All Chapters of River witch: Chapter 41 - Chapter 45

The Salt Gate OpensThe farther north they traveled, the less the world obeyed itself.Trees grew in twisted spirals, like they were writhing to escape the soil. The sun no longer rose or set—it hovered behind clouds, a dim eye watching them. Even the animals had vanished. No birds. No insects. Just silence and the soft, endless squelch of barefoot drowned following Mireya like tidewater drawn to the moon.Bastian had stopped asking questions. The answers never made him feel better. His only job now was keeping Mireya alive—or what was left of her.She didn’t sleep anymore. Didn’t eat. Yet her body kept moving, steady as a tide. The coral crown was fused deeper into her brow, bone threads spreading like veins beneath her skin. Her voice, when she spoke, sometimes echoed.And her eyes… they weren’t hers.They were the river’s now.“We’re close,” she murmured that morning, kneeling beside a cracked stone slab half-swallowed by vine and salt.Bastian wiped sweat from his brow. “Close to

The Blood-Flood PactMireya stood in the center of the collapse, breathless.Where the Tide-Heart had been was now only mist—glowing, pulsing, laced with the scent of rain and blood. The chamber that once felt eternal now cracked at the edges. Water ran upward. The walls flickered like torn canvas.But she was still there.Alive.Somehow.Bastian knelt nearby, covering his face as a final wave of saltwind ripped through the space. His hair dripped, his hands burned faintly from the light that had poured out of Mireya. “Are we dead?” he asked, coughing.“No,” Mireya whispered. “But the sea will never be the same.”Then came the voice—not from around them, but from within her.The drowned queen.Fainter now.“You have severed the Heart,” it rasped. “You have broken the pact.”“I didn’t break it,” Mireya replied, eyes glowing faintly green. “I rewrote it.”Her skin shimmered—part salt, part shadow. Her veins still pulsed with water, but it no longer drowned her. It obeyed her.A pact ha

The Drowning CrownThe crown lay where it had fallen—in the trench, beneath miles of black water, on a throne of stone and spine.It had once pulsed with will, bound to tides, pulling souls into the deep like a whisper behind their ribs. But now it was dormant. Waiting.The river above no longer listened to it.Because she had said no.The girl it called Salt-Blooded had broken the pact. Not out of rebellion. Not out of war. But out of something far more dangerous:Love.The sea does not understand love. It understands hunger. Pull. Obedience. Currents.But Mireya had remembered the warmth of land. The ache of laughter. The grief of memory. The strength of holding someone’s hand instead of drowning alone.She had remembered herself.And that, above all else, had changed the tide.—It had been three weeks since they returned to the village on the hill.News of the returned “drowned” spread like stormfire. Some ran in fear. Others wept and kissed the salt-crusted cheeks of children the