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The wind had died hours before dawn, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
The sky was black at the edges where night still clung to the horizon. Some days never really see the light.
He walked down the dunes barefoot, carrying her cold against his chest. The linen shroud was wrapped with strands of kelp, braided the way she’d taught him — her favorite part of preparing the ritual, she used to joke, because “the sea liked its offerings dressed properly”.
He used to laugh at that. This morning, he could barely breathe.
She felt light — too light. Weightless, like something already claimed by another realm. He pressed his cheek to her clothed temple.
“We’re almost there,” he whispered, voice frayed. “I’ll take you home.”
He descended the slope with slow, careful steps. When he reached the water’s edge, the sea didn’t greet him with waves or foam. It waited, dark and heavy — a flat mirror stretching into oblivion.
The tide sat in unholy stillness, as though something ancient were leaning in to listen. He closed his eyes and spoke the funeral vow she had once made him promise to learn:
“Salt to salt, heart to hollow,
Let the tide unmake what the earth has taken.
May the sea keep her where I cannot follow—”
His voice cracked halfway through. He swallowed it down. There would be time to fall apart later, but not now. Not yet.
“And grant her rest in the waters that loved her first.
For every mortal path ends where all paths sink —
In the ancient mouth of the ever-hungering sea.”
He stepped forward. The water rose around his ankles and the sand gave way under the weight — his and his grief’s combined.
He had imagined this moment dozens of times over the night, and none of them had prepared him. The shroud grew darker, soaking through when the water reached his waist.
“I love you,” he murmured — a prayer, a plea, a final offering of his own.
He kissed her forehead through the fabric, braced himself, and lowered her into the sea.
And the sea rose to meet her—
Then halted.
The entire ocean recoiled as if her touch had set fire to the water. The tide jerked backward in a violent convulsion, ripping itself away from them. He nearly fell as the undertow tore at his legs like clutching hands.
The shore elongated before his eyes, and the seabed was an abomination of symmetrical shapes and shadows — rocks usually buried beneath the water’s grip, fingers of seaweed clinging to them, tide pools glowing with a lurid green light pulsing from below.
The pressure in the air spiked — an invisible noose being pulled around his skull. The sea groaned in a tremor deep enough to vibrate in his teeth. His heart stuttered.
Her body floated as the shroud unraveled, falling away in soft folds. Her shoulders rose from the water, smooth as carved marble; black hair unfurled in a silken cloud, darkening the water around her.
Her face was a beauty sharpened by death into something flawless and equally dangerous. Skin unmarred by decay; lips parted from her last breath; eyelids heavy as in deep slumber.
Then her chest jerked. Once. Twice. A grotesque, unnatural seizure.
Her back arched in a shudder not meant for human joints, her head snapping back as her mouth opened in a silent scream that spewed a sudden gush of salt water. Her fingers curled and uncurled with an insectile twitch. And her eyes—
God help him — her eyes opened.
Not the warm, dark shade of green he knew. A drowned light burned within those eyes, flickering with the same phosphorescent sickness as the tide pools.
He whispered her name, choking on his breath.
She blinked slowly, painfully, as if remembering how. And in a voice that was still hers, but layered with something vast and ravenous, she whispered:
“My love…”
He stumbled back, throat locking on terror so sharp it tasted metallic.
“You kept your promise,” she said.
He had dreamed of her voice a hundred times over the night. He feared he would forget it. Tears blurred his vision.
She stepped towards him though her feet hovered inches above the exposed seabed. Her hair swayed around her face in a halo of dark tendrils. Her skin glowed faintly where the green light touched her.
She reached for him, pale arm dripping, trembling, as if she were struggling to hold her shape. Her fingers grazed his jaw — still cold like the dead, but he leaned into it. Because despite the horror — the impossible wrongness — there she was. Her touch was the first thing that pierced the numbness in his chest since she collapsed in his arms.
“I thought I lost you,” he whispered.
“You did,” she said, voice shaken with sorrow that mirrored his own. “We all lose everything, in the end.”
He shut his eyes as a tear spilled out. She brushed it with her thumb, smearing salt with salt. The sea behind her shuddered like a creature waking. The glow flashed, and the distant horizon sank as a towering tide began to form.
His breath hitched. “Please, come back to me.”
The wave behind her grew taller, groaning under its own weight — a slow, monstrous wall of water pulled from the bones of the ocean.
“This is my home now. My body belongs to the sea. My breath is its tide.” Her cold fingers slid down his neck, over his chest. “But the current in me still runs to you.”
Her lips brushed his jaw, a chill that made him shiver. Her breath, if breath it was, smelled of salt and hidden places where the sun never shines.
“Stay with me.”
He leaned forward as if gravity were pulling him into her.
“Does it hurt?” he asked — the smallest, and yet the most important question every heart asks before stepping into any darkness, be it death, love, or the sea.
Her smile was soft and unbearably sad. “Only for a moment.”
The wave crested, ready to fall.
“Take my hand.”
He looked deeply into her eyes — the woman he had loved through seasons and storms, layered inside the creature she had become. He had loved her intensity, her strange rituals, the way she pressed her ear to a seashell as if listening to an old friend.
And he loved her still.
So he took it.
The wave collapsed. The ocean curled around them with the ruthless strength of a lover unused to mortal fragility — freezing, crushing, seizing his lungs. He gasped and found no air, but her hand never let go.
Through the blur of turbulent water, she pulled him until their foreheads touched. A kiss like a blessing.
Stay with me, her voice echoed.
Stay…
Something inside him yielded. Lungs burned, then softened. Heartbeat slowed until the world dissolved into silence. He exhaled his last breath as a man who walked on land, and the sea inhaled him deep.
Storm clouds broke overhead. When the tide finally returned to the shore, calm and gentle, it carried no bodies. The villagers who lived along the coast said that, from that day on, the tides obeyed a softer rhythm — as if guided by two voices instead of one.
“I’ll do anything…”