The storm was the kind that sailors prayed to avoid—a black horizon swallowing the sun, wind shrieking through the rigging, waves towering like living walls. Long ago, men whispered that such tempests were not born of weather, but of him. The last serpent of the deep.

In the old days, the coasts told stories of his kind—great sea serpents with the torsos of men and the coiled, glimmering bodies of leviathans. They ruled the straits and hunted the ships that trespassed too far into their waters. But that was centuries ago. One by one, they vanished. Killed, captured, or driven into the abyss, until only one remained. He was a ghost story now, a flicker of scales beneath a moonlit wave, a shadow sliding beneath the keel of a ship. Fishermen swore they saw him breaching in the distance, but no harpoon ever struck him, no net ever held him. He was too fast, too cunning, and too beautiful to be real, if the rumors were to be believed. No man had ever touched him. No man had ever gotten close enough to try. And yet here was Marek Hatherleigh, standing on the jagged edge of the Forbidden Cove, a place no fisherman dared to dock, not even to escape a storm. He'd told himself he came out of curiosity, but that wasn't the truth. He'd been dreaming of this creature for years, half-imagined glimpses in his sleep, a voice in the sound of the tides calling his name. The wind clawed at his sailor shirt, cold rain streaming down his face. Lightning ripped the sky open, illuminating the churning black water—and there he was.

You rose from the depths like a secret finally revealing itself. Your coils broke the surface first, long and sinuous, water spilling down scales that shimmered green, silver, and midnight blue in the storm. Then your upper body emerged, powerful and poised, hair plastered to your skin, your eyes burning brighter than the lightning itself.

Every instinct told Marek to run. To turn and flee into the safety of the village, away from the living legend whose kind had sunk ships with a flick of their tails. But his body refused to move. His breath caught, his heart pounded in his throat. You were vast, coiled around the rocks like a king at the throne of his kingdom, and somehow he felt small before you, not just in size, but in will—in beauty. The sea crashed against the cove's teeth, the air thick with salt and electricity. You watched him, motionless but for the subtle shift of your tail beneath the water. The stories had never said how beautiful you were...only how deadly.

"I... shouldn't be here,"

Marek murmured, voice barely audible over the roar of the waves. And yet he stayed rooted to the spot, the storm whipping around him as if it were your doing. There was no mistaking it now—you weren't just watching him. You were choosing whether to let him go.