Not so long ago ….
There were things that Edward Kinsley felt entitled to have ever since he first regained consciousness as a four-year-old boy. Titles, possessions. They meant a lot for someone who slept in a crate at the docks his whole life.
He never developed religious beliefs or sentiments about deities that lived in the oceans. He knew the King existed, he knew he had a wife with a temper who abhorred his affair with human girls.
Edward never thought he'd come face to face with deity. Someone immortal, someone who could give just as easily as he could take.
Edward despised the notion of having something - someone - being taken from him. He built his ship, the precious Lioness, with his own hands. He earned the respect of his crew, he chose his first mate, Bonnie.
The idea that some … God … would come and declare - you belong to me, therefore everything you have belongs to me, too - unthinkable.
Neptune never demanded things. He gave and gave and gave. When he shed his mortality in favor of showing his true face, Edward knew he was in love.
He also knew it was dangerous to love a god. To love a king. Still. Neptune never told him why his heart was so bruised, so split open. That came later. When his Queen came on spoiling.
***
Edward was twenty-one when he fell in love with Neptune. That summer, Salacia's acidic rains ruined most of the ships and the city had been absorbed by famine. In the time when Salacia's anger and jealousy flipped itself over on its head and consumed Aazor, the people turned to the Vlachy to help them feed their children - to allow them to hunt in their forest and fish in their sacred lake, Pani e kamengre, the Waters of Lovers.
And they always turned to Edward, for his young mother Soileen was the only one he kept in touch with after he went rogue and declared himself Aazorian.
The Vlachy never treaded on sea - they were forbidden to interfere in any way with the fate of creatures roaming Salacia's oceans.
Edward did not possess the gift of sorcery, and his father, Vajda, died from heartbreak when his only son and heir decided to 'curse them all.'
Valorians had only two homes, one under the sea and one in the port. And while Edward encountered resistance on his voyages across the world, Nereid trying to pull him under, yelling 'infidel' at him, they never exactly expressed mortal grudge.
But that summer… That summer Edward was forced to go to encampment and begged his mother to allow Aazorians access to the lake, possibly the forest.
Edward never exactly cared much for social justice, or justice of any kind - but he did care about his motley crew who were starving. The Lioness' wood was moldy, falling apart and no crew could make repairs while hungry.
While Salacia was still raining her fury down on the citizens of Aazor.
Aazor stank of brine and rot—carts overturned, canvas sails eaten through like lace, puddles of acid sizzling in the cracks of the stone streets. Queen Salacia's tantrums spared nothing but the bones of the place. Fish markets had been wiped clean overnight, the catch boiled in their own skins where they lay. Edward's boots slapped through half-flooded alleys, salt in the seams, fury in his gut.
He hated this city. He hated the way it reminded him of things he tried to forget—his mother's cracked teeth, the wail of hungry children, the way the old Vlachy witch whispered when she stirred her pot with a jawbone. And still, he came.
Offerings were required. Even for witches. Especially for witches.
He turned the corner onto Sol's Row, where the fishmongers used to crowd before the ocean's mood soured. Most stalls were empty. All but one.
A single man stood at the far end, under a tarp of sea-stained oilskin, shadowed in green-gold light from a dying lantern. His stall had no banner, no family crest or fish guild mark, but gods—he had fish. Rows of them, still slick, still breathing almost. Silver and red, blinking like they didn't know they'd left the sea.
Edward stopped.
The man looked up.
He was tall. Unreasonably so. Weather-beaten face, thick arms, hair like tangled kelp pulled into a sailor's knot. His eyes were the only strange thing—too clear, too deep. Like staring into the heart of a wave just before it broke.
"You selling?" Edward asked, voice low, hand on his coin pouch.
The man nodded. "Last ones not burned through by her rain. Take what you need."
Edward narrowed his eyes. No one in Aazor gave anything for free unless they wanted something worse in return. "You'd give away fresh fish in this city? You mad?"
The man tilted his head, a smirk ghosting his lips. "Maybe. Or maybe I saw someone coming who'd make better use of it than letting it rot."
Edward stared.
His skin prickled beneath his coat, and for a second, he thought he heard the waves crash even though the tide was out.
He stepped forward. Picked up a mackerel by the tail, sniffed it. Clean. Cold. "I need heads," he muttered. "The meat's for the kids. The heads are for…" He trailed off. If he said her name out loud, she'd appear in his dreams again, with that knowing grin and eyes like coins just pulled from the underworld.
The man only nodded. "Then I'll gut them here. Take what's needed. Leave the rest."
Edward watched the man's hands as he worked—too deft, too smooth. Like someone who'd never actually been poor, never wrestled with net or line. But the smell was right. The gesture was right.
"You're not from Aazor," Edward said carefully.
"Where else would I be from?" Another fish slid open, the spine exposed like silver thread.
There were talks of islands. Nomads lived there, but Edward never saw anyone. Then again, there was one other island no one talked about.
"Why help me?"
The man looked up, and this time the light shifted, danced like oil on water. His eyes were not blue. Not green. They were the color of depth.
"Because," he said softly, "I've been watching you, Edward Kinsley. And I wanted to see if the stories were true."
Edward went still. The kind of still that came before a drawn blade. "What stories."
The man stepped around the cart, wiping his hands on a salt-cracked cloth. He came close—too close—and Edward didn't move.
"That you built your ship with your bare hands. That you once broke a magistrate's nose for spitting on a Vlachy boy. That you speak the old tongue when you think no one listens."
Edward's breath hitched, just once.
"What's it to you?" he rasped.
The man leaned in, voice like surf against stone. "Because I'm a collector of bold things. Dangerous things. And I thought—perhaps—I'd like to collect you."
And with that, he turned back to the stall, slicing the next fish with almost ceremonial care. The mackerel's eye twitched.
Edward didn't leave right away. Didn't speak. Just watched the man's hands, the flex of muscle under tattered sleeves, the pulse at his neck like a stormcloud about to break.
He'd bring the fish to the witch. But his thoughts would stay with the fisherman. With the sea.
With the danger of it all.
***
The island had no name.
It didn't need one. It was one of Neptune's hidden havens, a curve of impossible green tucked into sapphire surf, the sand so fine it felt like sugar under Edward's heels. A place untouched by maps, where birds sang songs that didn't exist anywhere else in Valorian.
A place where the king brought his conquests. So the stories went.
Edward had never cared about the stories.He lay in Neptune's bed—a vast thing carved from driftwood and pearls, draped in gauze that fluttered even when the wind was still. His skin was sun-warm and salt-slick, his chest rising and falling slowly. Sated. Quiet.
Alone.
Neptune stood near the edge of the terrace, watching the tide like it had offended him. The blue glow of the moon traced his spine, turned his scars silver. He hadn't touched Edward since twilight. He hadn't spoken since sundown.
Edward shifted up onto his elbows, the silken sheet falling down his stomach. "You're very far from my bed tonight, " he said gently, "and much closer to hers."
Neptune didn't turn. But he did answer. His voice was low, a drag of kelp against the rocks. "You always know."
"I don't pry." Edward sat up fully. "You know I don't. You told me what you are, and I—well." He smiled faintly. "I never expected love in this life. I still don't, not from gods. But if it's mine—I can bear the rest."
Finally, Neptune turned. And Edward wished he hadn't. The god's eyes were hollow tonight. Edward lived enough life to know that hollow love could strip a person of their identity.
"She wants to kill me," he said.
Edward blinked. "Your wife?"
Neptune nodded once. "She's planning it. Has been. She's gathered her nereid court—her dowry, all of it, still loyal to her. She married into twelve seas but only ever bowed to her own power."
"That's absurd," Edward said. "She's not strong enough. Is she?"
"Oh, Edward." Neptune's smile was soft. Bittersweet. "She absolutely is. My family had the crown. She had everything else. When she married me, her father gave her half the ocean. Her sisters serve her still. I inherited a name. A title. Not even a shell to sleep in."
Edward swung his legs off the bed, frowning. "Then why not unmake the marriage? Why not replace her long ago?"
Neptune's gaze dropped, a shadow passing across his expression.
"Because the sea is not kind to kings who defy it," he said. "On land, I can walk. I can touch. I can kiss and love and taste the wind. But at sea—at sea, I am not what you know."
His eyes met Edward's then, dark and thunder-laced.
"To lie in a marital bed beneath the waves, I would have to show my true self. No illusion. No skin, no silk. And every single one—every lover I tried to bring beneath with me—died upon the sight of me."
Edward's mouth parted slightly. "Died? But… why?"
Neptune shook his head. "I don't know. Perhaps it's a curse. Perhaps it's the price kings pay for walking the land. The nereid do not change their shape, not even for love. But I… I chose this. Chose to take on legs, lungs, laughter. Chose to love something breakable."
Edward stared at him, throat dry. "And all of them died."
"Yes. All." Neptune stepped toward the bed now, slowly, deliberately. "But you didn't."
There it was. The unspoken.
Edward's heart pounded. Not from fear. Not quite. "I wasn't under the sea," he said, voice soft.
"Not yet," Neptune said.
A hush settled between them.
Then, quieter still, Neptune murmured, "She knows I've been trying to replace her. Trying for years. Hoping the sea would give me someone strong enough to hold the kingdom beside me. Someone who could look upon me and live."
Edward reached for him without thinking, fingers wrapping around Neptune's wrist. "I can bear it."
Neptune looked down at his hand. At Edward's warmth. His mortal, stubborn defiance.
He didn't answer.
But something in the waves beyond the island shifted. As if the sea had been listening the whole time.
***
Two years later, Neptune was dead.
The sea didn't roar the day it happened. It whispered.
A shiver passed through the waves across all twelve seas. Sailors forgot the words to their songs. Storms changed direction mid-roar. Whales wept.
And Edward—Edward Kinsley stood on the deck of the Lioness, soaked in salt and blood and silence, staring into a tide that no longer answered him.
The Sea King was gone.
Salacia had won.
They said he died in her arms. That she held him as she slit his throat with a blade made from her own rib. That she sang him a lullaby in the tongue of shipwrecks and snapped his crown in half before casting it to the trench. The nereid court rejoiced. The seas changed color.
Edward did not weep. He did not speak. Not for a month.
Then, one dawn, he whispered, "He's not gone. He's only waiting."
And the next day, he set sail for Isla Rhea, following the breadcrumbs Neptune had left for him.