The eyes beneath

The knock came again.

Three slow, deliberate raps. Then silence.

Clara stood motionless in the hallway of the lighthouse, hand hovering above the doorframe where she’d tucked a charm of woven sea grass and bloodroot. Ashani was beside her, flashlight in one hand, the other gripping the iron crowbar they’d brought up from the dive shed. Isla, eyes wide, clung to her mother’s side.

Another knock.

Then the sound of breathing—not like a person, but like something practicing how to sound human.

Clara raised a hand. “Don’t open it. No matter what it says.”

Isla stepped forward. “It’s not real. It doesn’t know how to knock right.”

They all turned to look at her.

“It’s just copying what the people in its dreams used to do,” she said calmly. “It doesn’t remember doors.”

Clara felt the blood drain from her face. Isla had never said its before. Always “the sea” or “the dark” or “the dream.”

Now it had a pronoun.

They waited.

After several long minutes, the presence moved on. They could hear it squelching across the sand, dragging something wet behind it. The waves swallowed the noise.

Ashani finally exhaled. “That was no illusion.”

“No,” Clara said, checking the salt lines and sigils again. “That was a message.”

⸻

At dawn, Clara opened her grandmother’s old field diary—the one recovered from the ruins of Hollow Hill after Varethkaal’s banishment. Though scorched and water-damaged, it still held fragments of lore passed through the Yanuwah bloodline.

One page stood out now more than ever:

“The Sea Holds Another Root. Not born of the Forest, but of the Deep Wound. The Seed was not singular. There were three. One buried. One drowned. One stolen.”

Clara whispered the words aloud, her breath fogging against the pages. “One stolen…”

Ashani frowned. “The drowned one must be here—Marellen.”

Clara nodded. “Then where’s the third?”

Before Ashani could answer, Isla stepped in from the hallway, dragging a waterlogged bundle wrapped in seaweed. Her hands were covered in dark sand and tiny barnacles.

“I found it in the old cellar,” she said.

They unwrapped the bundle. Inside was a stone bowl etched with tide marks, filled with what looked like dried kelp, ash, and tiny bone fragments. Symbols ringed the rim—sigils matching those found beneath WildWood and the temple ruins.

“A binding bowl,” Ashani whispered. “Like the one used to hold Varethkaal’s essence.”

“But smaller,” Clara said. “Child-sized.”

Isla looked down at it. “It’s not for binding. It’s for remembering.”

Clara’s heart skipped.

That night, Clara and Ashani reviewed the town’s forgotten records once more. A hidden volume—long misfiled behind property tax ledgers—contained a folk legend previously unrecorded.

A tale of a bride of the deep, sacrificed during the storm of 1893.

Her name had been Ariyah Yanuwah.

Clara’s breath caught.

“Ariyah was my great-great-aunt. She vanished from Terrell in 1889. They said she eloped and disappeared.”

“But she didn’t,” Ashani murmured. “She came here. Or was brought here.”

Clara closed her eyes. “And she became the Drowned Vessel.”

⸻

That night, Clara dreamed again.

She stood at the base of the black spire, deeper this time. The sea above her was not water but sky, and floating within it were the broken remains of cities she didn’t recognize—walls of salt-stone and shell, drifting in forgotten silence.

Something moved between them.

A shape.

It didn’t have a face. It had faces—borrowed from the drowned, worn like masks.

Clara stepped forward.

It noticed.

From behind the spire, something slithered forward. A woman, hair long and flowing like kelp, skin grey-blue, eyes empty. But her face—

Clara gasped.

It was her own.

Twisted. Broken. Drowned.

“You will not bind this one,” the drowned Clara said. “You carry a bloodline built on failure.”

Clara tried to speak, but her dream-self choked. Water poured from her mouth.

“You think you know Marellen. But Marellen does not know itself. It is becoming. And you are its cradle.”

The drowned version stepped closer. “The third seed already took root.”

Clara’s scream woke her.

⸻

Later, in the lighthouse’s flickering candlelight, she told Ashani everything. The dream. The woman. The warning.

Ashani was quiet for a long time.

“What if this isn’t just a new awakening?” she asked. “What if Marellen isn’t returning… but transforming?”

Clara sat in silence.

“You said Isla called herself the dreamer once. Not just dreamed of Marellen. What if she’s… part of its birth?”

Clara’s blood ran cold. “A vessel.”

Ashani shook her head. “No. A mirror. Marellen is dreaming through her.”

⸻

They returned to the shoreline that afternoon and followed Isla to the edge of the cliffs. There, she pointed to a tidepool that seemed unnaturally deep.

Clara leaned over it.

A pale stone shone within the pool, covered in the same glyphs from the binding bowl. She reached in—

A voice echoed through her:

“You will lose her. Just like the others.”

She yanked her hand out, panting. The stone’s warmth lingered on her skin.

Ashani pulled a slip of paper from her bag. “These sigils—they match the ones carved into the Terrell wards. The ones that held the forest back. What if they weren’t just meant for Varethkaal?”

“They’re multipurpose bindings,” Clara realized. “We can use them to slow Marellen’s transformation.”

“But we need a tether,” Ashani said. “Something tied to it.”

Clara looked toward Isla, who now sat by the water, speaking to it in hushed tones.

“She’s the key.”

⸻

That night, the rain returned, and with it came the whispers.

From the sea. From the cellar. From the wind.

The lighthouse began to shake.

And far below, something rose from the trench.