Chapter Text
Chapter One
Reports had been coming in for weeks, people gone, no bodies, no explanation, and always from the same town. Not the townn over. Not anywhere else along that stretch of coast. Just here.
That detail was what actually got Wifies moving. Disappearances happened everywhere eventually, for one bad reason or another. Disappearances that stayed confined to a single town, out of every town along the same coastline, meant something specific was going on, something local, something with a cause worth finding, not just misfortune spread thin.
It was exactly the kind of detail most investigators skimmed past, and Wifies had built his whole reputation on refusing to.
By the time he reached the town, the story had already hardened into fact the way these things always did. Everyone he passed on the road in wore the same look,the too-quiet, too-careful look of people who'd stopped letting their children out after dark and hadn't slept properly in a while.
He found most of the town already gathered in the square, packed shoulder to shoulder, voices pitched high and overlapping.
Whatever this was, it clearly hadn't waited for him to arrive. He pushed in close enough to catch a woman's sleeve. "What's happening?"
"Another one went missing." She didn't look at him long enough to register him as a stranger.
"That's five now. Five, in less than two months. Nobody's found so much as a footprint, not even a clue."
"Five." Worse than he'd been told.
"And everyone's decided it's—"
"The Leviathan." She said it the way people say things they've long since stopped questioning.
"What else would it be?" A voice cut through the crowd from somewhere near the front, not old, exactly, just certain, the kind of voice built for being obeyed. Wifies didn't need an introduction to guess this was whoever ran things here.
"We've let this go on long enough," the man said. "If the Leviathan wants something from us, we give it something. A sacrifice. Blood, the way the old stories tell it, before any of this politeness we've since talked ourselves into."
The crowd didn't cheer, but nobody argued either, which somehow felt worse.
"That's insane." Wifies said it louder than he meant to. Heads turned. "You're talking about killing someone based on a guess."
"And who exactly are you?" A man near the front rounded on him, sharp. "I've never seen you in this town in my life. Why are you putting your nose in business that isn't yours?"
"Because five people are dead or missing, and you're about to make it six over a story nobody's actually confirmed." Wifies held his ground. "If it's not the Leviathan doing this, and you don't actually know that it is,then killing someone accomplishes nothing except giving you a body count of six instead of five."
The man in charge, Parametrization, someone nearby murmured, like the name should already have meant something to Wifies, considered him for a moment, entirely unbothered.
"Fine. Then there's another option. We give him a bride instead. Appease him, rather than provoke him."
Wifies laughed before he could stop himself ,short, disbelieving, too loud for the room.
"A bride." He shook his head. "You think the Leviathan is going to walk up and take a bride? That there's a creature out there with some kind of romantic interest in whoever you hand it, and it'll just stop taking people because you gave it a spouse? Do you hear how insane that sounds?"
Nobody answered him. A few people gave him the exact look he'd expect from a room full of strangers he'd just insulted.
"This isn't a monster or maybe he is," Wifies went on, since apparently nobody was going to stop him now. "But yhis is a person doing this. A human being, with a human reason, walking around free while all of you point at the water and call it settled."
Parametrization's expression didn't change so much as sharpen. "You seem very sure of yourself for someone who's been in this town less than an hour."
"I'm sure of the pattern. That's different."
"Then perhaps you'd like to prove it." A pause, deliberate. "How about you go?"
"No." Wifies didn't even have to think about it. "Why would I?"
"Because you're so certain the rest of us are wrong." Parametrization stepped down from where he'd been standing, closing some of the distance between them,unhurried, not threatening, just closing it. "You've been here less than an hour, and you already think you understand this better than people who've lived with it for months."
"I think you're about to hand someone's life over based on a guess. That's not the same as thinking I know everything."
"Then you won't mind proving it." Something shifted in his expression,it wasn't anger, closer to amusement, like he'd just landed on a way to enjoy this. "Oh, how about we do this."
The crowd's murmuring quieted, curiosity winning out over fear for a moment.
"There's a fish in these waters,"
Parametrization went on.
"The Glasstail."
Near impossible to catch, even most fishermen here have never so much as seen one in their lives. Find it before I do, and you walk away, no argument, and I'll tell this whole town myself the bride idea was wrong. I find it first, and you go instead of whoever else's name might have come up."
It was a ridiculous offer. Wifies knew that. He also knew that saying no, in front of a crowd already looking for someone to blame, would make him look exactly like what they already suspected,a stranger too afraid to put his money where his mouth was.
"Fine," he said. "Glasstail it is."
By evening, Wifies stood in the shallows with a fish flexing in his hands, its scales so pale they were nearly see-through. Parametrization returned from the tide pools two hours later, empty-handed.
Word spread through the town before Wifies even made it back to the square. He'd won. Fair, in front of enough witnesses that nobody could argue it away.
He expected an apology, or at least an acknowledgment. What he got was Parametrization studying him with the same flat patience as before.
"You still have to go."
"I won."
"You did. Doesn't change what this town needs." Parametrization said it without any particular cruelty, which somehow made it worse.
"Someone has to go. It might as well be the one who already thinks he understands more than the rest of us."
Wifies could have argued. Could have reminded him, in front of everyone, exactly what fair was supposed to mean. Instead he found himself thinking about the five missing people, the wrongness of the whole story this town had built for itself, and the fact that in a few more days he'd have left anyway with no real answers to show for it. Going to the Leviathan directly wasn't the punishment Parametrization thought it was. It was the only lead he had left.
"Fine," Wifies said again, and meant it differently this time. "I'll go."
He spent the two days before he was meant to leave doing what he always did,asking questions, and writing down every answer even when they didn't agree with each other.
Everyone had seen the Leviathan, according to the town. Or claimed to, at least. A fisherman swore he was easily three times the height of a man, with a tail like an eel's dragging behind him through the shallows. A baker's wife described fangs long enough to pierce straight through a person, teeth she'd apparently gotten a very clear look at from what she admitted was quite far away, at night, in the fog. A child, when Wifies made the mistake of asking one, told him with complete confidence that the Leviathan had eyes on the back of his head as well as the front, which nobody bothered to correct.
No two descriptions matched. Big, though, everyone agreed on big. Bigger than anything that should be able to move quietly, let alone unseen, night after night, into a town full of people who apparently spent every evening watching the water for exactly this.
That was the part that didn't sit right with him.
Nobody's dogs had barked. Nobody's livestock had spooked. Whatever had come through this town five separate times hadn't left a single frightened animal behind it, hadn't so much as knocked over a fence post, and hadn't been seen, not once, by any of the supposed witnesses at the actual moment someone went missing. Only before. Only after. Never during.
That wasn't how something the size of a house moved through a town. That was how a person moved through a town,quietly, carefully, and only when it mattered.
He didn't have a name yet, or a reason, or anything close to proof. But a shape was starting to form, and the shape wasn't scaled, and it wasn't three times the height of a man. It walked on two legs the same as anyone else, and it had been walking through this town, unnoticed, for two months.
He still didn't believe in the Leviathan. Not the version the town described, and increasingly, not any version at all. They all just heard about the leviathan in books, in stories, that's why they're imagining things, and are afraid.
He was about to find out just how wrong he was.