The Wreckage

“Ship!” shouted one of the sailors, his voice swallowed by the roar of the wind and the relentless pounding of waves against the hull of the Siren of Storms. “To the south!”

Aria snatched up her spyglass, heart hammering in her chest, fingers trembling with tension. Between the towering walls of water she made out a silhouette — a ship torn in half, black against white foam. The mast wobbled like a broken bone; the shredded flag whipped and flailed in the gale as if signaling its own death.

“Captain, it looks like—” she began, but a deafening explosion split the air and the deck shuddered beneath their feet.

Thunder, flame and wind ripped that mast clean. The flag disintegrated into ember and ash; a section of hull fell away and the ocean swallowed it whole. Splinters of wood and flaming iron fell into the waves in a glittering rain. The air was thick with the acrid bite of burning pitch and salt; men on deck inhaled like they’d been slapped.

“It’s over,” Lior muttered, staring as the last fragments sank beneath the churning black water. “No one could survive that.”

Aria did not look away. Her eyes swept the wreckage, sharp and impatient. The lightning cast quick, cruel light across the surface — and in that strobing white she saw motion: pale against the black, a limb, a hat, the hollow roll of something caught in the surf.

“No,” she whispered to herself. “The sea is never empty.”

There, among planks and ropes and the glint of something metallic, a body drifted, half-submerged and beaten by the breakers. It took less than a fraction of a heartbeat for decision to harden into action.

“Prepare the net!” she screamed, voice cutting through the thunder.

Hands moved. Coils of rope were flung. Grapples flew. Men called and ran. Lior’s hand closed on her sleeve. “Aria, wait!”

She wrenched free, ripped the captain’s hat off her head and flung it to the deck — the wind stole it instantly. Her fingers undid the sword-belt with quick, practiced motions; steel hit wood with a dull, decisive clang. She shoved aside anything that might weigh her down. Rain cut her face like fine wire.

“Aria!” Lior yelled, reaching for her.

“If I wait, he’ll drown!” she snapped back, eyes bright and unblinking.

She vaulted the rail and plunged into the black mouth of the ocean.

The water took her breath in a single, terrible mouthful. Cold slammed into her ribs like knives; the sea felt alive and furious around her. She fought to break the surface, lungs burning, salt stinging her throat. Waves rolled over her head, dragged at her limbs, tried to drag her down into the blind, hungry dark — but she clawed forward.

There — a shape. Half-bobbing, face turned away, limbs loose as rope. She reached him, fingers finding torn fabric and bone. He was lighter than she feared, and heavier than she hoped: a young man made of frost and blade scars, his clothing singed and shredded. She rolled him onto her shoulder and kicked toward the net, every stroke a battle with the current.

“Hold on!” she shouted up through the rain, though her voice was paper against the storm. “Pull!”

The crew heaved. Ropes bit into palms, boots slipped on the wet deck. The net caught under the stranger. Rough hands scrabbled and pulled, and then — with a lurch that seemed to tear a breath from the world — they were over the rail and onto the deck.

Aria collapsed beside him, coughing, salt in her mouth. He was young — maybe barely older than she — and colder than any man had a right to be.

“Breathe,” she told him fiercely, palm pressed to his chest.

At first nothing. Then he coughed, watery and small; his body convulsed as the sea pushed itself out of his lungs. Water dripped from his hair and eyelashes. Aria let out a laugh that was half sob, half triumph. “Alive,” she whispered. “Damnable miracle.”

Lior knelt at her side, jaw hard. “Barely. We should—”

“We take him below,” Aria cut him off. “Now.”

They carried him through narrow, slick corridors. The ship still shrieked and bowed under the storm, but below decks the air smelled of oil and dried herbs — small comforts. Aria laid the stranger on a canvas cot, peeling back sodden cloth to find a map of scars: old slices puckered closed, newer red lines, a ragged burn that blackened one sleeve. Whoever he’d been, he’d been well acquainted with battle.

“You’ve seen war,” Aria murmured as she wiped salt and blood away, fingers practised and steady. “You’ve stayed alive long enough to be stubborn.”

Her hand brushed near a pale, long scar at his ribs — it should have been fatal. For a beat warmth slid up through her fingertips, an odd, instant heat like something alive answering the touch. Before she could pull back his hand shot up and gripped her wrist.

His eyes opened, storm-gray and wild, and the room narrowed to the two of them. “Who are you?” he rasped; the voice scraped like timber. Salt crusted his lashes.

Aria met his gaze without flinching. There was no softness in it now, only iron. “Who are you?” she answered. “Who has the sea given us?”

The grip loosened. His lids drooped. He fell back into sleep, exhaustion swallowing him like foam.

Aria stayed, finishing the bandaging, breathing slowly to calm the tremor in her hands. The cot creaked. Above, the ship still threw itself at the storm; below, lantern light trembled on damp wood.

The door burst open. Darius entered, cloak dripping salt, his face a hard plane of judgment. “What’s that?” he barked, eyes cutting like a blade. “What did you drag aboard, Aria?”

“He was drowning,” she said, her voice low but steady. “I wasn’t about to watch the sea finish what it started.”

Darius’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “The sea doesn’t hand back prey for free,” he said. “You may have pulled a blade into our ribs.”

“Then I will watch him,” Aria replied, voice flat. “If he’s a threat, I’ll be the one to throw him overboard.”

For a long moment Darius measured her, the two of them like two halves of a blade. Finally he nodded, slow and reluctant. “Very well. But mercy has a price.”

Lior lingered at the doorway, arms folded, face closed. “The men are whispering already,” he said low. “This will seed trouble.”

“He breathes,” Aria answered, folding the bandage once more. “That is the only language that matters for now.”

They left her alone with the breathing of the ship and the soft, irregular rise and fall of the stranger’s chest. Hours passed like small waves. Lanterns guttered. Rain softened.

When he stirred again his eyes opened, bewildered and wet. “Where…am I?” he whispered.

“You’re aboard the Siren of Storms,” Aria said, keeping her voice steady though her heart eased like a rope slackening. “You’re safe.”

He blinked slowly, the movement of a man surfacing from sleep. “Ship,” he repeated, the word like a rough stone.

“Do you remember your name?” she asked.

He looked past her at the small porthole where lightning had given way to the dull wash of dawn. He pressed his fingers to his temple as if squeezing something loose from the dark. “I… don’t know,” he said finally. “I remember… water. Fire. A roar — like the world breaking. Then nothing. Only the sea.”

Aria watched him. The emptiness in his voice was not show. She felt both pity and a practical, quiet assessment, as always: what might he become? friend or hazard?

“You’ll have a name until you remember,” she said after a moment’s pause. “Kael.”

“Kael,” he repeated, tasting the syllable. It fit oddly like a hand falling into place. He closed his eyes for a moment, exhausted.

“Rest,” she told him softly. “When you’re strong enough, you’ll earn your food and your place. Nothing is given here.”

He listened, and in the slow blink after she pulled the blanket over him he thought — not of faces, nor of family, but of the cold, of teeth of wind, and of the way the water had gone dark and deep and swallowed everything. He tried to take hold of a memory and found only motion: the surge and the white of foam, a flash of heat, a scream that might have been his or might have been the world — and then the blank.

Something else — quieter than thought — threaded through the emptiness: a pull, a small tug toward the sound of Aria’s voice. A faint, guilty gratitude, already beginning to etch itself into the raw space where his past had been.

Outside the hull complained and the wind kept its whispering litany. Kael’s breath evened. The sea, for its part, did not stop speaking. It slid through the timbers and under the keel and, if one listened long enough, seemed to say something that might be mercy, might be warning:

You were not meant to die today — but neither were you meant to be forgotten.