I recognize it immediately.
I carved the star from a piece of driftwood and the moon from a beautiful white seashell I’d found on the beach. The bell I purchased from a traveling bell maker, pestering him as I rang each bell inside his cart, one after another. I wouldn’t settle until I found the perfect sound.
I spent a week crafting the chime. I meant to hang it above my niece’s cradle, so she could hear the wind.
But she was born too early. If she’d been born in the autumn, she would have lived. But as everyone knows, all children born during the storms never survive past the first breath.
Sung was heartbroken.
In a rage I’ve never felt before or since, I took the charm to the cliffs outside our village and pitched it over the edge. I watched as it fell and shattered upon the rocks. Last I saw the chime, it was in pieces as they were swept away into the sea.
All around me the chimes in the shop begin to jingle—somehow swaying in the windless air—until the shop is a clamor of cacophonous sounds.
Wind chimes ringing without wind mean there are spirits about.
I exit the shop, the sound of the chimes dampened to my ears. If there are spirits here, and they’re invisible, watching, what do they see when they look at me?
I walk fast. The night is long, and the ribbon is a weight against my hand. Beyond the gate is one grand courtyard after another. I look at none of them. After the fifth, I’m running.
I step through a final gate, climb the stone steps, and enter the throne room of the Sea God, stopping only then to catch my breath.
Moonlight filters through breaks in the raftered ceiling, slanting broken light across a great hall. The twilight gloom of the fog is muted here, but still the eerie silence remains. No servants rush out to greet me. No guards move to block my path. The Red String of Fate ripples. Slowly it begins to shift from a bright, sparkling crimson to a deep bloodred. It leads me to the end of the hall, where a massive mural of the dragon chasing a pearl across the sky frames a throne on a dais.
Slumped over the throne, his face shadowed by a magnificent crown, is the Sea God. He’s dressed in beautiful blue robes, stitched silver dragons climbing up the fabric. Around his left hand is the end of my ribbon.
I wait for the spark of recognition in my soul.
According to myth, the Red String of Fate ties a person to her destiny. Some even believe that it ties you to the one person your heart desires most.
Is the Sea God tied somehow to my destiny? Does my heart desire him most?
There’s a sharp pain in my chest, but it’s not love.
It’s darker, hotter, and infinitely stronger.
I hate him.
I take a step. And then another. My hand that holds the ribbon goes to my chest and comes away with the knife.
What would the world be like without the Sea God? Would we still suffer the storms that rise out of nothing to wreck our boats and drown our fields? Would we still suffer the loss of our loved ones to famine and sickness, because the lesser gods can’t or won’t hear our prayers, fearful as they are of the Sea God’s wrath?
“What would happen, if I were to kill you now?”
As the words echo in the vast hall, I realize these are the first words I’ve spoken aloud since arriving in the Sea God’s realm.
And they’re words of hate. My anger swells up like an unstoppable wave. “I would kill you now and sever the ties of our fate.”
My words are reckless. Who am I to defy a god? But there’s a terrible ache inside me that needs to know—
“Why do you curse us? Why do you look away when we cry and scream for your help? Why have you abandoned us?” I choke on these last words.
The figure on the throne doesn’t answer. The magnificent crown he wears leans so far forward over his face that it shadows his eyes.
I take the last few steps to the dais. Reaching out, I remove the crown from the Sea God’s head. It slips from my fingers to land with a thud against the silk carpet.
I lift my eyes to look upon the face of the god of all gods.
The Sea God is …
A boy. No older than myself.
His skin is smooth, unmarred. His hair flops against his forehead, curling around slender ears, one pierced through with a golden thorn. His eyelashes are noticeably long in the way they fall across his cheeks, dusky and misted. I watch as his mouth parts, letting out a soft sigh of breath.
He’s … asleep.
My hand tightens around the handle of my knife. I don’t know what I expected, but it’s not him, a boy who appears so … human, he could be a neighbor or a friend. I watch as a tear slips down his face, catching on his lip before falling over his chin and sliding down his neck.