1089: Story 1089: Sister of the Drowned 1089: Story 1089: Sister of the Drowned There was a place beyond the marshes called Deadwake Bay, where no birds flew and no wind stirred the thick, corpse-sweet air.
The villagers spoke of it in hushed tones, calling it cursed, haunted by a presence older than the tides themselves.
They spoke of the Sister of the Drowned.
She was no mere ghost, they warned, but a living memory of every soul claimed by the sea.
When the survivors’ caravan reached the Bay—desperate for shelter, desperate for anything—they found only the skeletal remains of ships half-buried in black mud and the glint of empty eyes watching from the water.
Jonas Rook, a sailor once before the oceans died, led the way.
He carried an old ship’s lantern that sputtered weak blue flame—a relic from ships that had sailed in waters far darker than night.
As they crossed the mire, the mist thickened into shapes.
Shadows of drowned men and women, their bodies grotesquely twisted, their mouths moving as if singing silent laments.
Every few steps, someone would vanish into the fog with a muffled cry.
Jonas held firm, muttering prayers older than memory.
Near the shattered ribs of a great galleon, they saw her.
The Sister.
She appeared as a maiden clad in seaweed and barnacles, her hair a flowing mass of tendrils that dripped saltwater, her face veiled by strands of sodden cloth.
Her hands were pale and webbed, her feet never touching the ground.
She sang.
It was a song of loss, of endless sorrow, and it gnawed at the heart, making the strongest fall to their knees weeping.
Jonas dropped the lantern.
The moment it touched the ground, its blue flame burst outward in a ring of light, pushing back the mist—and revealing the truth:
Inside, where her heart should have been, writhed a thousand tiny drowned faces, moaning and clawing at the inside of her translucent skin.
The Sister opened her arms wide.
And from the mire, the dead came, staggering with broken limbs and torn faces, called by her song.
Jonas and the few who remained fought to retreat, but the mud sucked at their boots, the fog thickened in their throats.
Jonas turned one last time to face the Sister and threw a shard of silvered glass into her chest—a mirror of the sky, stolen from a witch long dead.
The shard struck true.
The Sister screamed, a noise like the collapsing of worlds, and the drowned faces within her exploded into vapor.
The mist recoiled, and the dead fell back into the swamp with sickening splashes.
But Jonas knew it was only a reprieve.
As they fled Deadwake Bay, the waters rippled once more.
The Sister would reform.
She always did.
For the drowned never forget—and they never forgive.