── the tide's lament
༄ pairing: rafayel x non-mc reader
༄ summary: At fifteen, you are saved from a storm by a Lemurian boy. Three years later, he washes ashore mute and mistaken, believing your cousin Mei is the girl he pulled from the sea. You know the truth, but the sea witch’s bargain demands a price before the third moon rises. You are faced with an impossible choice - tell him… or let him go.
༄ cw: MDNI!, fem!reader, non-mc reader, little mermaid au, fairytale au, princess!reader, MC is called Mei, unrequited love, mistaken identity, major character death, angst with no happy ending, hurt/no comfort, background mc x caleb, unbeta'd, unedited
༄ wc: 9.3k
༄ a/n: HAPPY VALENTINES DAY 🥹
༄ lads masterlist ༄ fairy tale aus ༄ AO3
The storm comes on your cousin's eighteenth birthday.
You remember this clearly.
The way the sky split open, the way the sea turned from sapphire to slate in the span of a single breath.
One moment the royal vessel is cutting through calm waters, lanterns strung along the rigging for the celebration, music spilling across the deck where Mei is laughing, radiant in a gown of soft lavender, her hair loose in the salt wind.
The next moment, the world tilts.
You are only fifteen.
You are not supposed to be on the upper deck.
You are not supposed to be on this ship at all.
Your uncle, the King, though you have called him Father for as long as you remember, forbade it.
The sea is no place for you, he said, the same words he has said every year since you were old enough to ask why Mei and the other children were permitted to play on the shore and you were not. It is the same careful refusal delivered with a tenderness that almost masked the fear beneath it.
You were only three years old when the sea took your parents.
Your real Father, the King's younger brother, had been dispatched on a diplomatic mission to the southern kingdoms. Your mother sailed with him, as she always did, because they were the sort of couple who did not do anything apart.
They left you in the palace with your nursemaid and your cousin Mei, who was six and who held your hand at the harbor and said, They will come back. They always come back.
They did not come back.
The ship went down in a storm three days out of port.
No survivors. No wreckage.
The sea swallowed them whole and offered nothing in return, not a plank, not a ribbon, not a body to bury. Your uncle closed the ports for a week of mourning and then closed them around you for the rest of your life.
You do not remember your parents.
You have a miniature portrait of them that you keep in a locket, and sometimes you study their faces and try to find yourself in them, the shape of their jaws, the set of their brows, the curve of their lips.
People say you have your Mother’s eyes.
You would not know.
All you know is that the King and Queen took you in without hesitation.
They gave you their name, their home, their love.
They raised you alongside Mei, and if there was ever a difference in affection between their daughter by blood and their daughter by grief, you never felt it.
The Queen braids your hair the same way she braids Mei's. The King reads to you at night from the same book of fairy tales you loved. When you are ill, they sit at your bedside and refuse to leave until you recover.
They love you.
You have never doubted this.
But they are afraid.
The guilt of your parents' death, the mission the King himself ordered, the ship he chose, the sea he sent his brother into, has hardened into something immovable, a conclusion that lives in the marrow of their bones.
The sea takes what they love.
The sea took the King’s only brother and his wife.
The sea will not take you too.
And so you are kept from the water.
The beach below the palace cliffs is forbidden.
The harbor is off-limits without an escort of no fewer than four guards.
You are not taught to swim.
You are not permitted on boats.
When the court sails for summer holidays, you remain behind with your tutors and your books and the loneliness of a girl watching from a window while everyone she loves disappears over the horizon.
And yet.
And yet.
You love the sea.
You love it the way a caged bird loves the sky.
You love the sound of it, the smell of it, the way the light changes when the tide shifts.
You sneak to the cliffs when your maids and guards are not watching and stand at the edge, letting the wind pull at your hair, breathing in salt air like you are starved of it.
The sea killed your parents.
You know this.
You understand deeply why your uncle prohibits you from stepping close to it.
But the sea does not feel like death to you.
It feels like home.
Like something vast and ancient is calling your name in a language you almost, almost, remember.
So when Mei's birthday celebration is held on the royal vessel this year, and you are told, as always, to remain at the palace, you do something you have never done before.
You disobey.
You slip aboard in the chaos of departure, hidden among the servants, dressed in a servant’s garb you have stolen from one of your maids, carrying crates of wine and garlands of flowers.
You tuck yourself below deck and wait until the ship is too far from shore to turn back, and then you creep up the stairs because you want to see the stars over open water, because you want to watch your cousin dance, because you are young and foolish and the sea has been singing to you your entire life and tonight, for the first time, you are close enough to answer.
The sea is not singing tonight.
The sea is hungry.
The wave that takes you is enormous, a wall of black water that crashes over the railing and sweeps you off your feet like you are nothing.
You hear screaming, Mei's voice, sharp with terror, calling your name, and then the ocean closes over your head and the world becomes dark and cold and silent.
You fight.
You kick and claw toward what you think is the surface, but the current is too strong, pulling you deeper, spinning you until you cannot tell up from down.
Your lungs burn. Your limbs grow heavy.
The cold seeps into your bones, and you think, with the strange calm of someone who is drowning that this is how you die.
The same sea.
The same way.
Just like your birth parents.
And then, hands.
Not human hands.
The fingers are too long, the grip too strong, and there is something strange about the skin, smooth as pearl, cool as the water itself.
They wrap around your waist and pull you upward with a force that defies the current, and suddenly you are breaking the surface, gasping, choking on salt water, alive.
You can barely see through the rain and spray, but you see him.
Blue eyes.
That is the first thing.
Eyes that glow, luminous and unearthly, the deep blue against the darkness brought by the storm. They pierce the storm like twin flames, too bright to be human and too vivid to be real. Hair that clings to his face in wet strands. and a face that is startlingly beautiful and otherworldly.
And below his waist are not legs.
A tail.
Scales that shimmer between deep blue and iridescent pink, catching the fractured light of the storm, the blue dominant and dazzling, shifting to rose at the edges like the sky at the last moment before nightfall.
Lemurian.
The word surfaces through the haze of panic and cold.
The sea people.
The ones your tutors said were legends, fairy tales told to children who asked too many questions about the deep sea.
He is no legend.
He is warm where the sea is cold, solid where the water is relentless, and he holds you against his chest as he swims toward a rocky outcropping barely visible through the storm.
His tail cuts through the water with effortless power, and you cling to him because he is the only safe thing in a world that has become chaos.
When he reaches the rocks, he lifts you onto the flat surface with a gentleness that surprises you. Your fingers scrape against stone as you pull yourself up, coughing water, shaking so hard your teeth rattle.
And then he sings.
It is not a song you can name or describe.
It is not a melody that belongs to any instrument or language you know.
It is something older, a sound that seems to come from the ocean itself, haunting and achingly beautiful. It wraps around you like warmth and the cold recedes.
The terror of your almost drowning recedes.
Everything recedes except the sound of his voice and the blue of his eyes.
You reach for him.
Your trembling hand finds his cheek and he goes still.
The singing stops.
He stares at you with those impossible eyes, and his expression shifts into tenderness.
His hand comes up to cover yours, his palm warm against the cold of your skin.
"You are safe," he says, and his voice is the most beautiful thing you have ever heard. Low and melodic, with an accent you cannot place."I will not let you drown."
You want to speak.
You want to tell him your name, ask his, and understand how this is possible.
That a creature from legend is holding your hand on a rock in the middle of a storm.
But the exhaustion is pulling you under, and the last thing you see before you lose consciousness is his face, haloed by lightning, and the worry in his glowing blue eyes.
When you wake, it is already morning.
The storm has passed.
You are on a beach, alone.
Your cousin's search party finds you an hour later.
Mei weeps when she sees you, she holds you so tightly you think your ribs might crack, and she says over and over, "I thought I had lost you. I thought the sea took you."
The King's face when they carry you home is something you will never forget.
There is no anger, not yet, but he wears a face of a man who has already buried his brother to the ocean and has just, for one terrible night, believed it also took his brother's child, his daughter, as well.
He holds you and does not speak for a very long time.
"Someone saved me in the water," you tell him, your voice still raw from salt water. "Someone pulled me out."
"Who?"
You do not know how to explain, so you just shake your head and let the servants wrap you in blankets and carry you home.
You never tell anyone the truth, but you never forget his face.
His voice.
The warmth of his hand against yours.
You are fifteen years old, and you are already in love with someone who does not know your name.
Three years pass.
You grow up in the shadow of your cousin's presence.
Mei is the crown princess of Linkon, smart and beautiful and destined for a political marriage that will secure and strengthen the kingdom.
You are the younger, quieter ward and the less remarkable princess, content to spend your days in the palace library or walking the cliffs above the sea.
Always the sea.
The King's restrictions tightened after the night of the storm.
Guards are now posted at the cliff paths, the beach gate locked, stern lectures delivered by a desperate man who cannot lose another person he loves to the water.
But you find your ways.
A window seat that faces the ocean.
A tower room where the sound of the waves carries on the wind.
The cliffs, when you can slip past your guards and maids who are always, always watching.
You are drawn to it in a way you cannot explain, standing at the edge of the rocks and staring into the water as though if you look hard enough, you might catch a flash of iridescent scales beneath the surface.
You never do.
You never see him again after that night.
You paint him sometimes.
In the privacy of your chambers, with watercolors that can never quite capture the luminous quality of his eyes or the way his voice made you feel.
The paintings are hidden beneath a loose floorboard in your closet like love letters no one will ever read.
Mei's heart, meanwhile, belongs to someone entirely unsuitable.
Caleb has been a friend to both of you since childhood.
A boy who grew into a soldier, who climbed the military ranks with the same stubborn determination he once used to climb the palace walls on a dare.
He is tall and broad-shouldered, with purple eyes that are warm when he is laughing and fierce when he is protecting someone he loves.
He is now the youngest general in Linkon's history, and he is hopelessly in love with your cousin.
The feeling is mutual, though neither of them will admit it.
You watch them dance around each other.
Mei's blush when Caleb offers his arm, Caleb's distance when he remembers his rank is not suited for a princess.
Your uncle has made it clear that Mei's marriage will serve the kingdom, not her heart.
You ache for them.
The quiet tragedy of loving someone who is right there, close enough to touch, but separated by difference in status.
You understand that ache better than anyone.
You are not betrothed to anyone, which suits you fine.
The suitors who have expressed interest in the King's ward have been met with your disinterest because how can you consider marrying someone when your heart already belongs to a creature you met once, in a storm, three years ago?
Foolish, you tell yourself.
He is not coming back.
He probably does not even remember you.
But you remember him, every night, before you sleep, you close your eyes and hear his voice.
You are safe. I will not let you drown.
And then, on a morning in late spring, everything changes.
The guards find him on the beach below the palace cliffs.
You hear about it from a servant. A breathless maid who comes running into the library where you are reading, her eyes wide.
"Your Highness! They have found a man on the shore! He is injured, and he cannot speak, and Princess Mei is with him —"
You are on your feet before she finishes the sentence.
You run.
Through the corridors, down the winding stone stairs that lead to the beach, your heart hammering with a ferocity that has nothing to do with the adrenaline of running, because you know.
Before you even see him, you already know who it was.
The beach is crowded with guards and servants clustering around a figure lying on the sand.
Mei is kneeling beside him, her hand on his shoulder, speaking in the gentle voice she uses when she is trying to calm you when you are scared as a child.
You push through the crowd and your world stops.
It is him.
You immediately recognize his blue eyes.
They do not glow now as they were in the storm, but still that impossible shade, but now the deep blue is threaded with soft pink at the bottom, half-open and dazed with pain.
His face is exactly as you remember, beautiful and otherworldly. His hair is longer now, tangled with sand. He is wearing nothing but a length of fabric someone must have wrapped around his waist.
And he has legs.
Where his tail should be are legs, long and pale and trembling, as though they are new to him and he never used them before.
They are scraped raw, bleeding, and he keeps looking down at them with an expression of both pain and bewilderment.
Your heart stops, you know what he has done.
You have scoured every book in the library about him and his people after that night.
Lemurians do not have legs if they will it.
The stories you found spoke of sea witches and bargains.
What did you pay, you think, staring at him, your heart sinking. What did you sacrifice to come here?
"He washed up an hour ago," the captain of the guard is telling your uncle. "No identification, no clothing. He also appears to be mute."
Mute.
Your stomach drops.
His voice, that beautiful voice that sang the cold out of your bones?
It is now gone.
The sea witch must have taken his voice, the thing that you have treasured the most, in exchange for legs.
"He was reaching for me when the guards arrived," Mei says softly. "As though he recognized me and as though he was trying to tell me something."
Your chest tightens sharply you cannot breathe.
He thinks it was Mei.
The realization crashes over you like a wave.
He thinks Mei was the one he saved that night.
He came here for her.
Not you.
He does not remember you.
But it makes a terrible kind of sense.
Mei was on the ship that night because it was her birthday.
If he saw the royal vessel, if he knew a Princess of Linkon was aboard, of course he would assume it was Mei.
Not the unremarkable ward who should not have been on the ship at all and was not even supposed to be near the water.
You know you should say something.
You should step forward and say, it was me.
You open your mouth.
And then he looks at Mei with those blue-pink eyes full of desperate relief and reaches for her hand.
Mei takes it.
You close your mouth.
You do not say anything.
You are eighteen years old and your heart is quietly breaking and no one even notices.
They bring him into the palace.
Your uncle is reluctant, but Mei insists.
"He is hurt and needs care. We cannot simply leave him on the beach."
So he is given a room in the guest quarters.
You watch from a distance as he learns to walk on legs that do not know how to hold him, stumbling, falling, catching himself on walls and doorframes with the frustrated grace of a creature built for water and now forced to navigate land.
He writes his name on parchment the first day they give him ink.
Rafayel.
The name settles into your chest.
You have spent three years loving someone whose name you did not know, and now that you have it, it makes everything worse.
He is real and present.
He is walking the corridors of your home, and he does not know you exist.
That is not entirely true.
He knows you are the King's ward, Mei's younger cousin. When you are introduced, he bows politely, and when his eyes meet yours there is nothing.
There is no recognition in his blue-pink eyes, just the courteous blankness of a stranger who is forced to meet someone new.
You smile and curtsy and say, "Welcome to Linkon, Rafayel."
Your voice does not shake, and you are proud of that.
He writes, Thank you, Your Highness. You are very kind.
Kind.
The word tastes like ash.
Rafayel becomes a fixture in the palace.
He is charming without his voice, expressive and warm, communicating through notes and gestures and a smile that he easily wins over the court.
And he paints.
Your uncle gives him a studio, and the canvases he produces are extraordinary.
Seascapes in colors so vivid they seem to move, portraits that capture the subjects better than any artist in Linkon could.
He paints Mei the most.
You try not to look at those paintings.
You fail.
Mei, for her part, is gentle with him.
She visits his studio, brings him tea, and sits with him while he works.
She treats him with the compassion she shows everyone, genuine and warm and without pretense.
She does love him.
You can see that clearly, even if Rafayel cannot.
Mei loves Caleb.
You see it in the way her eyes follow him across the training yard, in the way her laughter changes pitch when he is nearby, in the way she touches the small apple-shaped pendant he gave her for her last birthday, a private gesture she does not know you have noticed.
Caleb loves her back.
You see it in the way he stands slightly too close at formal dinners, in the way his voice softens when he says her name, in the way he looks at her when he thinks no one is watching, with a devotion so naked it makes your chest ache.
But your uncle has been negotiating a political marriage for Mei.
A duke from the Eastern kingdom, an alliance that would secure Linkon's borders.
Caleb's rank, however elevated, is not enough.
A general is not a duke, and for a crown princess like Mei, love is not leverage.
Rafayel sees none of this.
Rafayel sees only Mei, the woman he crossed an ocean for, gave up his voice for, sacrificed everything to find.
And you see only him.
You discover the truth about the sea witch's bargain by accident.
You are in the library late one night, unable to sleep, when you find a book about Lemurian folklore left open on a reading table.
The pages are marked with small notes in Rafayel's handwriting. He has been researching his own curse.
The passage he has marked reads:
The sea witch's bargain is thus: a voice for legs, the ocean for the land. The transformation is maintained by the bond that is formed the moment a Lemurian's lifeforce intertwines with a human's. To break the bargain and restore what was taken, the Lemurian must receive a true love's kiss from the one with whom they bonded. If the kiss does not come before the third moon after he arrives on land, the Lemurian will dissolve into seafoam, lost to both worlds forever.
Your hands shake so violently the book nearly slips from your grasp.
The one with whom they bonded.
That is you.
In the water, in the storm, when he held you and sang and your hand touched his face, your bond with him was formed.
His lifeforce is intertwined with yours, not Mei's.
He needs your kiss to survive.
Not Mei's.
Yours.
And he does not know.
You sink into the nearest chair, your mind racing.
You could tell him.
You could go to his room right now and tell him.
But if you tell him, will he kiss you out of desperation to survive or will he kiss you because of the bond?
Will you have to live knowing the only reason his lips touched yours was because he had no other choice?
You want him to choose you because he remembers you, not because a curse demands it.
So you close the book, return it where you found it, and go back to your room and cry until dawn.
You do not say a word, but you keep reseaching.
You return to the library every night after that.
When the palace sleeps, you are awake, pulling every text about Lemurians from the shelves, cross-referencing myths with the scraps of writing from scholars who treated the sea folk as more than legend.
It takes you eleven days to find an alternative.
The passage is in an old text, so old the pages are brittle and the ink has faded to brown.
It is written in an archaic dialect that takes you hours to translate, hunched over a dictionary by candlelight, your eyes burning, your hands stiff with cold.
There exists a second path to sever the sea witch's bond. If the bonded human willingly offers their heart, sacrificed in the place where the witch resides, the bond dissolves. The Lemurian is freed, their voice restored, their form their own to choose, the human perishes.
You read it three times.
Four.
Five.
The human perishes.
Your vision blurs.
You press your fist against your mouth to stop the sob that wants to come out.
You could save him, but not with a kiss he does not want to give you.
Not by humiliating yourself, by forcing a reveal that would make him look at you with guilt instead of love.
If he has not find this part of the bargain, then you could save him without him ever knowing it was you who has bonded with.
He would get his voice back.
He would be alive and free.
He could stay on land or return to the sea, whichever he chose.
He could love Mei or not love Mei on his own terms, without a curse dictating the shape of his life.
All it would cost is your heart.
All it would cost is your life.
You close the book.
Your hands are steady now, they should not be.
You should be shaking and falling apart.
But instead there is a strange, terrible calm settling over you, the calm of someone who has been drowning all her life and has finally found the will to stop fighting the current.
This is how it was always going to end, you think.
He saved your life in the water, now you save his.
It is that simple.
The grief is not.
You have nineteen days until the third moon.
Nineteen days to find the sea witch.
Nineteen days to say goodbye to everyone you love without alerting them of your plan.
You begin with Mei.
Your cousin finds you in the garden the next morning, which is unusual, you are not a morning person, and the garden is Mei's domain, not yours.
She raises an eyebrow when she sees you sitting on the stone bench by the roses.
"You are up early."
"I could not sleep." You pat the bench beside you. "Sit with me?"
Mei sits, studying your face carefully, brows furrowing as she tries to read what you are thinking.
"What is wrong?"
"Nothing. I just… I wanted to tell you something."
You take her hands, holding them tightly and memorizing the shape of her fingers.
"You should be with Caleb."
Mei goes still.
"What?"
"I know you love him. I have known for years, and he loves you. Everyone can see it except Father, who refuses to look." You squeeze her hands. "Do not let the political marriage happen. Fight for what you want, Mei. You deserve to be happy."
Your cousin stares at you, her eyes filling with tears.
"Where is this coming from?"
"It is coming from someone who does not want you to waste the love you have." Your voice cracks. "Promise me. Promise me you will fight for him."
"I…" Mei blinks, the tears spilling over. "I promise, but you are frightening me. Why are you speaking like this?"
"I am not frightened. I am merely… clear, about some things." You smile, and it is the gentlest lie you have ever told. "I love you, Mei, more than anything. I need you to know that."
"I love you too." Mei pulls you into a tight hug. "You are being strange, and it worries me."
"I am always strange."
"True." She laughs wetly. "But this is a different kind of strange."
You hold her for a long time, breathing in the scent of her hair, memorizing carefully as part of your memory that you will carry into the dark.
You spend the next week quietly putting your affairs in order.
You write letters and hide them in places they will eventually be found.
One for Mei in her favorite book, one for your Father and Mother in the book of fairytales they read to you as a child, one for Caleb folded into the scabbard of his sword.
You finish your watercolor paintings and leave them stacked neatly beneath the loose floorboard where you have always kept them.
Dozens of paintings of blue eyes and iridescent scales and the silhouette of a boy in a storm.
You request access to a small boat, telling the King that you want to paint seascapes from the water.
It is an unusual request, more than unusual, given your Father’s lifelong prohibition, but you frame it carefully.
You are eighteen now, you point out.
Old enough to make your own peace with the ocean that took your parents.
Old enough, you say, with a smile that hides everything, to stop being afraid.
Your Father’s face is torn when you ask.
He looks at you, the way he does sometimes when the light catches your face at an angle that reminds him of his brother, and you see the war behind his eyes.
The guilt and the fear.
He knows that he cannot keep you caged forever, so he grants the request.
He warns you to take guards.
You will not take guards, but you agree, because agreeing is safer than arguing.
You cannot give your plan away.
You cannot reveal that you are a dead girl walking through the last days of her life, smiling at everyone, eating meals she cannot taste, sleeping in a bed she will never return to.
The last few days of your life are the loneliest days you have ever experienced.
And you have been lonely for a very long time.
On the fifteenth day before the third moon, you visit Rafayel's studio.
You have avoided this room since he arrived.
The smell of paint and linseed oil, the sight of his hands moving across canvas, the particular way he tilts his head when he is concentrating.
All of it is too much.
Too close, too real.
But you need to see him one last time.
Not from across a dinner table or the opposite end of a corridor, up close.
In the place where he is most himself.
He is painting when you enter.
Another seascape, waves crashing against rocks under a stormy sky.
The colors are violent and beautiful, and you recognize the scene immediately.
It is the night of the storm.
The night he saved you.
He looks up when you knock on the open door, and surprise flickers across his face.
You have never visited him here before.
He gestures you in warmly and reaches for a parchment.
Your Highness, this is a pleasant surprise.
"Please," you say. "No titles, not today."
He looks at you curiously, but nods.
You walk around the studio, looking at his paintings, every one of them is extraordinary.
They are all raw and emotional and full of a longing so palpable you can almost taste it.
You stop at the storm painting, your throat tight.
"This is beautiful," you say. "The storm, it looks so real."
I painted it from memory, the night I saved her in the water.
Her.
Not you.
Her.
"The person you saved," you say carefully. "Do you remember much about that night?"
He is quiet for a moment, his pen hovering over the paper, then he writes slowly.
I remember the feel of her hand on my face, cold and trembling. I remember singing for her. I remember the way she looked at me.
You have to turn away.
You pretend to examine another painting, blinking hard, willing the tears back.
"That must have been a powerful moment," you manage.
It was the moment I knew I would find her. No matter what it cost.
No matter what it cost.
You turn back to him.
He is watching you with an expression you cannot decipher.
Curiosity, perhaps, or confusion.
"May I ask you something?" you say.
He nods.
"Was it worth it, leaving and giving up everything you knew? For someone who might not… who might not feel the same way?"
He does not hesitate.
Yes, a thousand times yes. Even if she never loves me, even if I become nothing, I would do it all again.
You give him a sad smile.
"She is lucky," you say. "This girl that you saved, even if she does not know it. She is the luckiest person in the world."
He looks confused by your words.
Are you all well, Your Highness?
"I am fine," you say, and you leave before he can see the tears fall.
You find the sea witch on the twelfth day.
It is not the dramatic confrontation the stories describe.
There is no cave of bones, no garden of corals, no monstrous creature wreathed in smoke and malice, welcoming you to her lair.
The sea witch is just a woman who looks ancient and weary, sitting on a rock at the edge of a tidal pool in a cove three hours south of the palace.
She is waiting for you.
You know this because she speaks before you even say a word.
"The other one," she says, and her voice is like the sound of shells being ground by waves, musical and rough at the same time. "The one from the water, I was wondering when you would come."
"You knew about me."
"Of course I knew. When I made the bargain with the boy, I could feel the bond where it led, who it held, you, little princess, not the pretty older cousin." She tilts her head, studying you with eyes that are pale and depthless, like tide pools reflecting an empty sky. "He does not know, does he?"
"No."
"And you do not intend to tell him."
"No."
The witch is quiet for a moment.
Then she laughs with a sadness that surprises you.
"You humans," she murmurs. "So fragile and stubborn. He came to me begging for legs so he could find the girl he saved, and you come to me ready to die so he will never have to know she was you." She shakes her head. "Two sides of the same fool's coin."
"Will you do it?" Your voice does not shake, you are proud of that. "My heart for his freedom, that is the alternative, I read it."
"I can do it," the witch says. "But you need to understand what you are offering. It is not merely your life, child. Your heart, the very thing that bound you together. When I take it, the bond dissolves, his voice returns. His legs become his own again, no longer tethered to the curse. He will be free."
"And I will be dead."
"Yes." The witch's pale eyes hold yours. "But not immediately, you will have until the tide turns. A few hours, perhaps. Enough time to walk back to shore, enough time to be somewhere familiar."
Somewhere familiar, the beach below the cliffs.
The same beach where they found Rafayel. The same part of the beach where your Mei found you three years ago.
The irony of it is so perfect it makes you want to laugh.
"There is one more thing," the witch says. "The wound, where I take the heart, no human eye will see it. The magic will seal your flesh. To anyone who looks, you will seem untouched. As though you simply lay down on the sand and stopped breathing."
"But?"
"But a Lemurian will see it. Their eyes were made for magic, you see. If the boy finds you, he will see the wound. He will see what has happened." She pauses. "And he will know."
Your stomach drops.
"Know what?"
"That someone loved him enough to cut out their own heart so he could live."
The words hang in the salt air between you.
"So he will he know it was me?"
"That depends," the witch says, "on whether he is paying attention."
You close your eyes, it is too late to go back now.
You have already decided to end everything here.
The wind is cold off the water, and you can hear the sea moving beneath the rocks, and somewhere in the distance, a bird is calling out across the waves.
"Do it," you say.
The witch rises from her rock.
She is shorter than you expected.
She smells of brine and something older, something that has no name in any human language. Her hands, when she places them on your chest, are gentle and impossibly strong.
"You are brave," she says quietly. "Stupid, but brave."
"Is there a difference?"
"Not usually."
The pain is —
You expected agony.
What you get is something worse, a pulling, slow and unyielding, like a thread being drawn from a tapestry, and the tapestry is you, and the thread is every moment you have ever loved him.
The storm.
The singing.
The rock.
His eyes.
His hands.
The paintings you hid under the floorboard.
The three years of silence and longing and watching from the shadows.
The sea witch pulls it all out, and it takes the shape of your heart, and your heart takes the shape of a small, iridescent scale.
The deep, shimmering blue of his tail, edged with the faintest blush of pink.
It is the color of his tail.
The witch holds it up to the light.
It catches the sun like a jewel, like a tear, like the last note of a song that will never be sung again.
"Beautiful," she murmurs. "They always are, the hearts that love the hardest."
She closes her fist around it.
The scale dissolves into light, and the light sinks into the sea, and somewhere miles away, in a palace on a cliff a man who has been silent for weeks opens his mouth and makes a sound.
You feel it happen.
You feel the bond sever, like a rope cut with a blade and then you feel nothing at all where your heart used to be.
No pain.
No grief.
Just a hollow so vast and quiet it makes the ocean look small.
"The tide turns in four hours," the witch says. "You should go."
The walk back takes longer than the walk there.
Your legs are heavy.
Your body knows what has been taken from it, even if the wound is invisible and you cannot see it, even if you look the same as you did this morning when you woke and dressed and walked out of the palace for the last time.
You are dying.
You are dying slowly but gently, the way a candle dies when the wax runs out. The flame is still there, still burning, but with nothing left to feed it.
You make it to the beach below the palace cliffs just as the sun begins to set.
You take off your shoes and walk barefoot to the water's edge, letting the waves lap at your feet.
The cold feels distant.
Everything feels distant now, as though you are watching yourself from very far away.
You sit down, then you lie down, your hair fanning across the warm sand, your face turned toward the sea.
The sky above you is beautiful, painted in shades of gold and blue and deep, burning orange, like one of Rafayel's canvases come to life.
You stare at it and think that this is the last beautiful thing you will ever see before you die.
You are not afraid, you thought you would be.
You thought the end would come with fear, with regret, with the desperation to live, but instead you only felt peace.
You have done the thing you came to do.
You have paid the price.
Rafayel is free.
You close your eyes.
The last thing you hear is the sound of the waves, and beneath them, so faint you might be imagining it, the echo of a song you heard once in a storm, when you were fifteen and drowning and a boy with blue eyes held you and promised you were safe.
You are safe. I will not let you drown.
Forgive me, you think. I could not keep you from drowning either, but I could keep you from disappearing. I hope that is enough.
I hope I was enough.
The tide turns.
The waves reach for you, gentle as his hands were he saved you from the storm.
You let them.
His voice comes back like a tide.
He is in his studio when it happens, standing before the storm painting, brush in hand, adding details from memory that grow sharper by the day instead of fading away.
One moment, there is nothing.
The silence that has been his prison for weeks, the maddening absence of sound in his throat.
The next moment, a broken gasp comes from his throat.
Then a sound, that sounds primal, a mix of shock and relief and confusion.
“What —?”
His own voice, raw and not quite what it was before, but it is his.
He immediately drops the brush and a hand goes to his throat. He speaks again, testing.
"How —"
The curse is broken.
He can feel it.
The severing of the bond that has been wound tight around his chest since the day he crawled onto this beach.
The sea witch's magic is unraveling.
His legs no longer ache with the wrongness of transformation. His body feels, for the first time since leaving the water, as though it belongs to him again.
But the bond…
His hand goes to his chest, the bond is gone.
He feels its absence like a phantom limb, the severed thread that once connected him to the person he saved in the storm, the invisible tether that has been pulling him toward Mei since the day he arrived.
He stops.
Except… it was never pulling him toward Mei, was it?
He sees that now, the sudden clarity after the curse broke, like a fog lifting away to reveal a landscape he should have recognized all along.
The bond was never pointed at Mei.
It was pointed at the girl who stood in the shadows.
The one who walked the cliffs.
The one who came to his studio and asked if it was worth it, and smiled at him with such sadness that he could not sleep afterward, could not paint, could not do anything but stare at the ceiling and try to understand why your face kept replacing Mei's every time he closed his eyes.
The King's ward.
The quiet one.
It was you.
The night of the storm.
The hand on his face.
Small. Cold. Trembling.
Not a woman's hand.
You were fifteen then, like he was.
Mei was eighteen.
He has been looking at the wrong person for weeks.
Painting the wrong portrait.
Writing love notes to the wrong woman.
When the right one has been there the entire time, watching from doorways and shadows, smiling your quiet smile, carrying a secret so heavy it should have crushed you.
He needs to find you.
Now.
He needs to tell you…
But wait.
If the curse is broken… If the bond is severed…
The book said the only ways to break it were a true love's kiss or…
Or
The blood drains from his face.
He runs.
He checks your chambers first.
Empty.
The bed is made, the curtains drawn, and there is a neatness to the space that feels final, like the person tidying is preparing for a journey with no return.
He feels the pull to your wardrobe.
He opens it, pulls up the loose floorboard he has accidentally seen you glance at in one of the rare moments he passed by your chambers.
Paintings.
Dozens of them.
In watercolors, small and delicate, layered carefully between sheets and sheets of parchment.
He pulls them out with shaking hands and lays them across the bed, and he gasps sharply.
They are all of him.
Him in the water, tail and all, holding a girl against his chest while the storm rages in the sea.
Him singing on the rocks, his face lit by lightning, his eyes glowing blue with that otherworldly light that you have captured perfectly.
Him from the back, looking out at the sea, the line of his shoulders painted with an intimacy that speaks of someone who has memorized his every angle.
Him peacefully sleeping in a chair in the studio, when did you see that?
How many times did you stand in his doorway watching, while he dreamed of another person?
The earliest paintings are crude, the work of a fifteen-year-old girl with more passion than technique. But they grow more skilled as the years progress, and the most recent ones, painted since his arrival at the palace, are heartbreaking in their accuracy.
You have captured the exact shade of his eyes, the blue, the mix of pink.
The exact curve of his mouth when he smiles.
The exact expression he makes when he looks at Mei.
There is one painting at the bottom of the stack that breaks him.
You have painted yourself from behind, standing on the cliffs, looking out at the sea.
You are alone and the wind is pulling at your hair, and the sea stretches out before you, and in the water below the cliffs, barely visible, a flash of iridescent blue, a tail, a shadow, a memory of him.
You titled it, in small, careful letters at the bottom corner:
Waiting.
He gathers the paintings against his chest.
He is shaking so hard they rattle against each other.
He needs to find you.
He needs to —
Mei appears in the doorway.
"Where is she?" His voice is cracked and barely functional.
It does not matter. The words work.
"Rafayel? Your voice — you can speak? How —" She stops, seeing his face and sees the paintings. "What are those?"
“Where is your cousin?" He repeats, desperately this time, ignoring her question.
"I do not know. She left this morning. She said she was going to paint by the water —"
He is past Mei before she finishes the sentence.
He hears her calling after him, hears Caleb's voice too, the general must have been nearby, but he does not stop.
He cannot stop.
He runs through the palace and down the stairs to the beach, and his legs carry him perfectly for the first time since he crawled out of the sea.
He does not stumble nor fall.
The curse is broken and his body is his own, and the irony of it is that he is finally free and the freedom may have been bought and paid for by your own life.
He reaches the beach.
The guards are already there.
They found you at the water's edge.
You are lying on the sand, your hair spread around you like seaweed, your face turned toward the sea.
You look peaceful, and like you are just sleeping, but you are no longer breathing.
There is no wound, no blood, no indication if you were drowned. Nothing.
The guards are confused, they do not know and do not see it, but Rafayel does.
His eyes, Lemurian eyes, made for magic, see what human eyes cannot.
He sees the wound.
It is not a cut or tear but a hollow in your chest where your heart should be, glowing faintly with the residue of sea witch’s magic.
And in the center of the hollow, where your heart was supposed to be, a single scale, small and iridescent. It is the deep, shimmering blue of his tail edged with the faintest blush of pink.
It is all that is left of your heart.
The part of you that loved him, the part that bonded you to him, transformed by magic into the only shape it knew how to take.
His own scales.
His.
He drops to his knees beside you.
His hands find your face, cold now, so so cold, and he cradles it the way you must have cradled his once, on a rock in the middle of a storm, when you were both fifteen and he sang the cold from your bones.
The sound that comes from him is not human.
It is Lemurian.
A keen, a wail, a sound that comes from the deepest part of the ocean where the water is black and the pressure would crush anything that did not belong there.
It is a sound of grief so deep that it makes the waves pull back from the shore, as if the sea itself is flinching.
Mei arrives.
Then Caleb, running, his hand on his sword as if he can fight whatever did this.
Then the King, the Queen, servants, guards, all of them pouring onto the beach like a wave, and the sound they make when they see you is nothing compared to the sound still tearing itself from Rafayel's throat.
"What happened to her?" Caleb's voice is steel. He is kneeling on the other side of your body, his hand on your shoulder, his face carved from granite. "There is no wound. There is nothing. How —"
"There is a wound," he says, and his voice breaks on every syllable. "You cannot see it. Only I can."
He looks at Mei.
His vision is blurred with tears, but he can see her clearly enough.
Her shattered expression, the way she is gripping Caleb's arm so hard her knuckles are white, the way she is looking at your body with an expression of incomprehensible horror.
"It was her," he says. "In the water. The night of the storm. It was never you, Mei. It was her. She was the one I saved. She was the one I bonded to. She was the one I loved. She has known the entire time."
Mei's face crumbles.
"What?"
"The curse. The sea witch's bargain. A kiss from the bonded one, or —" He chokes on the words. "Or the bonded one's heart given willingly. She found the sea witch. She traded her heart to break my curse. And she never… she never said a word. She never told me it was her. She let me believe… she let me chase after you while she…"
He cannot finish.
He presses his forehead against yours, cold against cold, the living against the dead, and he cries.
The King makes a sound.
It is a small, quiet sound.
The grief of a Father losing his child.
He had made a promise to protect you from the very thing that killed your birth parents.
He kept you from the water your entire life, and the water took you anyway.
Not by storm.
Not by the sea.
By love.
The Queen catches him when his knees buckle.
Mei is on her knees in the sand, sobbing, and Caleb has his arms around her.
Rafayel lifts his head.
His hand moves to the hollow in your chest, the wound only he can see, and he touches the scale.
The blue scale that is all that remains of your heart.
It is warm.
Against the cold of your body, against the cold of the sand and the sea and the dying light, the scale is warm.
He picks it up with trembling fingers.
It is small enough to fit in his palm, light as a feather, luminous as a star.
The color shifts as he holds it, blue to pink, pink to blue, and it seems to pulse, faintly, like the echo of a heartbeat.
Your heartbeat.
He closes his fist around it and brings it to his lips.
"I would have chosen you," he whispers, "If I had known. I would have chosen you."
But you cannot hear him.
Not anymore.
The sea witch was right.
The hearts that love the hardest are always the most beautiful.
And the most easily broken.
They bury you on the cliff above the sea.
Not in the royal crypts beneath the palace, where the dead of the royal family are laid in marble and forgotten.
On the cliff.
In the open air, where the wind smells of salt and the waves can be heard crashing against the rocks below, ceaseless and eternal and indifferent.
Rafayel insists, and Mei agrees with him.
Your uncle, who has been hollowed out by grief into a shell of the stern king he used to be, does not argue.
He stands at the edge of the cliff and stares at the sea with the expression of a man who has spent fifteen years building a wall against the tide and has learned, at last, that the tide does not care.
It will take and take and take.
The grave is marked with a simple stone.
No title.
No epitaph.
Just the view of the ocean, stretching out to the horizon, the same view you loved, the same view you stood and stared at for three years, waiting for something that was already there.
Mei stands at the grave for a long time after the ceremony. Caleb stands beside her, his hand in her.
The two of them are finally together because you pushed Mei toward him in the garden, because you wrote it in the letter she found in her book.
Let yourself love him. Do not be like me, do not be afraid.
She found the letter the morning after they found your body.
She read it and screamed so loudly the servants thought someone else had died.
Caleb holds her and lets her cry into his chest.
"She knew," he says. "When she came to me last week and asked me to look after you. She knew she was not coming back."
Mei shakes her head, tears streaming.
"She told me to fight for you. That was her farewell. And I did not… I did not even realize…"
"You could not have known."
"I should have. She was my sister," Mei's voice breaks."I should have seen it."
But no one saw it.
You, who spent your entire life being protected but overlooked, used that invisibility one last time, to do the one thing no one could stop because no one was watching.
Rafayel does not attend the funeral.
He is on the beach.
The same beach where they found him.
The same beach where they found you.
He is sitting in the sand at the water's edge, the blue scale in his palm, and he is talking to the sea.
He does not sing, not anymore.
His voice is back but no longer the way it was before the curse.
It is rougher and thinner now.
The sea witch gave him his voice but kept its beauty, a final cruelty or perhaps a mercy.
The most beautiful parts of his voice are gone, just as the most beautiful part of your heart is gone, and perhaps that is the balance the witch intended all along.
He talks to the sea because he cannot talk to you.
"I remember clearly now," he says, his voice cracking. "The storm, finding you half-drowned. I remember how I brought you to the surface. Your face. I remember the exact feeling of your hand on my cheek."
The waves lap at his feet.
"I do not understand how I forgot, how I confused you with your cousin. You do not even look anything alike. You do not feel anything alike." He laughs bitterly. "The sea witch's magic. It must have clouded my memory, made forget you."
He opens his fist and looks at the scale.
It catches the light, pulsing softly.
"I saw your paintings," he whispers. "Dozens of them. Three years, you waited for me and you never said a word, and when I arrived here looking for the wrong woman, you just…stepped aside. You watched me court her. You watched me write her love letters and paint her portrait and make a fool of myself, and you said nothing."
His voice breaks completely. He bows his head, pressing the scale against his forehead.
"You brave girl. I would have kissed you and meant it. If you had told me… if I had known.. I would have looked at your face and known it was you, and everything after that would have been different, you would have been alive. The bond was pulling me toward you the entire time. Every time I felt confused, every time I looked at Mei and something felt wrong, that was you. The bond was trying to show me what the sea witch’s curse was hiding."
He lifts his head.
"I would have chosen you," he says to the sea. "I need you to know that. Wherever you are, whatever comes after, I would have chosen you."
The sea does not answer.
The sea never answers.
END.
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