The villagers believed Caelen had gone mad. Perhaps he had. Grief could look very much like madness.

He sat on a trunk of driftwood, the iron harpoon resting across his knees, looking out to sea.

Behind him, wrapped as a corpse in layers of enchanted netting, lay the mermaid. Her scales were the iridescent green of deep-ocean ice, her hair long and dark like wet seagrass. She did not thrash or plead; she simply watched Caelen with eyes as pale and unblinking as polished pearls.

Three days he had kept her as a lure. Ransom for the return of his daughter, Maeve, stolen from a spit of sand by a rogue wave. Not even her body returned. The priest told him to build a pyre, for the Lord of the Deep took what he chose, and gave back the bounty of the sea.

Caelen refused to make offerings to a thief. He gathered his meager coins and begged the witch of the wilderness to enchant his net. At dusk he sailed into the wake of the retreating tides, dropped the net, and dragged up one of Poseidon’s own daughters from the blue abyss.

Now, he waited at the edge of the roaring surf, to bargain with a god.

“He does not bargain with mortals,” the mermaid sang. “He will drown this shore rather than return what he has claimed.”

“He returns my child, whole and hale, or himself knows the loss of a child.” Caelen’s voice was flint.

At noon, when the tide should have been coming in, it flowed out. The water roiled and was sucked back from shore, receding hundreds of yards, exposing piles of rocks, flailing fish, and valleys of black mud that had not seen sunlight since the world was born.

Then, the ocean rose. It did not come as a wave, but as a wall—a tower of black water three hundred feet high, spanning the entire horizon.

Suspended within the translucent wall of the sea were glowing, bioluminescent eyes the size of shield-bosses and the wandering shadows of leviathans. At the center of the towering wall, a face formed from foam and white water.

The Lord of the Deep looked down upon the tiny strip of land. The pressure in the air spiked, making Caelen’s ears pop and his nose bleed.

“RELEASE MY DAUGHTER,” a sound thundered through the sky, not as words, but as the crushing weight of five hundred fathoms of pressure. “WHAT IS TAKEN IS MINE FOREVER.”

The wall of water surged forward ten paces, hovering precariously above Caelen. A shower of droplets scattered across the sand. The mermaid released a shrill, singing cry of hope, lifting her webbed hands toward the wall.

Caelen leapt up to stand over the mermaid, harpoon raised. Raw, primal terror threatened to snap his mind like dry kindling. Every instinct pounded in his chest, screaming at him to throw himself on the wet sand, beg for mercy, and release the sea-born creature.

“Always have I praised and made offerings to thee!” Caelen screamed into the roaring wind of the tide-wall, raw with grief and rage. “Still, thou’st has stolen mine only treasure, the very breath of my lungs and beat of my heart! Give me back my daughter, cruel and selfish god. It is a tiny thing to you, but everything to me.”

The air shuddered as if from thunder. Spray flew across the shoreline. The giant face in the water twisted in divine fury.

“WORTHLESS SPECK! I BEHELD THY DAUGHTER SINGING ON THE SHORE. HER VOICE PLEASED ME. SHE ABIDES NOW IN THE TIDES! I WILL FLOOD THE LAND TO THE MOUNTAINS ERE I RETURN WHAT I HAVE TAKEN!”

The leviathans within the wall thrashed against the boundary, eager to drown the coastline clean of life.

Caelen locked eyes with the god, his arms coiled, and he pointed the barbed iron tip directly at the mermaid’s breast. “And I will drive this point through her heart before your wave reaches this ledge!”

“STOP THINE HAND! THE GRIEF OF HER LOSS WOULD DRIVE ME TO MADNESS, AND I WOULD SHAKE THE PILLARS OF THE EARTH!” The god of oceans and earthquakes intoned, loud as a thunderclap.

The mermaid’s song became a wailing dirge.

Caelen did not blink. He had nothing to lose; without Maeve, his world was dead already.

For agonizing moments, the world hung on the edge of a razor.

Then, with a sound like a tearing mountain, the wall of water shook.

“A MORTAL LIFE TAKEN BY THE SEA CANNOT BE RETURNED. BUT I WITNESS YOUR SUFFERING TO BE TRUE. SPARE MY DAUGHTER, AND THINE WILL COME EACH DAY AT EVEN-TIDE AND SING AND ABIDE WITH THEE UNTIL NIGHTFALL. AND WHEN THY TIME ON LAND IS DONE, BY MY OATH, THOU MAY ABIDE IN THE TIDES WITH HER UNTIL THE END OF DAYS.”

Caelen wept bitter tears from a rent heart that knew the words to be the truth. He dropped the harpoon and raised his hands in supplication.

“Let my time be done!” he pleaded.

“NAY, EVEN I CANNOT UNWIDE THE TWINES OF FATE. YET, BEHOLD AND REJOICE, HERE ART THINE CHILD.”

In the waves Caelen saw the familiar shape of his beloved Maeve, her hair flowing. No longer of the land, an iridescent tail shimmered where once her legs had been.

Caelen unwrapped the netting around the mermaid and carried her to the wall of water. The ocean took her and she vanished into the blue. Like a great breath being loosened, the water sank until it once again covered the rocks and mud, and the surf with its frothy seams raced to and fro over the sands.

Maeve swam to the edge of the surf where her father sat. In a voice filled with love, she sang the songs he once sang when she was but in her cradle.

Caelen looked down at his daughter’s smiling face, closed his eyes and listened to her songs until the sun set.