Kaelen wasn't supposed to be out this far.
The shore had vanished behind the mist, a soft silver-gray that blurred the line between breath and sky. The rowboat rocked beneath him with each tug of the tide, more creature than craft, lashed together by seaweed cord and desperation. He kept one hand on the worn oar and the other near the knife in his boot. Neither offered real protection.
The water here didn't ripple. It pulsed.
He didn't know why he'd gone this far. The night before, he had dreamed of something breathing under the waves. Not a beast. Not a voice. Just pressure. Cold and low and aware. It hadn't spoken, but it had listened. He'd woken sweating with salt on his tongue, already walking toward the docks before the sun had risen.
The island's elders marked the boundary in salt-painted stones. They said it was a tradition, but no one crossed them unless they had something to prove. Or something to lose. Kaelen had both. He rowed past them before dawn, telling himself it was for fishing. But his net was still dry, rolled under his seat like an excuse.
Now the tide was changing. He could feel it in the current, in the way the boat stopped following his pull and began dragging its own path.
He didn't fight it. Not yet.
The mist thickened until the sea and sky folded into one color. A lighter patch floated ahead. At first he thought it was driftwood, or a capsized vessel. But as the boat coasted closer, he saw the shape.
It was a body.
Long and low, slumped over the surface with its head half-submerged. Pale hide stretched thin over an unnatural frame. Antlers spiraled back along a skull that had no eyes. Just hollows. The jaw hung wide as if mid-exhale.
The boat slowed. The water around the body didn't move.
Kaelen stood, heart thudding in his throat. The creature's skin shimmered faintly. Not with wetness. With runes. Soft and irregular, like they had been carved from memory. Some flickered, others bled into the mist. He couldn't read them, but his spine began to ache just looking at them.
He blinked. For a moment, the runes on the beast's side mirrored the pattern of the runes that decorated the spine of his people's Totem wielders. Then the vision shifted, and the runes unraveled again into nothing.
Kaelen's fingers curled around the edge of the boat.
The tide stopped.
Completely.
No wind. No rocking. Even the sound of waves vanished. The sea held still, not like glass, but like a lung between breaths. Kaelen looked down at his hands, then at the beast. Something inside his chest answered a question he didn't remember hearing.
The beast twitched.
Its jaw did not close. Its eyes did not open. But the runes along its flank flared—once, silently.
And in that instant, Kaelen felt something move beneath his skin.
Not pain. Not light.
A weight.
As if a second spine had begun to form beside his own.
He stumbled backward into the hull, oar clattering free.
The boat did not move.
Neither did the body.
But something inside him had changed.
The oar dragged heavy through the water, as if the sea resented being touched.
Kaelen didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the mist ahead, though it shifted slower now. Or maybe that was him. His muscles ached in strange places. Deep, tucked beneath bone. His spine still buzzed faintly, a second rhythm under his breath.
The boat creaked. A gull called once from far off.
By the time the shoreline faded in, Kaelen's shoulders had gone numb. The rowboat nudged the dock gently, like nothing had happened at all.
He tied it with shaking hands.
No one was waiting for him. The small fishing village stood quiet, low huts sloping toward the tide. The smoke from the morning cookfires had long gone cold. He walked barefoot across the packed sand and felt the grain rub wrong against his soles.
He passed Old Genni, who always whittled fishhooks on her porch. She didn't look up.
He reached the foot of the path to the upper village and stopped.
He didn't feel different. Not completely. But his balance was off. His hearing sharper. When he closed his eyes, he could still see the runes.
Kaelen touched the back of his neck again. Still skin. Still warm. No scars. No marks.
He wanted to ask someone. But not yet. He didn't have the words for what had happened. He barely had the shape of it. He knew only one thing.
The sea had paused.
And he had returned from it unchanged. But not untouched.