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The first child they brought in was six years old and barefoot.He came through the ambulance bay wrapped in a beach towel, wet to the knees, with a thin cut along his palm and a splinter of old wood lodged beneath the skin. His mother kept saying he had been asleep the whole time.“His eyes were open,” she whispered, as if the boy might hear her and remember. “But he was asleep. He was asleep.”Nora Vale had worked as a paramedic in Blackwater Cove for nine years, long enough to know the town’s rhythms better than most marriages. Lobstermen with hooked thumbs. Tourists with jellyfish welts. Drunks who mistook the seawall for the sidewalk. Blackwater was the kind of town where almost every emergency eventually traced back to weather, water, or bad decisions made within sight of both.She cleaned the child’s hand under fluorescent light while he dozed on the gurney, his lashes silver in the moon-washed dark coming through the bay windows.“What were you dreaming about, Milo?” she asked softly.The boy’s eyes fluttered, but he did not wake.His heart rate was elevated. Skin temperature low. Pupils normal. He smelled faintly of brine and diesel.That last part made her pause.Diesel had a particular sour-metal stink. It did not belong on a child in pajamas at two in the morning.She checked his smartwatch while his mother filled out forms. Most parents in Blackwater strapped their kids with trackers now. The town pretended it was for storms and bike accidents and too many wooded trails. In truth, it had begun three weeks ago, when the first few children started walking out of their houses after midnight.The watch showed a sharp rise in pulse at 1:12 a.m. Then an odd drop. Then another spike. His route map, blurred by bad satellite lock, drew a shaky line toward the harbor.Toward the old north pier.Nora looked up.Nobody used the north pier anymore. It had been condemned before she was old enough to drive. The pilings were rotten. Half the decking had gone soft. A chain-link fence ran across the road leading to it, topped with red signs: UNSAFE. NO ENTRY.Yet lately, parents and police had been finding children there in clusters. Standing at the very end of the broken planks, all facing the water.As if waiting for something to arrive.By the end of the week there were eight of them.Then twelve.Then twenty-three.Some came back with rope burns around their wrists. Some with bruises on their shoulders shaped like fingers. One girl had a crescent of rust embedded beneath her thumbnail. None of them remembered leaving home. None of them could explain the injuries.But they all said the same thing when they woke.The bell is ringing.At first everyone blamed stress. Mold. TikTok. Carbon monoxide. The school counselor gave interviews about mass suggestion. The mayor talked about “collective anxiety behaviors following an unfortunate viral incident.” The police chief added patrols around the pier and told the local paper it was under control.Then Officer Harlan’s daughter climbed out a second-story window in her sleep

Every spring, the people of Briar’s Hollow climbed the black path to Stormglass Peak.They went in silence, carrying baskets of grain, polished stones, carved bone charms, and small jars of honey sealed with wax. At the summit, where the mountain split open into a cave of dark volcanic glass, they laid the offerings in a ring around the entrance and bowed their heads to the ashes inside.No one remembered when the tradition had begun.No one agreed on what it meant.The elders said it was respect. The farmers said it was caution. The children said it was to keep the dragon asleep.Mara’s grandmother had always said something different.“It is a promise,” she used to whisper, leaning close to the fire when the wind howled at the shutters. “And promises do not stop meaning something just because one side forgets.”Mara had believed her when she was young. Back then she would sit with her chin in her palms and imagine a great scaled body buried beneath the mountain, gold eyes glowing beneath layers of ash, listening to every footstep on the slope.But Grandmother was dead now, and Mara was nineteen, and Briar’s Hollow had become a place of practical people. People who looked at the mountain only when thunder rolled over the valley. People who honored old rituals not because they believed, but because no one wanted to be the first to stop.That year, spring came late and angry.The soil stayed cold. The lambs were born thin. The clouds gathered above Stormglass Peak for days at a time, bruised purple and green, grumbling with distant thunder. By the morning of the climb, the air tasted like iron.Mara joined the procession with a basket of apples from her father’s cellar and a small beeswax candle she had made herself. The villagers moved in a crooked line up the mountain path, boots slipping on damp stone, cloaks snapping in the wind.At the front walked Elder Rowan, broad-shouldered and gray-bearded, with the hollow look of a man who carried responsibility like a sack of stones. Beside him shuffled old Mistress Vale, who knew every birth, burial, and boundary in the valley and recited tradition the way other people recited prayers.At the rear came the children, whispering and daring one another to peek into the cave.When they reached the summit, the wind rose hard enough to make them stagger.The cave mouth yawned before them, wide and dark. Its edges shone with strange glassy ripples, as if the stone there had once melted and frozen again in a single breath. Ash lay inside in gray drifts.Mara stepped closer than most. She always did.There was no skeleton in the cave. No great curved ribs or giant skull to prove the old stories true. Just ash. Charred stone. Silence.“Set your offerings,” Rowan called.They placed the baskets and jars in their usual ring. A few muttered blessings. One of the children burst into tears when thunder cracked directly overhead.Then the mountain answered.Light split the sky.The strike hit somewhere above the cave with a sound like the world being torn in half. The ground lurched. Several villagers screamed. Mara

I'm standing in a kitchen I don't recognize and somehow know better than anything in the world.

Warm light spills across countertops. There’s a pan on the stove, something sizzling and a woman is laughing at something I just said. 

I can't hear my own voice. I can't make out the joke.

Her face is clear, though. Brown hair twisted up messily, a spoon in one hand, a small smear of sauce on her wrist, the smell of zesty italian in the air. Her amber eyes crinkle and head rolls back when she laughs. She looks at me like she’s known me for years. 

My chest is full. Heavy. Raw.

I reach for her.. 

A tiny hand closes around my finger. 

My world shrinks to that grip. There’s a hospital room, machines humming somewhere behind me. A blanket, white, striped with blue and salmon pink color wrapped in a bundle around a furious little face. New little amber eyes, the same color as the woman in the kitchen, skin so soft I feel afraid to breathe too hard.  

I say something, whisper it, but again I can’t hear my own words.

The woman is there, hair down this time, exhausted and glowing at the same time. She smiles at me, eyes shining with tears, her lips move but I can't make out the words. The moment freezes, then fades..

A folded flag.

Someone’s reading from a piece of paper. Their voice is flat, professional. The words don’t land. My hands feel numb. My throat is closing around something that will never come out. The flag is folded with reverent, practiced motions and handed toward me.

I don't move.

A hand pushes at my elbow. I reached out. The cloth is stiff and light and means nothing, and everything, all at once.

There is a large portrait on an A-frame standing beside a casket bearing a row of tridents down the length of the reddish-brown shimmering wood. My eyes lift to the portrait and I start to recall..