It happened on a Tuesday.
Not that days of the week mattered to beings who measured time in tides and moon cycles, but Rafayel would remember it was a Tuesday because that was the day Nana had summoned him to show her a nest of baby birds she'd discovered outside her window. She'd been so delighted, so eager to share this small joy with him, that he'd actually forgotten—for just a moment—about everything else.
That was when the pain hit.
It felt like being ripped in half. Like every cell in his body was screaming simultaneously. Like the ocean itself was dying inside him, because it *was*.
Rafayel collapsed mid-sentence, his hand clutching at his chest where the bond mark burned with an intensity that would have killed a human. Nana's delighted laughter cut off instantly, her hands reaching for him, her voice distant and distorted through the roaring in his ears.
"Rafayel? Rafayel, what's wrong?! What's happening?!"
But he couldn't answer. Couldn't speak. Could barely breathe through the agony that was *knowing*.
The Lemurian Sea was gone.
Not dying. Not receding. *Gone*.
The last of the water had drained away, leaving behind only a desert of golden sand that stretched as far as the eye could see. The coral gardens—ancient and beautiful and alive for ten thousand years—had crumbled to dust in the open air. The palace carved from pearl had collapsed, its towers falling like the bones of some great beast finally laid to rest.
And his people...
*Oh gods, his people.*
He could feel them dying. Not individually—that would have been too merciful—but as a collective consciousness, a web of lives connected to his through the bond of kingship. Ten thousand souls turning to sea foam, evaporating into nothing, their final moments echoing through him like a symphony of endings.
*Your Majesty, why?*
*The water—it's gone—we can't breathe—*
*Please, someone save us—*
*Mother? Mother, I'm scared—*
*It burns, it burns, help us, it BURNS—*
And then, one by one, silence.
The High Priest was last. He felt her die with crystalline clarity—felt the moment her ancient body began to dissolve, felt her final thought reach across the distance between them like an accusation carved in stone.
*You chose*, her voice whispered in his mind. *You chose her over us. I hope she was worth it, my king. I hope she was worth everything.*
Then she was gone. They were all gone.
And Rafayel was left kneeling on the floor of a palace bedroom, his chest on fire, his soul screaming, his hands clutching at nothing while a girl who didn't understand held him and begged him to tell her what was wrong.
*Everything*, he wanted to say. *Everything is wrong. I killed them. I killed them all. For you.*
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🐚🐚🐚
The Curse Awakens
The pain didn't stop. If anything, it intensified, spreading from his chest outward like poison through his veins. The bond mark—which had pulsed with warmth and approval when he'd chosen Nana—now burned like a brand, searing itself deeper into his flesh.
This was the punishment.
The curse written in the sacred stones. The price for breaking tradition, for refusing the sacrifice, for dooming his people through selfishness and love.
*A Sea God who abandons his duty shall share the fate of those he abandoned*, the ancient text read. *For betrayal of the covenant, the betrayer shall dissolve as his people dissolved, shall turn to foam as they turned to foam, shall know the death he condemned them to.*
*Unless the sacrifice is made before the final grain of sand settles.*
*Unless the heart is given willingly before the curse completes.*
*Three months from the fall of the sea to the fall of the god.*
*Choose.*
Rafayel had read those words a thousand times, had dismissed them as metaphor or exaggeration or the kind of dramatic flourish ancient scribes loved. He'd thought—if he'd thought about it at all—that he could find a loophole, could bargain with fate, could somehow save everyone.
He'd been wrong.
The curse was real. It was literal. And it was already taking hold.
He could feel it—a wrongness spreading through his body like ice through water. Starting at his extremities, working its way inward. His fingers felt strange, almost translucent when he held them up to the light. Like he was already starting to disappear.
Three months.
He had three months before he would dissolve into nothing. Before he would experience firsthand the death he'd condemned ten thousand others to. Before everything he was—god, king, assassin, the fool who'd loved a girl for a hundred years—would become sea foam and drift away on a wind that didn't care.
Unless.
*Unless the heart is given willingly.*
Unless he did what he should have done from the beginning. Unless he took Nana to the stone altar—exposed now in the middle of the ruins, no longer protected by water—and completed the ritual he'd been too weak to perform.
Unless he killed the girl he loved more than life itself.
"Rafayel, please, you're scaring me!" Nana's voice finally penetrated the roaring in his mind. She was holding his face in her hands, forcing him to look at her, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Please tell me what's wrong! Let me help!"
*You can't help*, he thought. *Unless you're willing to die for me. Unless you're willing to give me your heart—literally—and let me cut it out on a stone altar while you smile and tell me it's okay.*
*Are you willing to do that, Nana? Are you willing to save me by dying?*
But she didn't even remember him. Didn't remember the promise she'd made a hundred years ago, didn't remember saving his life, didn't remember anything that would make her understand why this was all so cosmically, tragically unfair.
She just saw a man in pain and wanted to help.
Because that was who she was. That was who she'd always been.
The girl who saved people, even when saving them destroyed her.
Rafayel managed to pull himself together enough to speak, though his voice came out rough and strained. "I'm fine. Just... a headache. It passed."
"That was not just a headache," Nana said firmly, her hands still cupping his face. "You collapsed. You were—" She touched his chest where the bond mark burned beneath his robes. "You're burning up. We need to get you a physician—"
"No." He caught her wrists gently, moved her hands away from his chest. From the mark that would condemn them both. "No physicians. I just need... I need some time."
"Time for what?" She was looking at him with such concern, such genuine care, that it was like knives in his heart. "Rafayel, I've never seen you like this. Something's wrong. Really wrong. Please, let me—"
"You can't help me," he said, and the words came out harsher than intended. "This isn't something you can fix, Nana."
She flinched slightly at his tone, but didn't back away. "Then tell me what it is. Maybe I can't fix it, but at least I can understand. At least I can be here for you the way you've been here for me."
*Be here for me*, he thought bitterly. *The way I've been here for you. Do you have any idea what that means? Do you know what I've sacrificed for you? What I've destroyed?*
*Do you know that ten thousand people just died because I couldn't bring myself to kill you?*
But saying any of that would mean explaining everything. The bond. The curse. Lemuria. The fact that he was supposed to be her assassin, not her friend. The fact that every moment they'd shared had been built on lies and manipulation and a plan he'd been too weak to follow through with.
The fact that he'd loved her for a hundred years while she'd lived and died and been reborn without any memory of him.
How do you explain that to someone? How do you tell them that they're the cause of—and the only solution to—your complete destruction?
"I can't," Rafayel said quietly, releasing her wrists and standing on unsteady legs. "I can't explain. And I can't stay."
"What? Why?" Nana stood too, reaching for him, but he stepped back. "Rafayel, please don't leave like this. Don't shut me out. I thought we were—I thought we were friends. Maybe more than friends. I thought—"
"You thought wrong," he said, and the lie tasted like ash. "This was a mistake. All of it. I never should have—" He stopped, unable to finish that sentence because finishing it would mean admitting this had all been real, that his feelings weren't part of some plan but genuine and devastating and world-ending.
Nana's face crumpled, hurt bleeding through her confusion. "You don't mean that."
*I don't*, he wanted to say. *I don't mean it at all. You're everything. You're the reason I'm still breathing. You're the reason I condemned my kingdom. You're the reason I'm going to die in three months unless I kill you first.*
*And I still can't regret choosing you.*
But he couldn't say any of that. So he just looked at her—really looked at her, trying to memorize every detail in case this was the last time—and said, "I have to go."
"When will I see you again?" she asked, and there was something in her voice. Fear. Like she knew, somehow, that this was different from their other partings.
*Three months*, he thought. *You'll see me in three months when I'm desperate enough to ask you for your heart. When I'm close enough to dissolving that fear finally overcomes love. When I'm willing to become the monster I've been pretending not to be.*
*Or you'll never see me again, because I'll choose to die rather than hurt you.*
*I don't know yet which ending we'll get.*
"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't know anything anymore."
And then he was moving, was out the window and across the rooftops and away from her before she could stop him, before he could change his mind, before the look on her face could break what remained of his already shattered heart.
Behind him, he heard her call his name once. Twice. The sound echoing across the distance between them like a question that would never be answered.
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🐚🐚🐚
Rafayel didn't stop running until he reached the sea.
Or what used to be the sea.
The journey took two days of desperate travel, using every ounce of his remaining power to cross the distance. And when he finally arrived at the coast where Lemuria had once thrived beneath the waves, what greeted him was a nightmare made manifest.
Golden sand. Just golden sand, stretching endlessly in every direction. The ocean that had been there his entire life—that had been there for ten thousand years before him—was simply *gone*. Evaporated. Drained away as if it had never existed.
The seabed lay exposed like a corpse, all its secrets revealed. He could see the topography of what had once been hidden depths—the trenches where his people had retreated in their final days, the ridges and valleys that had formed over millennia, the scars where ancient volcanic activity had shaped the ocean floor.
And in the center, like a monument to his failure, stood the ruins of Lemuria.
The palace had collapsed into rubble. The coral gardens were skeletal remains, already crumbling to dust in the dry air. The pearl streets were cracked and scattered, their luster fading. The market squares where his people had traded and laughed and lived were empty, silent, tomb-like.
But worst of all was the foam.
It covered everything like snow—delicate, iridescent, already dissipating in the wind. The remains of ten thousand souls who had dissolved in those final moments. Each particle was once a person—a child, a parent, a lover, a friend. Each fleck of foam had been someone with dreams and fears and hopes for the future.
Someone Rafayel had been responsible for.
Someone he'd failed.
He walked through the ruins like a ghost, his feet leaving prints in the sand that had once been ocean floor. Every step felt like a violation. Like he had no right to be here, walking on the grave of his kingdom, breathing air while his people had suffocated.
The stone altar stood exactly where it had always been—in the heart of the palace, carved from black volcanic rock, inscribed with runes that glowed faintly even now. It had been submerged for millennia, a sacred place where every Sea God since the first had performed the ritual that awakened their full power.
Now it stood exposed, waiting. Judging.
Rafayel approached it slowly, his hand reaching out to trace the ancient inscriptions. His fingers came away covered in sea foam—the last remains of his people clinging to the sacred stone as if seeking sanctuary that would never come.
*Unless the heart is given willingly before the curse completes.*
Three months.
He had three months to bring Nana here. To lay her on this altar. To ask her for her heart and then cut it out while it still beat. To complete the ritual that would save him and doom her.
The thought made him physically ill.
But the alternative...
Rafayel looked down at his hands. They were definitely more translucent than they'd been two days ago. He could see light passing through his fingers, see the bones beneath his flesh like he was already halfway to becoming foam himself.
The curse was working quickly. Efficiently. Making sure he understood exactly what he'd condemned his people to, by making him experience it himself.
*Poetic justice*, some might call it.
*Torture*, Rafayel called it.
Because knowing you're going to die is one thing. But knowing you could save yourself by killing the person you love most? That's something else entirely. That's a special kind of hell designed specifically for people who thought they could cheat fate.
He sat down at the base of the altar, his back against the stone that demanded sacrifice, and tried to figure out what he was going to do.
*Choose*, the curse whispered. *You have three months to choose. Her death or yours. Love or life. Salvation or sacrifice.*
*Choose.*
But how do you choose between the two things that matter most?
How do you weigh one heart against your own?
How do you look at the person who saved you—twice now, across two lifetimes—and ask them to die for you a third time?
Rafayel didn't have answers.
He just had three months.
And a girl standing by a window.
And a stone altar waiting in the ruins of everything he'd destroyed.
And a choice that would define whatever remained of his existence.
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🐚🐚🐚
To be continued __