Prologue
I no longer remember the last time I looked up and saw an open sky instead of an endless weight of water.
Here, in the depths where sunlight has never reached, time moves differently. It lingers, slow and heavy, like resin drawn from an ancient tree. Somewhere above, spring has probably returned. My daughters are there now, drifting through coral gardens, laughing as the currents carry their voices across the sea. Their laughter has never reached this place.
I had six daughters.
That is the truth I repeat to myself whenever the silence becomes too difficult to bear—if silence and night can even exist in a world where darkness never truly ends. I no longer tell myself that I have six daughters. I tell myself that I had them. The past is easier to survive than hope.
I am not a mermaid. I never was, though I gave birth to six of them.
Lamia are not born in coral palaces. We come from older waters, from the abyss where the boundary between sea and darkness has long since faded away. My fins were never shaped like my daughters’. My scales bear a different pattern, and my eyes were made to see where even the oldest merfolk would lose themselves.
When I entered the royal palace as a bride, the old queen—my husband’s mother—looked at me as though I had stolen something that had never belonged to me. Foreign blood upon the throne, the courtiers whispered whenever they believed I could not hear them. Queen Sevil never abandoned that belief. Even years later she searched patiently for a reason to cast me out forever.
The people who live along the coast tell frightening stories about me.
To them I am the Sea Witch.
Mothers whisper my name to children who wander too close to the waves, warning them not to swim beyond the safety of the shore. They speak of a creature lurking beneath the sea, one who grants impossible wishes and demands souls in return.
They are not entirely wrong. I do take payment. Nothing is ever given freely in the deep.
What they do not know is that I once lived in a palace of shimmering mother-of-pearl, and that there was a king who looked at me as though the sea itself had been created for no one else. They do not know that I held six tiny daughters in my arms, each smelling of salt and young kelp, and sang them lullabies that have vanished from the world.
Or perhaps they still exist. I simply taught myself to forget them.
The humans have never known why I was exiled. Some would say it was because I spilled blood.
They would not be wrong. I sank a ship.
It carried men who hunted whales—the ancient giants whose memories stretch further back than those of the Sea Kings themselves. I destroyed that vessel alone, beneath the cover of night, without asking permission and without pausing to consider what my anger would leave behind.
Children who would grow to adulthood believing that a storm had claimed their fathers, never knowing it had been my hand instead.
I have never asked forgiveness for what I did.
The ship was not the only thing I drowned. I drowned my own life with it.
The woman I had been disappeared beneath those waves, and even my name was swallowed by the sea until no one dared speak it aloud.
Queen Sevil received exactly what she wanted.
She raised my daughters herself, according to her laws, her beliefs, and her version of the truth.
As for me, I remained here, among those who find it easier to keep silent in darkness than to speak beneath the light.
Sometimes—though not often, because the pain is almost more than I can endure—I swim upward until I reach the place where darkness begins to yield to light. The water grows clearer there, and if one knows where to look, faint shapes can be seen moving high above.
I never go farther. The light no longer belongs to me. I watch it from a distance, as though through cracked glass.
And I watch my daughters. All six of them.
I know which one greets the dawn with song and which still trembles when storms gather overhead. I know them with the certainty only a mother can possess, even if they no longer remember that I exist.
Yet it is the youngest I watch most often. Liren.
She was little more than an infant when I lost her. She cannot possibly remember my face. Now she is quiet where the others are carefree, thoughtful where they are restless. Again and again I find her gazing toward the surface, as though she senses that something beyond the sea is worth sacrificing everything to reach.
I know that look. Once, it belonged to me.
One day Liren will find her way into the darkness where I have made my home. I have never doubted it. Some paths are chosen long before we understand we are walking them.
When she finally stands before me, will I tell her the truth?
Or will I remain silent, as I have for all these years?
