The ocean was no longer silent.
It called now—loud and insistent, like a mother summoning her lost child. The waves crashed against the cliffs with unnatural rhythm, as if each strike was a word in a forgotten tongue. Lightning split the sky into jagged pieces, and the wind howled low and deep, carrying voices that did not belong to the living.
In Brinemere, panic had taken root.
Doors were barred. Fires burned all night. Priests from the old faiths gathered on the shore, chanting prayers meant for gods long buried beneath time and salt.
But no prayer could stop what was coming.
Inside Quinta's cottage—now more shrine than home—Frank Frownwater stood by the window, watching the storm roll in with eyes that had seen too much.
Behind him, Quinta sat on the floor, her back pressed against the cold stone hearth. She held the coral key in one hand, the glow from her chest dimmed but still present, pulsing like embers waiting to catch flame again.
She had seen the truth.
She had felt it.
"I don't know if I can do this," she whispered.
Frank turned slowly. "You don't have to do anything. You just have to be ."
She looked up at him, eyes wide with fear and something deeper—something ancient stirring behind her ribs.
"What if I don't want to be whatever they made me to be?"
Frank stepped closer, crouching so he could meet her gaze.
"You think you have a choice?" He smiled, but there was no humor in it. "The blood doesn't ask permission. The tide doesn't wait. You are what you are, whether you say yes or no."
Quinta swallowed hard.
Outside, the sea roared.
At dawn, the villagers came.
Not with torches and pitchforks this time—but with weapons.
Swords forged from black iron. Spears tipped with bone. Rifles loaded with bullets etched in symbols older than the town itself.
They surrounded the cliff.
They knew what was happening.
And they would not let it happen.
A man stepped forward—Elder Rellis, his face lined with years and fear.
"Quinta Quiz!" he called. "Come down! We know what you've done!"
She stood at the edge of the cliff, hair whipping in the wind, skin shimmering faintly under the gray light.
"I haven't done anything," she said, voice steady.
"You woke the sea," he spat. "You brought the old ones back."
She glanced at Frank, who watched silently, arms crossed over his chest.
"I didn't wake them," she said. "They were never gone."
Rellis raised a trembling hand. "Then we'll send them back."
The villagers raised their weapons.
And the ocean answered.
A wave unlike any other rose from the horizon.
It was not water alone—it was shadow and memory, curling high above the land like the hand of something vast and unseen. It moved without sound, yet its presence silenced everything else.
The villagers froze.
Even Rellis took a step back.
Quinta felt it before she saw it—the pull in her chest, the echo in her bones.
The First was near.
And she was not pleased .
From the depths of the sea, a voice rolled through the air like thunder trapped in a shell.
"They forget. But I remember."
The wave crashed—not onto the village, but around it, forming a wall of water taller than any building, enclosing Brinemere in a circle of roaring silence.
No one could leave.
No one could hide.
The ocean had come to judge.
Quinta turned to Frank.
"What happens now?"
He looked at her, expression unreadable.
"Now," he said softly, "you speak for your kind."
She looked out over the village, over the people who had feared her since birth, who had whispered and pointed and prayed for her to disappear.
And she understood.
This was not war.
This was reckoning.
She stepped forward, raising her hands.
The wind stopped.
The rain ceased.
And the sea waited.
Quinta closed her eyes.
And for the first time, she spoke .
Not in words.
In memory .
And the ocean listened.