Chapter 20 The Pull Beneath My Skin

Chapter 20 The Pull Beneath My Skin
Cleo

After last night, the ocean no longer feels like scenery.

It feels like memory.

Even while standing in my small, sunlit kitchen, wrapped in a wool shawl and listening to Aries breathe quietly in the next room, I can still feel it, a phantom touch around my ankles, a pressure behind my ribs, as though the tide has sunk hooks into invisible places inside me. I longed to be back at the shore feeling th breeze on my skin. The desire to touch the water, be in it, sourounded by the seas embrace. An ancient call I am starting to realize I can hear.

I am brought from my thoughts as smoke fills my vision.

Breakfast burns on the stove.

I don’t notice the smell of it scorching until smoke curls toward the ceiling. I hastily move the pan away, heart thudding, hands unsteady.

Focus, Cleo.

But the truth is… my mind isn’t here.

It’s out there. I can almost hear the ocean calling me to join it depths.

Out where the Naiyra whispered my name.

Out where Aries stood waist-deep in surrender and choice.

Out where something ancient, watchful, and unnervingly familiar stirred when he turned away.

I glance down at my palm.

There is a faint, pale line curling there that wasn’t there before, like the delicate beginning of a spiral, shimmering just beneath the skin. Almost like a tide-mark.

Almost like a symbol.

A memory flickers, sudden and uninvited.

I am a child, standing on this very shore. The waves rush in ferocious and playful. I trip, small and clumsy. The water pulls me under.

But instead of drowning…

I am held.

Hands beneath the surface. Strong. Careful.

A woman’s voice, not my grandmother’s, humming through the water like a lullaby:

You are not meant to sink, little one.

I grab the edge of the counter as the vision leaves me.

“That wasn’t a dream…” I whisper to myself.

It never was.

A soft knock sounds at the kitchen doorway.

Aries stands there, watching me. He looks drained. Haunted. But he is still here. Solid. Real.

“You should have woken me,” he says quietly.

“I didn’t sleep.”

“Neither did I… fully.”

The silence between us is different now. Not just tension or romance or fear…

Recognition.

“Did anything about last night feel… familiar to you?” I ask carefully.

He nods once. “Too familiar. The water recognized me on a level that frightened me.” He hesitates. “But it wasn’t the only thing that did.”

My stomach tightens. “What do you mean?”

His gaze drops briefly to my hands.

“To you.”

A strange chill runs over my arms.

“When you touched me in the water, I felt something else,” he continues. “Not just land. Not just human.” His eyes lift to mine slowly. “You felt like… a bridge.”

The word sends an electric tremor through my spine.

“That’s what the journal called the Naiyra,” I say softly. “A bridge between sea and land.”

“Yes. But they’re broken. Twisted. You are not.”

A knock of wind shakes the window slightly, as if emphasizing his words.

I walk past him toward the small shelves where my grandmother kept her most private books, the ones she never let anyone read while she was alive. The leather is worn thin with age, warped like driftwood.

My fingers drift over their spines.

I choose the one with no title.

The one that feels warm when I touch it.

It opens easily, as though waiting.

Inside, diagrams. Symbols. Star charts. Tidal maps layered over family trees. Names scrawled down the margins over generations.

And then I see it.

My grandmother’s handwriting:

“Our blood once answered to the ocean before it ever learned to walk on land.”

I swallow hard and read on.

“We are not mer. We are not human. Not fully. We are the Keepers of Thresholds, born where worlds touch. Rare. Fading. Forgotten. But when the sea begins to stir and the old magic returns… so do we.”

A small drawing sits beneath the paragraph.

A woman standing at the shoreline, one foot on land, one in sea.

A spiral carved into her palm.

My breath catches painfully.

I flip my hand over again.

The mark is clearer now.

“You’re not just protecting me from the sea,” Aries murmurs behind me.

“I think,” I whisper, barely believing the words even as they fall from my lips…

“I might be what the sea is actually afraid of.”

Silence thickens.

Outside, the waves crash, not angrily, not playfully…

But restlessly. Uneasily.

“For the Naiyra to leave last night…” Aries says, his voice low and troubled, “something more powerful than them had to be present.”

“You think that was me?”

“I think it was what you don’t remember being yet.”

Suddenly another page begins to flutter though there is no breeze.

One sentence becomes visible, written in darker ink as if pressed into the page:

When the Tidekeeper awakens, the witch will come herself.

A cold awareness washes through me.

“This isn’t just about you being claimed,” I say slowly, turning to face him again. “It’s about her trying to stop me from remembering.”

His jaw tightens. “Then we need to make sure you remember first.”

“And if what I remember is dangerous?” I ask.

“Then I will stand between you and the ocean,” he answers without hesitation.

“And if the ocean is only trying to reclaim what was stolen from it long ago?”

He steps closer now, close enough for our breaths to mingle.

“Then I’ll stand between you and the ocean,” he repeats, “even if the ocean is myself.”

For the first time since all of this began, something inside me settles.

Not certainty.

Not safety.

But power.

And understanding.

The tide is not just calling Aries home.

It is calling me to remember where I came from.

And somewhere deep beneath the waves, the sea witch is no longer simply watching.

She is preparing.

Because soon…

She will have to face what the shore has been hiding all along.