The Tide
That Counts

Scholar Arren Voss thought he knew loss — his mentor, Magister Kaelen, drowned twelve years ago during an expedition to map the drowned castle of Iskael. Now a junior archivist at the Lyceum of Tides, Arren is hired to catalogue relics recovered from that same sunken ruin. Everything is salt-crusted, barnacle-scarred, dead. Everything except one amulet: obsidian set in black iron, etched with whorls that seem to move when he isn't looking. It will not dry. Water beads on its surface, perpetually, as if the stone itself is weeping. And at night, when the sea wind rattles his window, the amulet whispers. Coordinates. In Kaelen's voice. Following the voice leads Arren to a stretch of coast no cartographer has named — a shore where the tide never fully recedes, where wet sand glistens under a moon that seems too close. Half-buried, he finds the rest of the castle. Not a ruin. Whole. Rising from the shallows, windows dark, every stone weeping the same perpetual water. And inside, something that has been counting the days, the hours, the breaths since he last walked these halls. Something that knows his name. Something that calls him 'student.'