Chapter 18 Salt in My Sleep

Chapter 18 Salt in My Sleep
Cleo

I do not remember falling asleep.

One moment I am still sitting at the table, a worn journal beneath my hands, the lamplight flickering over sketches of water-born women and inked warnings. Aries is across from me, silent, tense, his eyes moving constantly to the windows as though he can feel them out there, waiting.

The next moment…

I am wet.

Not the sticky, earthly damp of sweat, but ocean-wet. My skin glistens beneath a pale, silver-blue light, and water laps at my calves as though I am standing at the edge of the world’s quietest sea.

I am barefoot on smooth black stone. The sky above me is without stars, without moon. Just an endless, deep indigo dome stretched over an impossible horizon.

And I am not alone.

Seven figures circle me in the water.

They do not splash as they move. They glide, half-floating, half-walking along an unseen floor beneath the waves. Their hair drifts around their faces like slow-motion storms, their bodies luminous, pale, marked with faint turquoise veins that pulse softly like living tide lines.

My chest tightens.

“I’m dreaming,” I whisper.

Are you?

The voice doesn’t come from one of them. It comes from everywhere at once. In my skull. In my veins. In the salt on my lips.

One of them steps closer. Up close, I can see she is impossibly beautiful. Her skin shines like pearl. Her eyes are endless green, ancient and sharp. Water beads on the delicate line of her jaw, the curve of her throat.

“You’re one of the Naiyra,” I murmur.

She smiles slowly. Not kind. Not cruel.

We are the Daughters of the Current, she answers. We have worn many names. Once we guided sailors. Now we guide truth.

“Truth?” I echo. “Or lies shaped as music?”

Her smile deepens.

Are the waves lies, land-walker? They promise the shore, yet swallow it every day.

Another one circles behind me, her fingers almost brushing my hair. The water around her glows faintly where she moves.

You smell like him, she murmurs softly. Salt and storm and forgotten depths…

My heart kicks painfully.

“Where is Aries?” I demand.

They all look at one another in synchronized calm.

Always his name on your tongue, the first one says. But do you know what it means to carry the sea?

The water around my legs ripples and climbs, curling around my knees, my thighs.

“I know I did not invite you into my dreams,” I snap.

You did not have to, one replies. He did.

A sharp, cold dread pierces me.

“What are you talking about?”

His blood remembers us even when his mind resists. Memory is an invitation, Cleo.

“How do you know my name?”

A soft chorus of laughter drifts around me, echoing across the water’s flat surface.

We know everything that touches him. And now… so do you.

The world tilts.

For a moment, I no longer see myself.

I see through water.

I see Aries, standing waist-deep in moonlit waves, his back to the shore, his head lifted toward the sky as if listening. His body is gleaming, power rolling through it. The faint outline of scales glimmer at his hips, his wrists, his spine.

And in the distance, beneath the surface…

Something vast coils in the dark.

Waiting.

He looks torn in two directions: ocean on one side… land on the other.

And me, somewhere in between.

He does not belong here, the voices whisper in unison.
The land is a cage.
You are human, fleeting, breaking, fragile.
He is eternal. Tidal. Bound to currents older than your bones.

Their faces come closer now. So close I can see the tiny shimmer of scales at their temples, behind their ears. Half women. Half something older.

He will break your heart, one murmurs gently, like a lullaby. Or you will break his world.

“No,” I say shakily. “You’re lying.”

Are we?
He already despises the land, another breathes. He has since he was born of the deep. Does he not cringe at your walls? At your shallow air? At the slowness of your gravity?

I see flashes now, not dreams, not my memories.

His memories.

Cold currents wrapping around a younger Aries. Other beings like him swimming beside coral palaces. Laughter like singing whales. A voice telling him: The surface is poison. The land steals. The land kills.

I stagger in the water, dizzy.

“You’re twisting things,” I say.

We are revealing things.

Suddenly the water drops away, draining into nothing.

I stand on dry stone, the sea far below me, as if I am standing on the edge of a cliff. And across from me stands Aries.

But… not the Aries I know.

This one is crowned with bone and coral. His eyes glow blue-green. Sea markings spiral around his arms and across his chest.

His expression is distant. Regal. Untouchable.

“You cannot keep me here forever, Cleo,” he says quietly.

Pain lances through me.

“I never tried to keep you,” I whisper.

He looks past me now, toward the open sea.

“You have no choice. You’re land. I am the tide.”

“You’re also more than that,” I argue, my voice breaking.

“There is nothing more than the sea.”

The nymphs rise behind him like silent attendants.

Come back, they whisper.
Remember who you were.
Remember who you despised.

“And what about me?” I plead.

In his eyes, something flickers, confusion, yearning, war, longing.

“You,” he says softly, “are the only thing that ever made the land feel less like a prison.”

The words hurt worse than if he had rejected me.

Because love… and goodbye… are not so different.

The world begins to dissolve, stone cracking, water rising violently, voices all around me now.

He will return to us.
He will choose the deep.
And you will be left salt-stained and empty on the shore.

“No!” I cry out. “He will choose for himself!”

A rush of water slams over my head.

Cold. Dark. Silent.

And then I wake with a violent gasp.

I sit bolt upright in bed, heart hammering so hard it physically hurts. My nightdress is clinging to me, soaked, not in sweat.

In saltwater.

The room is dim with early morning light. The house is silent. Too silent.

And then I feel it.

Warmth behind me.

An arm draped carefully around my waist.

Aries’ breath slow and even against my neck.

He is here.

Real.

Warm.

Alive.

But my eyes are drawn not to him…

But to the thin line of wet footprints leading from the front door… straight to my bedside.