Salt and binding

The storm cracked open the sky.

Wind howled like a thing in pain, rattling every board of the lighthouse. Salt lashed the windows, not from the ocean, but from the very air itself—as if the sea had taken flight, invading the land to reclaim something long denied. Inside, Clara, Ashani, and Isla sat huddled around the binding bowl, its contents glowing faintly with green-blue phosphorescence.

“The glyphs won’t hold much longer,” Ashani said, flipping through the codex. “These were meant for soil-born things, rooted horrors. Not… this.”

Clara didn’t answer. She stared into the bowl, watching tiny symbols swirl through the liquid ash. It moved like memory.

“We’ve been thinking about it wrong,” she said quietly. “Marellen isn’t just a creature. It’s a response. A reaction to a wound no one closed. A seed left to fester.”

Ashani raised an eyebrow. “A response to what?”

“To forgetting,” Clara said. “To forsaking old bonds. The Yanuwah bound the forest, but they never finished the rite in the sea. They left the drowning unfinished.”

Isla, sitting between them, suddenly gasped.

“They’re waking beneath us.”

Clara knelt beside her. “Who’s waking?”

“The ones that remember. The ones Ariyah tried to silence.”

Clara’s heart skipped. “Ariyah… she didn’t sacrifice herself. She was part of the rite.”

“She was the start,” Isla whispered, eyes unfocused. “She gave herself to Marellen but she didn’t dissolve. She split. Became part of it and part of something else. That’s why it still dreams through us.”

Ashani sat back. “We’re not just fighting Marellen. We’re fighting what it made from the pieces we left behind.”

⸻

By morning, the storm had passed, but the land was different. Salt-crusted grass. Shoreline riddled with holes like open mouths. Trees bent toward the ocean like supplicants.

Clara packed what they’d need. The codex. The bowl. A fragment of the old WildWood glyph stone she’d recovered months ago, pulsing faintly now as if remembering its purpose. Isla carried a pouch of dried root-ash and kelp-braided thread.

Ashani retrieved a dagger—one forged long ago by the Yanuwah from meteor iron and deep-sea bone. Its edge shimmered like memory.

They left for the cliffs by midday.

Their goal: the Spire Trench.

⸻

Reaching it meant following the narrow path Ariyah had once walked—the Sacrifice Trail, hidden beneath overgrowth and illusion spells designed to ward off the curious. The deeper they went, the more they heard the sea beneath the land.

Low tones. Whispers in brine. And laughter.

When they reached the final overlook, the sky had already darkened.

From the cliff edge, they could see the spire again—rising like a black tooth from the center of the trench. But now, it pulsed. Not with light, but with breath. It was alive.

And climbing its length was a figure wrapped in shadow and salt.

“Ariyah,” Clara breathed.

Or what was left of her.

She shimmered with the memory of a woman—long hair, ceremonial robes, but her limbs bent wrong, like coral grafted to bone. Her face was smooth, but her eyes were voids.

“She’s the key,” Ashani whispered. “She’s what holds Marellen back. And she’s slipping.”

Isla stepped forward.

“She wants to be freed.”

⸻

They descended.

Through carved tunnels filled with glyphs and chanting echoes, their feet touching stones no one had crossed in a century. At the base, before the water, they found it: the true altar. Cracked and moss-covered, but still pulsing.

Clara laid the bowl upon it and began the rite.

Isla spoke the words—words she had no memory of learning, but which came effortlessly. Ashani sliced her palm and let her blood spill into the bowl. The mixture hissed, turned black, then silver.

The glyphs ignited.

And the sea responded.

Waves pulled back. The trench opened.

Ariyah descended.

She did not walk. She floated, arms outstretched, face contorted with something between rage and mercy.

“You would bind what you never understood,” she said, voice like distant waves. “You would shackle the child of the deep.”

Clara stepped forward. “You began this. We need to end it.”

Ariyah smiled—teeth like shells. “You think this is ending?”

The spire cracked.

Salt poured from it like blood.

And from within… something began to rise.

⸻

It had no true shape—just memory made flesh. A shifting tapestry of drowned souls and broken roots, stitched together by longing. Eyes blinked open along its sides. Hands reached. It whispered names from the bloodlines it had touched.

“Lucas,” it sighed. “Emily. Devon.”

Clara stepped forward and drove the glyph stone into the earth.

“I remember,” she said. “I remember everything. You cannot feed on what is reclaimed.”

The creature reeled.

Ashani sliced the final bond into her own skin. “In the name of the Yanuwah. In the name of the bound earth and sea.”

Isla poured the final mixture from the bowl.

The wind roared.

The trench began to collapse, pulling the spire, the creature, and Ariyah with it.

The last thing Clara saw before it vanished was her ancestor reaching upward—not in terror, but in relief.

⸻

The sea calmed.

The glyphs dimmed.

The wind fell still.

They had done it.

For now.