I break through, gasping—not because I need air, but because I need to see.
“Kael!” I scream, voice raw and breaking, as the sea explodes below with his battle.
I hang on the whale, salt pouring off my hair, lungs heaving though the whale’s back rocks me atop the turbulent, black sea.
For a heartbeat, I only watch—inky water where his light fought the dark, a chaos of foam and shadow.
Then, like a bell striking something inside me I didn’t know I owned, the bond answers.
It is low and fierce and all his and all mine at once.
Enough.
I press my palms to the top of the water and send everything I can think of through that thin bright line between us.
Help him. Go to him. Protect him. Help Kael.
The plea isn’t elegant.
It’s raw and scared and small, the sort of thing you throw at the world when you have nothing else.
And then I surprise myself.
The call bends outward, skimming the surface, sliding into the sea like a stone skipped by grief.
It finds the whales, the sharks, the otters, the sea tigers—whatever I can name, whatever I can imagine.
Names and images and need tangle together, and the creatures answer.
At first, it’s a ripple—fins, flukes, a wall of mottled backs.
Then the blackness begins to retreat, not all at once but like a curtain being peeled away.
The inky stain that had been swallowing light thins to bruised blue, then to clean, living water.
Voices rise—calls of animals I didn’t think I could call—and they rush at the place where Kael fights.
Minutes that feel like hours pass.
I keep shouting into the bond, into the sea, into whatever thread ties me to him.
Do not give up. Hold him. Bring him back.
Then the water splits like a mouth opening, and he rises.
No longer that towering, unknowable Titan that had been more god than man an instant before—he shrinks, the colossal coils folding, the abyssal scale falling away until he is almost the man I know, only Kael was never a regular man.
He is a Demon Lord. A Lord of Water. And he’s mine. Wet and wild and burning with the aftertaste of battle.
He lunges for me, “Phoebe!”
For a moment, the world narrows to the press of his arms, the ache in his chest, the frantic throttle of his heartbeat against mine.
I sob without shame.
“I thought I lost you,” I cry, the words spilling out ragged.
He buries his face in my hair, and his voice breaks when he answers.
