Mira, before anything else, I need you to truly understand who I am—not some priest or a scholar, those men merely pick the sea apart and think they know it.

I am a sailor. A man shaped by salt and rope, by hauling nets full of the sea’s mysteries, by scrubbing decks until my knuckles bled, and by burning my hands on coarse lines that never seemed to soften. When the ocean fell silent, I drowned the quiet with too much drink. That was my entire schooling—only the endless, restless sea.

I lost my left eye in a war that forgot me the moment its guns fell silent. I came back half-shattered, half-faced, with no patience left for the land’s dry demands. My wife said the sea had hollowed me out, carved away the man she once knew. She took our boy away, inland somewhere safe and dry, and I let them go—not from bitterness, but because I no longer knew how to be anything but what the sea had made me. That was all I was when the ocean gave me Lyra.

I didn’t find her washed on some shore. No, I was fishing, nets out, the water so still I could see deep into it. Something heavy snagged the line. At first, I thought it was driftwood or wreckage, maybe a seal caught by mistake. 

The girl came to me in the quiet fog of dawn. Her hair was blooming black and wet like spilled ink, limbs limp and fragile as the first frost. She looked twelve years old. I remember thinking she was a mistake, a curse the sea meant to punish me for finding.

But then she breathed when I turned her over.

I pulled her into my boat and wrapped her in a sailcloth, my hands were trembling too much to tie proper knots. I waited, expecting the waves to rise and steal her back, but they did not. She coughed out salt and water and looked straight at me—calm, as if the vastness around us meant nothing—and asked why the sea was so loud. I told her the sea always sounded like that. She studied me like I was a puzzle, then said no—the sea only sang like that when I was near. I didn’t understand then, not fully.

I cooked for her—burning half the meals in the process—and taught her to sail, to read the fickle wind. She followed me like a shadow, watching and learning, just as my boy once did. I tried to give her a normal life: school and friends. But every time I kept her away too long from the shore, she would collapse, her body aching like it belonged to the water, not the land. I gave up pretending after that. I poured over books at night, trying to learn the things she needed to know. 

She grew older—19 years passed. She never left me, always by my side.

At night, I'd often hear her mumble in her sleep The child of the sea will bring the sun.

One day, she told me she had to go home to a world different from ours, I laughed first. I told her she was already home. She said her mother wasn’t a woman at all, but something older, something from the very beginning of things. She spoke about a boy named Auren whom she adored.

She handed me a strange blue book, pulled from someone else’s hands—someone I did not know, someone who might have wanted it back. The pages shimmered like living water, and for a moment I wondered if I had raised her to steal, to defy me. I wanted to argue or lie to hold her close.

Before she disappeared, she left me a letter, written so badly I could barely read it,"Goodbye, old man. I love you." I folded it until the paper nearly crumbled away. I tell you this because stories like hers rot if left unspoken. 

I failed her, Mira. I failed in ways that will weigh on me until the sea calls me too. I let her take those boys—I told myself they were strong.

When you played that song that night, Mira, I knew from the first stretched, low note. When the crowd heard music, I heard a tear in the air. My scarred eye burned. The sky thinned and water followed the moon.

I screamed—not to stop you, but to be heard. Old sailors get drowned out, I’m not mad. You know by now since you seem to hear the wrongness beneath the notes.

The sea took my little Lyra, and your two friends, as it takes everything. The only way to find them now is to join the song of the sea.

All we can do now is listen for what the sea will sing next.