The moon rode high and white over the river like a god's palm pressed to water. When Rhen stepped back onto the bank that second night, the scent of sea and fur braided together in his mouth: salt and pine, wet moss and the musk of an animal-crowd. He moved with a careful silence, because silence was a habit taught by centuries of half-lives—the kind of habit that saved him from hunters and from himself.
Nymera was already there, a dim shape beneath the glassy surface. Even close, where the moon light turned her skin a pale pearl, she belonged more to the water than to the air. Her tail folded beneath her like a sleeping thing; her hands, for a mermaid, were small and human in their gesture, and she held them pressed to her chest as though to stop the tides from pulling her apart.
When Rhen knelt, the river wrapped around his knees like a cool hand. He had told Thalos nothing of what he'd seen the night before—he'd lied by omission, because some things had to be found, not explained away. Thalos had barked once and called him foolish, but instead of dragging him home he'd let Rhen go. Even old men, it seemed, could keep their counsel when the moon demanded it.
"Why do you come?" Nymera asked. Her voice, when at last it left her, was no more than the whisper of leaves. She was careful—her lips barely moved because the Council's seal still hummed in the back of her throat. It would not let her sing, but it would let her speak. Short phrases. The sea would not hear their words, and the land might remain ignorant.
"Because I saw you," Rhen said. His silver eyes caught the moonlight and split it; he watched her face like a hunter might watch the animal he meant to spare, or the animal he meant to take. There was a softness in him that surprised him—an ache that had nothing to do with hunger. "Because you looked like you were hurt."
Nymera watched him, head cocked like a gull's. "You are not a hunter," she said. Whether that was an accusation or relief, he could not tell.
He wrenched his gaze away from the moon's reflection and into the water, where her profile trembled. "I don't know what I am," he admitted. The words were almost cruelly simple. "Only that when I looked at you last night something stopped me from running. I thought—" He swallowed. "I thought I'd wake up and find myself back in the forest, nothing more."
She smiled once—a small, heartbreaking curl of the lip that vanished too fast. "I should go," she said, but she did not move. "My father—"
Rhen's hand hovered over the surface. He had no idea how to breach the laws maintaining their distance. The old stories were full of warnings: the merfolk's skin tasted like salt and sorrow, their laughter lured men into whirlpools, their children were raised on lullabies that ended in teeth. But when his fingers finally ghosted the top layer of water, it felt like the softest thing he had ever touched.
The contact was tiny, nothing more than a ripple across their worlds. Still, it was enough.
A line of heat traced his forearm against the cool of the night, like a brand whose edges were blurred and wet. Rhen jerked back, heart pounding; the skin under his sleeve felt different, taut in a place it had never felt taut before. He reached with fingers that were clumsy and human and found a mark—an ink-dark sigil, braided like rope and coral. It had the shape of a moon clasping a jagged tooth.
Nymera saw him look and, in the next breath, paled so white the moonlight could have been jealous. Her hand flew to the place at her collarbone that had always been hidden beneath scales and sea-foam: a faint, pale indentation, hardly a scar, the shape of the same sigil. They mirrored one another like halves of a broken coin.
"By the tides," she breathed.
Rhen's voice was small. "What is that?"
She did not answer at first. Her lips moved over the shape as if tasting an echo. The seal bound by the Council had been woven through her flesh by monks of the deep to keep the old songs from waking the skies. It had never been supposed to be shared with land-born beings. Yet here it was—on him, as fresh and dark as a new wound.
Below them, in the slow black of the river, something shifted. The water gathered like a held breath. Rhen felt the hair rise along his arms.
"We were told—" Nymera said, the words stumbling—"we were told that when the moon's child found the tide's heir, we must never meet. It is—" Her fingers trembled as they traced the pale loop under her throat. "It is the binding."
Rhen thought of Thalos' warnings about mermaids bringing death. He thought of the old stories told to make children avoid cliffs and ledges. He thought of the way Thalos avoided the sea when they passed fishing shacks, as if the salt itself left a residue of guilt. He wanted to shout that the sign on his arm meant nothing, that flesh was flesh and blood was blood and prophecies were for the old to sell to frighten children. But the sign on his skin burned like cold iron until he could not deny it.
"What did your father say?" Rhen asked. He needed a map. The world felt crazily small and enormous at once.
"He said… he said we would be safe if we ignored it. He said—" Nymera's voice cracked. "He said prophecy bends to will. But the Council—" She forced a laugh that sounded like a bubble popping. "The Council remembers what changes the sea."
The river grew louder, as if in answer. Rhen's chest felt heavy with the weight of two worlds pressing in. A sound came from beyond the trees: a crack like a snapped branch, then distant voices and the beating of feet on earth. Thalos moved like a shadow through those voices—Rhen saw him standing on a nearby rise, axe gleaming faintly, and another figure he had not expected to see: three men with torches and the emblem of the town sewn clumsily onto their coats. They were not hunters but villagers—the last of the fishermen who still believed stories were prophecy.
"Rhen!" Thalos called low, not with anger, but with a note of warning. His voice was the wind that came before the storm. Rhen glanced at him and knew he had been seen.
Nymera's face flushed, and in her eyes was the old, dark terror: if the land saw her, if the kingdom saw a princess exposed to moonlight with a marked stranger at the river, what price would be demanded? The prophecy was not content with simple tragedy. It liked exchange—blood for blood, sacrifice for silence.
"Go," she mouthed, though her feet refused the command. "Go and hide."
He didn't move. In the human world, he felt smaller than a mouse before a hound. In the animal part of him, he felt the drumbeat of a fight. The moon tugged at him, and the mark on his arm hummed like a chord struck on an instrument in the ribs.
"Rhen, for the gods' sake," Thalos ground between his teeth. He stepped down from the rise and into the trees with a swiftness that made the villagers flinch. He was old but he could be quick with rules. He moved toward Rhen as if to say he would take the blame for what they were all about to do.
Rhen made his choice as if someone else had written the line for him. He rose, and where muscles tightened the beast murmured at his throat. "I won't let them take you," he whispered to Nymera.
She looked at him, and in that look something like hope and something like despair mixed until it could not be separated. "You cannot protect me," she said plainly. "There are things the sea can do that your fists cannot break." Her fins flashed beneath her, an abrupt reminder that she moved to the deep more easily than he could. "If they take me to the palace—if my father—"
A sudden, sharp laugh cracked from the trees like lightning. From the shadowed path came a stranger in polished, dark armor; he did not belong to the village. His helm glinted. Behind him, more shapes formed—figures that wore the crest of the Sapphire Court and the chain of command of those who answered to the king.
"All right," Rhen said. The words were soft but steady. He had never questioned the world before tonight and now question was a hunger he could not sate. "Then teach me what the sea does."
Nymera's eyes widened. "You—"
"Teach me how to keep you safe," he said. "If the prophecy says we will end each other, then I will learn what it wants. I will learn whether the end is set or if there are routes around it."
She wanted to argue. She wanted to tell him prophecies were not puzzles to be solved by stubborn men with silver eyes. But the sound of the approaching men was nearer now, and over the new moon-branded sigils on both their flesh a different fear rose: that someone else would read their marks and call them monsters.
"You are foolish," she whispered at last. "You are–"
"Not foolish," he corrected gently. "Brave."
As the royal guards' torches broke the dark with a spill of lacquered light and the scent of salt and authority, Nymera's instincts shouted to flee. Rhen held his place. Thalos raised his axe with a desperate handshake between age and duty. The river shifted and the moon shuddered in the sky like something with lungs.
They were halves of a story that hadn't been finished, and the pages were being lifted by hands that wanted a different ending.
When the guards reached the water's edge, their leader barked a command. He saw Nymera alone and did not see that Rhen's hand trembled where his mark showed through dark skin like a map. He did not see the small, shared sigil binding them together like a promise nobody had asked for.
He only saw an intruder where there should have been only a princess—an image the Council would pay dearly to maintain.
Rhen stepped between the guards and the river, and for a breath the moon stilled. The beast at his throat hummed. The water held its breath.
"Leave," Rhen told the first man, voice flat as river stone.
The man laughed once, short and frightened. "And who will make us, boy?"
Rhen did not answer. He watched the moon, then Nymera, then back at the village men whose torches sputtered like angry stars. He thought of Thalos' face and the way it had looked when he found the mark on Rhen's skin that morning: like a man who touched a wound that was not his and felt pain anyway.
"Whatever comes," Rhen said finally, "I will not let you take her in chains."
The leader of the guards hesitated as if he could smell a storm on the horizon. He made a decision that would tip the night's scale. "Seize him," he ordered.
Thalos yelled a single curse and moved like an old blade. Men lunged. The river answered with a roar as if it had been waiting to speak.
Under the moon, with the mark gleaming like a lie, Rhen roared—not the sound of a terrified wolf, but of a thing that had found a reason to live. And in that roar there was something that went clinking through the deep: an old bell of a curse loosening, a knot pulled on the other side of the world.
Nymera clutched at her throat where the pale sigil rested, and for the first time in her life she heard, not the Council's warnings, but a song—one note, raw as salt, pulled up from a place older than her father's rule.
It hummed with a name neither of them yet knew.