Chapter 12 – The River Remembers
Seer's POV
The night split.
Not with lightning, but with a pulse.
It rolled through the earth like a slow drumbeat, pressing into my skin, creeping into my bones. The wooden beams above me creaked, jars on the shelves quivered, and the water in the scrying basin rippled not from wind, but from the heartbeat that wasn't mine.
I had felt many tremors in my life earthquakes, wolf-footed hunts, storms shaking mountains but this was different. This one was learning me. It matched my breath, my steps, as though testing how deep it could go.
The Drowned King stirs.
I had prayed those words would die in the old ink of my records. That they would sink into forgotten history, like the bones scattered in the riverbed. But the pulse said otherwise.
I forced my hands still over the basin, leaned closer, and breathed into the water. It did not show me my face. Instead, it pulled me under.
The world went liquid. The basin became a river, fast and cold, carrying shards of visions in its current:
A girl with eclipsed-moon eyes, her breath visible in a place that had no winter.
A mirror-skinned creature stepping through breathing stone.
A man with a blade raised, his grip trembling but his stance unyielding.
A voice calling a name with reverence and hunger in the same breath.
And under it all, the same heartbeat, quickening.
The current dragged me deeper, until the surface light vanished and the water turned black. Shapes moved there slow, deliberate, watching. I knew better than to look too closely. Down here, the river looked back.
I gasped and tore free of the vision. My cabin felt smaller than it had a moment ago, its walls hunched close. The fire in the grate had dwindled to red threads, and my breath hung white in the air though summer still held the valley outside. That was never a good sign.
She's alive, the river whispered, though no lips moved. She carries him.
Lyra.
Her name had not passed my lips in years, but it had never left my mind. Her mother Elain brought her to me once, when she was barely walking. A quiet child, watchful even then, as if she understood that the grown-ups speaking over her head were deciding something final.
That day, the water in my basin had leaned toward her, reaching up like a hand toward its mirror. Elain had seen it and gone pale. "No," she had whispered, pulling her daughter back. "She is not his."
But the river chooses before the second year, whether we want it or not. I had known then what I know now: it had already claimed her.
I went to the far shelf where I kept the drowned records scrolls and stitched skins smelling faintly of silt and salt, their ink blurred from trembling hands. My fingers found the one I needed: The Cycle of the Tideborn.
It was no more comforting now than when I first read it.
The vessel will be of the bloodline. The river will choose before the second year. The chosen pulse will no longer be their own.
And in the faintest, almost hesitant writing, a line I had tried for years to forget:
When the vessel counts down, the tide will not stop at the shore.
The basin shivered again, though my hands were nowhere near it. I looked.
This time it showed me a face pale as moonlit bone, hair drifting as if she floated in water. The eyes were wide, their dark irises ringed with a faint glow.
I knew that face.
But it wasn't Lyra's.
It was her sister. The one the world believed had drowned before she turned two.
I had never believed she was gone. The river doesn't waste what it takes it keeps.
And now, the little sister was smiling at me.
A chill deeper than the season slid down my spine. "What do you want?" I asked, though my voice shook.
Her lips moved, forming no sound at first. Then the water carried the words into my ears: "When she breaks, I will be there."
The basin shattered.
Cold water soaked my boots, slithering toward the door like it had somewhere to be. And then, in the silence that followed, a different voice filled the cabin a low, resonant tone that seemed to come from everywhere at once.
"She will bring him to the surface. And when she does, you will not be able to look away."
The fire went out.
The shadows lengthened. I wrapped my cloak around my shoulders, not for warmth but for will. There was no more time to sit in the edges of prophecy. If the pulse had reached me, it had reached others.
Hunters. Rivals. And worse those who serve the tide willingly.
Outside, the forest was silent, but not still. Branches bent though there was no wind. The path ahead seemed to unroll itself in invitation and warning. I stepped onto it.
With every step, the pulse in my bones grew stronger, louder. Not mine. Hers.
Lyra's.
The countdown had begun.
And when it reached zero, the dead would walk in daylight,
and the river would never give them back.