Lahat ng Kabanata ng River witch: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

The Mirror MawThe sea was glass.Not metaphorically—literally.A flat, flawless pane stretching into infinity, reflecting the sky with terrifying precision. The clouds above and below moved in perfect unison. No ripples. No wind. Just silence and symmetry.Sefina whispered from the stern of the boat, “We’re here.”The Mirror Maw.The fifth tide.Jonas leaned over the side, staring down into the reflection. “It’s not water.”Maya joined him. Beneath their boat, their reflections stared up—not delayed, not distorted, but wrong. Maya’s mirrored self didn’t blink when she did. It smiled when she didn’t. Its eyes were darker.The dagger at her side began to hum.Sefina, pale and trembling, unwrapped the Testament. “The book’s refusing to open.”Maya frowned. “It’s too close. The Mirror Maw wants us to speak first.”Jonas looked around. “So how does this one work? Do we get pulled into the water again? Face another siren, another storm?”“No,” Maya said, staring at her warped double. “This

The Final MouthThe sky had no stars.The clouds above them were not clouds—they were veins. Pale and pulsing, spread across a dark dome that trembled with each breath the ocean took. The sea itself had turned to shadow. Not black water—something beneath it.The boat barely floated now. Every wave was slower, like time had grown heavy.No birds. No wind. No life.Only waiting.Maya stood at the bow, eyes fixed on the vast abyss ahead. Her dagger pulsed like a second heartbeat. The Testament, held tightly in Sefina’s arms, had stopped bleeding. Now it watched.Jonas whispered, “We’re in its mouth.”Sefina nodded. “The Seventh Tide. Where the Sovereign listens.”“And what’s it listening for?” Maya asked.Sefina’s voice shook. “For the voice that ends the story.”---The Final Mouth was not a place.It was an absence of place.The sea fell away beneath them, becoming a spiral chasm that didn’t descend—it devoured. The boat stopped moving forward. Instead, it tilted.Not with gravity.But

The Echo ShoreRevised Word Count: ~695---The river stayed gentle for weeks.Birds returned to the canopy. Frogs sang again beneath the reeds. The tidepool by the bend filled with moonlight each night, as if the stars were dipping their toes back into the world.But Maya couldn’t sleep.Not from fear. Not from dreams.From a strange, hollow stillness.Something was gone. But something else was not.The tides had ended. But sound… still traveled.---It began on the twelfth night.A faint clicking beneath the water’s surface.At first, Maya thought it was crabs or drifting coral. But the sound was too precise. Too timed. It echoed like language, not movement.She sat near the riverbank, wrapped in her stormcloak, bare feet pressing into the damp moss.Jonas and Sefina were asleep in the shelter.The moon glared overhead like a single, wide-open eye.And the river… spoke again.Not in words.But in a pattern.A flicker of movement.A clicking sequence.A shape in the dark.Something w

Drift of The DrownThe air thickened with salt and silence.Mireya sat crouched on a narrow spit of rock at the edge of a flooded mangrove trail. The red roots tangled like veins above the brackish water. Her arms were wrapped around her knees, blood still drying on her palms. She hadn’t slept. Not really. Since their flight from the Mouthless Trench, her mind had been locked in a cycle of dread and memory—Amaru’s eyes vanishing into the black tide, the song of the drowned echoing even now in the back of her skull.Bastian emerged from the water, gasping. His shirt clung to his chest like a second skin. “There’s something down there,” he said, panting. “A structure. Old. Coral-eaten.”“Another ruin?” Mireya asked without lifting her eyes.“No.” He looked around, then dropped his voice. “It’s shaped like a throne.”That made her look up.Behind them, the jungle trembled with insect buzz and distant gull cries, but beneath that was another rhythm—wet breathing, soft and slow, like lungs

The River That BleedsThey walked in silence for hours, the drowned trailing behind them like shadows that had come unhooked from the light.Mireya led without speaking, crown of coral nestled in her curls. It had fused itself to her skin. Bastian had tried once—gently—to remove it, and his fingers blistered instantly with salt. Now he kept his distance, walking slightly behind her, eyes watching everything: the trees that leaned closer than they should, the river that ran in unnatural directions, the mist that tasted faintly of iron.They were heading upstream, following a current that no longer obeyed gravity. Water flowed backward, climbing over rocks, swirling in unnatural spirals. Fish swam belly-up, yet they didn’t die. Some blinked, as if aware.“It’s not just you anymore,” Bastian finally muttered. “The whole river is waking up.”Mireya didn’t answer. She couldn’t. The voice of the drowned queen was still inside her, not loud, not cruel—just present, like a cold hand resting o