t them no more.”

A slow, sinking weight pressed against my chest. “That’s awful,” I murmured.

It was more than fear in his voice—it was grief.The kind that had settled into his bones lingered in the lines of his face. This wasn’t just a fisher’s tale. This had taken from him.

The silence that followed felt thick, filled with the things he wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say.

Footsteps approached from the village, breaking the tension. I looked up, spotting Garrick strolling toward us, that familiar smug smile tugging at his lips. I exhaled through my nose and flipped open my journal, trying to refocus as we turned away from the fishers, but the words blurred together, my thoughts still tangled in the conversation’s weight.

“Hey, beautiful!”

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