The Gunslinger
Written by Jeff Thach
Prologue:
He Said He’d Be Back
They did not come alone. Around the broken column, the Great DestroyerZ gathered, not as an army but as a ragged, impossible family. Hugo, his laughter always carried the smell of smoke and bread. Bee, his quietness was a kind of steel. DeeDee, hopped and perched on a boulder, fingers worrying at ribbons from unremembered places, serious and absurd in the same breath. Ithilion wore constellations in the set of his shoulders and the hush of his steps; when he breathed, the sky seemed to answer.
And there was Bipp, a creature of shadow and light, and improbable kindness. She had done what mothers do in the world’s crooked corners: she had “birthed” Sam back into Cravatoa, carrying him through a pocket of otherness in her chest until the place could hold him again. It was a strange, literal motherhood, and tonight Sam would call her “mom” with the full, unguarded thing of a son who had finally learned how to say it.
“Will it destroy Thornwall?” Bee asked, voice small as an afterthought.
“It sleeps here,” Ithilion answered. “Where roots have memory, the pillar listens. We unmake what would unmake us. Yes, It will destroy this place, and in doing so, save Okuza”
They spoke softly, because soft was honest. Sam and Samara stood before the pillar, hands linked like cause and effect. They had not forgotten everything, neither of them had the hubris to imagine such a thing, but they remembered enough lives, enough names, enough weights to know what sacrifice tastes like at midnight. Pieces of other selves showed in their faces: Sam’s grin still flickered with the gunmetal laughter of another tide; Samara’s steadiness carried the echo of a thousand vows. They had loved and lost and found and lost again. Tonight they would shape the last loss into a hope, the kind that could buy the world another sunrise.
“Plane-shift when I say the word,” Sam told his friends. He tried for light; what came was thin and true. “Go quick. Don’t look back.”
Hugo’s hand closed on Sam’s shoulder as if blessing could be a grip. Bee, breath caught, folded the necklace into Samara’s palm like a thing entrusted to a priest. DeeDee hopped and whispered some impossibly small benediction. Bipp’s eyes glistened, mothlight in an otherworldly face.
“Will you be back?” Bee asked, no bravado in it, only the hunger of someone too young in their heart for finalities.
Sam drew a breath and, with a mischief that was almost cruelty against the hour, “Of course, can’t have you guys having all the fun.” They traded jokes because the last courage is often comic.
Bipp stepped forward and waved her hand. Sam suddenly found himself nearly half his normal height, and still he kneeled for her. All of her arms wrapped around him. An embrace that could hold the tides at bay. Sam smiled through the tears that escaped his clenched eyes.
When they finally broke, Sam reached for his gun, Calypso. Named after the very goddess he had loved, and whom saved him. All of that seemed a lifetime ago.
“I’ll be coming back for this, keep it safe for me.” He placed the weapon in her hands, it looked strange, and yet, also right.
“You’re not allowed to die on me,” Bipp replied, and the words were not an order but a prayer. He grinned, ridiculous and brave as ever,
“Well, I fear this time, I am going to have to disobey my mother.”
It happened too fast. Sam and Samara were left alone with the obelisk, broken and shattered, but not yet destroyed.
“Hot chocolate?” Sam asked, slicing the silence with a smile. Samara nodded.
“With marshmallows?” She asked, settling beside him.
“Of course M’lady”
The pillar waited.
Even in ruin, it breathed. A monolith of fractured midnight, pulsing faintly in the dark like a heart that had forgotten it was broken. Around it, the world trembled as if listening for their decision. The air was thick with memory: ash and rain and laughter that had once belonged to a thousand yesterdays.
Samara reached first, fingertips tracing the jagged edge of the obelisk. It burned cold. “It remembers,” she whispered.
Sam nodded. “Then let’s make sure it remembers why.”
He took her hand again, fitting it into his own as though the gesture could cheat eternity one last time. Their joined palms held the necklace, the little trinket that had passed through too many lifetimes. The chain shimmered faintly, threads of light unraveling from it like tears made of dawn.
Samara turned to him. Her feathers caught the glow of the pillar, haloing her in impossible gentleness. “Do you think they’ll remember us? When we see them again I mean” she asked.
He wanted to lie. He wanted to promise the world would sing their names forever. But he had learned, in all his many lives, that memory was a fragile thing, even gods forget the songs they once hummed. So he did the only thing that was true.
“They don’t have to,” he said. “Their hearts will.”
She smiled at that, soft and endless, and pressed her forehead to his. Their breaths mingled, one inhale, one exhale, one last heartbeat in tandem.
“You always find me,” she said.
“And I always will,” he answered, voice breaking like surf against the shore of her calm.
The ground split, light screaming up from the cracks. The star stone awoke fully now, every fracture a conduit of divine power, every shard a note in a symphony of ending.
They moved together, one step, one purpose.
The necklace trembled between their hands.
“On three?” Sam murmured.
Samara laughed, a sound that held the weight of universes learning to forgive themselves. “You never wait for three.”
“Fair,” he said, and together, they pressed the necklace into the wound of the world.
For a moment, there was silence.
Then light.
It wasn’t an explosion, not exactly. It was becoming. The light poured out of the pillar like truth escaping a lie, searing through the roots, up through every vein of the earth, filling even the deepest shadows. In its brilliance, they could see everything they had been: soldiers and lovers, fools and saviors, the boy who laughed and the woman who stayed, the moments between battles when they had simply held hands and called that victory.
Their forms began to unravel. Not destroyed…translated. Sam watched the edges of Samara’s silhouette blur into radiance, and his own chest ached with wonder and grief. She reached for him, and though her hand was already turning to starlight, it was still warm.
“Sam…”
“Right behind you,” he whispered.
He kissed her then, the kind of kiss that forgets fear, the kind that carries through lifetimes. When they pulled apart, there was nothing left to say.
The pillar took them both. Light folding over light, and the obelisk faded with a sound like a sigh.
The shockwave rippled through Thornwall and beyond. The Great DestroyerZ, now distant and fleeing through that place between worlds, felt it in their bones. Not pain, not sorrow, but a vast, solemn peace. Bipp clutched the gun to her chest, whispering through tears that shimmered like oil on water, “He said he’d be back.”
They did not know. Could not have guessed, the boon that would come. They believed only in sacrifice and small mercy. They did not know that their giving, the destruction of the obelisk, had saved not just Cravatoa, but the whole of what still dared to be called a world. That their unmaking had unmade the rot itself. That afterward, a fuller remembering would come, that a cleansing would run through the marrow of what had ailed them.
They gave the world a breath, a small sliver of reprieve, and in so doing set their own hearts toward a truth they could not yet see.
The Gunslinger
His fingers traced the curve of her hip, wandered through the soft valley of her waist, and rose along her ribs until she squirmed, a breathless laugh escaping her perfectly shaped lips. The sound was light, a ripple across still waters. Beneath his fingertips, her skin quivered, alive as the sea in moonlight.
“You know,” he murmured into her hair, the scent of salt and storm lingering there, “it’s disturbing when you do that.”
“Then don’t tickle me,” she replied, smiling against his chest, the expression bright as the shimmer of sunlight on the morning tide.
Time slipped away like sand through open fingers. Afterward, their limbs lay entwined like drifting seaweed caught in a gentle current. She ran her fingers through his hair, slow and absent, while his head rested on her chest. It wasn’t a heartbeat he heard, it was the echoing thunder of waves crashing against distant shores. Ithilion loved that sound. It spoke to something eternal in him, some rhythm older than flesh or dream. He shifted slightly, a thought rising unbidden from the quiet between them.
“Why the gunslinger?” he asked at last.
“Hmm?” she hummed, half-lost in reverie.
“Why the gunslinger? Don’t misunderstand me, my love, by all accounts, a remarkable man. But how did he find himself within your tides?”
“Ithilion Laelathar,” she said, her tone a teasing melody, the voice of the sea when it laps gently against the rocks. “Is that a hint of jealousy I hear?”
He snorted, which said more than words could have managed. Calypso bent her head and brushed a kiss across his hair, a gesture both affectionate and ancient. “It’s a long story, my love.”
“Do I have time?”
“Here, in this place, with me, time is ours to squander. You may trance a little longer than usual, but it should go unnoticed.”
“Then please,” he said softly, “start at the beginning. I could listen to your stories until the stars go out.”
She drew a deep breath, and the air around them seemed to shift. The wind carried the scent of long-forgotten shores, the taste of salt and memory. When she spoke, her voice deepened, resonant as the sea itself; the language of tides and undertow.
“He was born in a small fishing village on the western coast of Myrrenvale,” she began. “His father, David Bedlam, was a humble fisherman. His mother, Helena Valehart, was a healer beloved by her people. Samuel Bedlam came into the world quick and curious, mischief forever dancing in his eyes. He’d put frogs in his sister Wendy’s bed, hide a shoe from his brother Robert’s room. Never cruel, just restless. The sea called to him even then.”
“What was the name of the village?” Ithilion interrupted.
“Huh? Oh, Narethil.”
“Narethil,” he mused. “Place of forgotten oaths?”
“Yes, love, that’s what the name means. Are you planning to interrupt through the whole tale?” She squeezed him closer, the waves of her voice teasing his patience.
“I’ll have questions.”
“You will definitely be trancing longer than usual,” she sighed.
He lifted his head from her breast to meet her gaze, his eyes bright with humor and something heavier beneath it. “My dear, we are about to enter the Archives. I’m fairly certain I’m sleeping on the outskirts of Citadel Casatum right now, and I still have no idea what price they’ll demand for the knowledge I need; to build a vessel worthy of Elara, or even to gather her scattered soul. I think the Great DestroyerZ™ can tolerate me sleeping in a little.”
She pressed a hand gently over his ear, guiding his head back against her chest. Her other hand drifted up, fingers combing through his hair once more as she kissed the crown of his head.
“My brave Lorian,” she murmured. “Ask all the questions you wish. Now, where was I?”
“Frogs in beds. Hidden shoes.”
“Ah, yes,” she said with a smile that lived somewhere between affection and memory.
“The village was close-knit, each life bound to the next by necessity and love. There were squabbles, of course, no shore remains calm forever, but they all understood how deeply they depended on one another. It was a good life. A simple one. My children favored them, and for a time, peace reigned.
“One sorrowful day, David took Samuel out on the water. A small gesture, to give his wife a moment’s reprieve from the child’s boundless energy, and to share something of himself with his son. The sea began calm, as though it meant to bless them. But despite what some might think, I do not command all waters, nor the tempests that dwell within them. The storm came swiftly, like a thought made manifest. David was skilled, but even the best sailor is no match for the fury of the sea.”
She paused, and the air seemed to darken, the sound of distant thunder folding into her words. “He was lost, slipping beneath the waves. The boy nearly joined him. One of my daughters caught Samuel as he fell, wrapped him in her arms, and was about to carry him into the cold below when I felt it. A pulse, ancient and strange. I saw him then, and in that small, gasping child I saw eternity clutched in a dragon’s claw. The Mother of Wyrms spoke to me. She said he was her ward, and asked that I spare him.
“So I did. I lifted him from the depths like driftwood washed into my palms. He coughed sea and terror, and in that delirium, he whispered a name:
Katala
“Like a lightning flash in a tempest. It was only a flicker, but it was enough. I placed him back on Narethil’s shore and waited.”
The wind stilled, and for a moment all the world was quiet but for the ocean thunder of her heart beneath his ear.
“The village suffered more than the loss of David. Others, too, were taken by the storm’s fury. Yet the survivors endured, as mortals do. They rebuilt, their grief hardening into strength, their sorrow weathered into song. In time, Narethil became more than a village, it grew into a thriving town. And I watched him grow with it.
“He was a bright soul, that one. Burning and frayed. Memory bled through him like light through cracked glass. He remembered things he shouldn’t: lives lived, loves lost, deaths uncounted. Each fragment cut him anew.”
“Speaking of memories,” Calypso’s voice rippled, soft as tidewater over stone. “Did you know you had met him, and Katala, before?”
Ithilion blinked, startled by the sudden turn. “What? When?” He turned to face her, eyes narrowing as memory teased the edge of his mind.
He felt her laughter against his cheek before he heard it. Gently, she pressed him back to her chest. “You didn’t know,” she whispered, smiling into his hair. “Your friend Regalia has a large family, does she not?”
“Yes she does. Let's see…Liliana, the matriarch, then Optima, the twins Sol and Luna, and... Dizzy.”
Calypso pinched the tip of his ear lightly, the way a tide teases the shore.
“Wait,” he began, lifting his head again, eliciting an exasperated sigh, “you mean to tell me, that time I met Dizzy, when Regalia and I helped her after…”
She hushed him by pulling him back down once more. “Yes, love. That day you and your companion saved her sister from death after the duel with Kovacs, you were saving Katala’s life. She had just slain Tiberius. Their love runs so deep, it binds them beyond mortality. When one heart curdles with corruption, the other must destroy it, so they may begin anew. Dizzy killed Kovacs after he turned to bloodlust and madness. Nearly a century later, on another plane entirely, Samuel killed her. Only she wasn’t ‘Dizzy’ then.”
Her fingers stilled in his hair. The sea seemed to hush in anticipation.
“She was using her true name.”
Ithilion’s breath caught. “Decime... Holy hells. Dizzy Lavander is Decime Lavander?”
“Yes, dearheart,” Calypso whispered. “The very same.”
He blinked, thoughts spinning. “But how did they come together again? On a completely different plane, and in a realm of dread at that?”
Her expression softened, gaze drifting toward the unseen horizon. “A favor,” she said quietly.
The word hung between them like the calm before a storm. Then, with a sigh as deep as the sea, Calypso continued.
“I watched him grow, and as he did, I began to see the memories seep through the cracks of his mortal mind. It was in his second decade when I first noticed the shimmer, that faint, familiar gleam in his eyes when the sea would rise in stormlight. It was also then that I realized, with a pang both tender and terrible, that I was falling in love with him.
“He had an easy smile, one that curved like the horizon after rain, and a brashness so bold it could not be halted by any mooring. For years, I watched from afar, content to linger in the foam and the current. But soon, the memories began to haunt him.”
“Others in the village noticed before I did. His laughter grew rarer, his eyes distant, his hands trembling at night as though the ghosts of a hundred lives whispered beneath his skin. He was in pain. Not of the body, but of the soul.”
“The Wyrm Mother came to me then. Her voice rolled like distant thunder across the deep. She asked me to aid him where she could not, for her eternal war in Pentagast kept her bound, unable to reach him through the veil of his rebirth.”
“My chance came during the next storm season. The sea churned black and silver, the winds clawing at the sails of his fishing boat. He was alone when the mast cracked and the waves rose to swallow him whole.”
“So I took him.”
“I drew him beneath the waves and across the planes, into the place between; my realm of silence and salt. There, in the still blue beyond mortality, I held him close. I let him forget.”
“For a time, we forgot everything but each other.”
“I erased the pain that clung to his mind, peeling away memories like wet parchment. In their place, I wrote new ones, gentle ones.”
“How?” Ithilion’s voice trembled against the rhythm of the waves.
Calypso smiled faintly, eyes fixed on a horizon that no mortal could see. “Some ask how one loves a mortal,” she murmured. “They expect storms, tempests cast against their enemies, palaces of coral and gold, gifts of impossible splendor. But love, true love, is not in the grand gestures. It is in the small things. It is the patching of an ache. A cool breeze after a fever. A lullaby sung to a soul too weary to dream.”
“So I began at the edges,” she continued softly. “I built him a life as one builds a coastline, grain by grain, curve by curve, until even the gods might believe it had always been there. I gave him a childhood, a home, a mother named Helena and a father named David. Not the same as before, but names that his heart would accept. I gave him the harbors of Waterdeep, the scent of salt and tar, a crew that bickered and laughed, a captain named McReary who taught him the crude poetry of sailors and the sharp trade of pirates. And I gave him Jazmina. A love born of sand and spice from Al-Qadim, so that he would learn the ache of loss and the healing after.”
Ithilion’s brows furrowed. “You stole all of them? All his own memories?”
Her voice faltered, just once. “I had to, my love. To do what Tiamat requested. To keep him whole. To keep him alive.” She turned away, brushing the spray from her cheeks. “He was breaking beneath the weight of what he once was. I needed… fresh sand, to rebuild him.”
She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was like rain falling on the sea. “The gun was a part of it, too. That came from a pirate named Flynt, here on Okuza. I planted Flynt in his memory, a swaggering smuggler who had threatened me with the thing, and shattered it on the shore. A gun I had kept for over a century finally found its purpose. It drew his focus away from the sword, from the memories that a blade would have awakened. To keep him from wearing armor, I gave him the fear of being enclosed. All things Tiberius would have been at home with, I replaced.”
Ithilion’s curiosity lingered. “How did you know all this about Tiberius?”
Calypso stilled. The sea inside her went silent. Ithilion felt it, the absence of motion, the quiet before the storm.
“He could not be allowed to remember,” she said at last. “So I did it for him.”
She turned her gaze toward him, and the waves whispered through her words. “From the first time he smiled at her, to the moment he drove his blade through her heart , I lived it. Every demon and devil he slew in Pentagast, every friend lost, every sacrifice made. Every time she killed him. Every time she died for him. I bore it all. Locked them deep within myself, and down in his own depths so that he would not have to.”
Ithilion brushed the saltwater from her cheeks. “Why?”
“For the same reason I would do so for you.” She smiled through her sorrow. “Because I love him.”
For the first time in their long centuries together, Ithilion saw her not as a goddess or a tempest, but as the sea itself: vast, sorrowful, and endless in her devotion.
“At first, it was mercy,” she whispered. “You think it theft? Perhaps. But I did not merely take. I lived those memories. I took the storms that would have broken him and made myself the reef. I carried every name he could not bear to remember, every death he could not relive. I held them so that his heart might still know peace.”
“There was a night, one I cannot forget,when she came to the island while the moon was low and the tide drank the shore. She stood upon the dunes, not as a supplicant but as a seeker. Decime, her cloak thin as a promise and her eyes like flame. She did not know him then, and he did not know her; they carried no recognition in flesh. Yet even from across the water, I felt something like a bruise on her spirit, a blackness seeping from the thing she bore.”
“She asked of the Heart of Thornwall, alone beneath the wheeling stars. She sought counsel and a name for an ache that would not quiet. I watched her on the sand and listened as her words brushed the edges of what would come. Decime,she who would be wrapped in other names and other griefs, stood not as enemy but as a woman with ruin in her hands. There was a rot beginning in the Heart, a whisper that tugged at her like a current. It stained the air about her, and for a moment, I swear it, her own soul looked back at me, pleading.”
“I could have wrenched her away. I could have silenced that ache with water and song. But when I looked at him, when I looked at Sam, newly warm in the life I had given, what I saw was this: if I clung to him now, I would bind him to a fate less merciful. The Heart’s corruption does not end with one heart. It spreads like oil across memory. To hold him forever would be to doom him to a slowly brightening hell in which he would remember everything in fragments and be broken again by each shard.”
“So I chose the cruel grace. I let him go.”
“It was not surrender but sacrifice. I set him upon the world with his false names and small loves, so that one day, if the weave of hearts was stubborn as I suspected, he might walk the pattern that would bring him back to what had been lost. If Decime’s heart could reach him through the thinnest of veils, then perhaps only by standing apart could they find the truth again. I would bear the weight of the knowing. I would be the sea that remembers, for two.”
He smiled faintly, pressed his lips to hers. “I love you, woman.” He gathered her into his arms, and when they settled again, she lay with her head upon his chest. Flowers bloomed where his fingers trailed through her hair, small and bright as foam.
She smiled at the gift. “There isn’t much more to tell,” she murmured, tracing the faded scars from struggles long past on his chest. “You know the rest.”
“He became Samuel Bedlam of Waterdeep. There were nights when I woke and felt his mind like the tide scraping at the cliff. I sent Maerath, you remember him, the coral-boned spirit who laughs like gulls, I sent him to keep watch. He would return with whispers: fragments of dreams, a name lingering in the air.”
She hesitated, the surf in her voice quieting. “I sealed the truth behind the tattoo on his back, the Heart he could never see. He later added to it, weaving the image of the Wyrm Mother herself into its lines.”
“The power of the Heart is not to be underestimated,” she sighed. “Despite all I did, the memories bled through. Fragmented and warped. He remembered Decime in Pentagast where there was Thyssara Kaelth, and Decime again where there was Seralyth Vaneir. The heart, it seems, has its own stubborn truth.”
“Why Decime so often?” Ithilion asked softly.
“I have a theory,” she said. “When Sam and his companions saved Rosewood, though they knew it then as Thornwall, Decime was there. Neither recognized the other. The corruption in the Heart had already begun. Tiberius did not see Katala, and Katala did not see the man who once held her soul. But the Hearts remembered. They whispered to each other through the veil of flesh. I think hers tried to reach him too… but I could not hear her as I did him.”
Ithilion’s gaze grew heavy. “Are you still connected to him?”
“I am.” Her smile was like the hush before dawn. “I feel him. His life has begun anew. But this time, he will remember, all of it. Tiberius. Samuel Bedlam. Even the life I crafted for him.”
She rose then, cupping his face in her cool hands. “Time is short, my love. You must wake.”
He began to speak, but she silenced him with a kiss.
“I love you, Ithilion Laelathar,” she whispered against his lips. “You are a good man, despite what they say about you.” She smiled at his shocked expression.
Ithilion held her in the kiss for a heartbeat longer, not out of hesitation, but reverence. He knew it was time. Yet the ache of departure lingered, that quiet fear of waking from something divine. He smiled faintly against her lips and murmured, “Do you know where he is?”
Her reply came like a whisper through the tide. “Wake now, Ithilion.”
The world tilted. The scent of salt and lilies faded.
“Ithilion! Wow, I didn’t know elves slept for so long! I thought you all only slept for like… four hours. Are you dying?”
The young aarakocra’s voice pierced the veil of his trance like a cracked whip at dawn.
He opened his eyes, blinking into the dim light of the camp. “No, DeeDee, I am not dying,” he said, his voice a low melody of amusement. “How long was I in trance?”
“Like… four hours and ten minutes. So long for you. Are you sure you’re not dying? You’re really old.”
The smell of crashing waves over fresh sand still clung to him. He smiled, soft and distant. “It’s true, I am very old,” he admitted, “but I am not dying, little one. Just dreaming… a dream that felt like a lifetime.”
She tilted her feathered head, golden eyes curious. “Must’ve been some dream.”
“It was,” he murmured, glancing toward the horizon where the first light of dawn stretched across the mist. “And I think… it’s not quite over yet.”
For just an instant, the faintest sound of waves brushed his hearing — distant, eternal. And there, between one blink and the next, he thought he saw her: pale against the dawn, her hand sweeping a lock of windblown hair from her face.
He closed his eyes, and to the rising sun he whispered, “Goodbye, my love.”
Epilogue:
The Boy By The Silver Shore
They say the sea remembers. Every life, every cry, every promise whispered into its vast, patient heart is carried in its depths until the tide is right to return them.
Talien Elenveil was born from such a tide.
The story began on the open waters between Ywandir and Cravatoa, aboard the Silverwind, a proud elven galleon built for speed and grace. His parents, Lord Caerion Elenveil and Lady Sylara Elenveil, were envoys of the Eledhel Court, voyaging to strengthen the bonds of peace and trade between the two lands. Caerion was a diplomat and scholar of the old myths; Sylara, a singer whose voice could calm storms or stir kings to tears. They carried with them not only the hopes of their people, but a child barely twelve summers old.
They never reached Cravatoa.
A tempest unlike any seen in generations tore across the seas. No natural storm, but a fury born of the gods’ old quarrels. The crew fought valiantly, but when lightning split the mainmast and the ship cracked apart like an egg under the weight of the waves, all seemed lost.
Caerion and Sylara did not panic. They wrapped their son in oilcloth and prayer, pressing their lips to his brow. “If the sea takes us,” Caerion whispered, “let Calypso cradle him. Let her see the spark of our love and know it is worth saving.” Then they set him adrift on a plank of silverwood, just before the final wave swallowed them. Despite their efforts, the child sank under the waves with them.
The storm passed. Silence returned.
Before the storm, and after it, a goddess waited. Calypso had not done it alone then however. There was a night, one of the nights that slips from history like foam, when her daughter knelt beneath the waves and held a drowning heart against her own.
Annastriana had come then, not as a daughter, but as midwife to grief. She had taken the fisherman's son, cold and sinking, into her arms beneath the surf after his father had perished, and for a time she kept him there, warm against the sea’s great hush. In that still blue she learned what it meant to carry a soul that was not wholly mortal: the tug of other lives, the echo of names that would not die.
When the Wyrm Mother asked Calypso to aid him, Calypso remembered that night through Annastriana’s hands. She remembered the small, fierce steadiness of her daughter, how Annastriana drew the boy to her heart and vowed to watch whatever came. It was that vow, made in the hush of surf and salt, that reached back and forward across the tides. Time bends where promises are true.
So when the sea gave the child back to Calypso, the goddess' daughter, once again, lifted him and this time, laid him on Elathen’s silver sands. The circle closed and opened all at once. Time shuddered, then smoothed, like a wave retreating home.
The first sound he heard was the sea. Not the crash of waves or the whisper of foam, but the breath of it. The slow inhale of eternity, the patient exhales of a god. The world itself seemed to sigh awake with him.
He opened his eyes to a horizon painted in molten silver. Dawn had not yet claimed the sky, twilight lingered like silk, rippling across the ocean’s surface. The air shimmered faintly with golden motes that drifted like fireflies, fading whenever he reached to touch them.
The boy sat up slowly. The sand beneath him gleamed like powdered glass, cool and damp. He tried to remember where he was…who he was, but the effort was like reaching into a tide that retreated faster than thought. Fragments came instead: warmth within his chest, the scent of salt and storms, and a voice that once called his name through the roar of thunder.
Samara.
No, not quite. The name was wrong, incomplete, like a melody half-remembered. Yet it stirred something deep within him, something ancient and restless.
He rose unsteadily to his feet. His legs trembled as though newly made, but there was grace in the movement, a memory of balance born from lifetimes of battle and dance. The wind wove through his silver hair, pale as starlight despite his youth. He could not have seen more than twelve summers, and his eyes held the rim of gold that marked the highborn elves of Ywandir. Within the blue depths of those eyes, age lingered, not of years, but of soul.
He looked down at his hands. Small, but steady. The fingers flexed as though they remembered the weight of a sword, or perhaps the cold precision of a trigger. Along the knuckles, faint scars shimmered like ghosted runes, visible only when the light struck them at the right angle, echoes of another life.
Behind him, the forest murmured with life. Towering silver pines leaned toward the sea, their roots drinking from both sand and stone. A brook wound from the treeline to the shore, its waters so clear they seemed to sing as they flowed. And beside that stream knelt a woman in a cloak the color of dawn.
She turned as she felt him stir.
“Ah,” she said, her voice warm and melodic, like a hymn half-remembered. “You wake, little one.”
He frowned slightly. “Where… am I?”
“The Isle of Elathen,” she replied, rising with the easy grace of the ageless. Her hair was braided in a crown of white and gold, and her eyes held a quiet radiance. “You were found adrift in the bay three nights past, clinging to driftwood. The sea delivered you here.”
“You found me?”
“Aye.” She smiled, The kind of smile that belongs to those who have seen too many beginnings and endings. “You may call me Annastriana.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “And… my name?”
Her gaze softened. “You did not know when you came to me. You spoke in your sleep, but the words were strange.”
“What did I say?”
Her fingers brushed through his pale hair. “You said Calypso. And then… home.”
The boy’s breath caught. The name echoed through him like a heartbeat beneath the sea. He did not know who Calypso was, but the sound filled him with a longing that was older than memory; love, sorrow, devotion, all braided together like strands of kelp in a current. He saw her face behind his eyes. Shifting, luminous, a goddess, a shadow, a wave that broke against eternity.
“Was she… my mother?” he whispered.
Annastriana smiled again, though her eyes glistened. “In a way,” she said softly. “Perhaps she still is.”
Days passed.
The boy, who now answered to Belanor, a name Annastriana gave him, lived a quiet life on the island. Together they tended the tide-shrine, stacking shells into spirals and lighting driftwood incense for the spirits of the deep. He learned the songs of wind and wave, and how to read the sea’s moods in the color of its foam.
But sometimes, when storms rolled in from the western edge of the world, he would climb the cliffs and watch the black waters heave. The thunder did not frighten him. The lightning made him smile. And when the first raindrop struck his skin, he would whisper to the wind;
Welcome back.
Annastriana watched from the shrine’s steps, her cloak drawn close. She never asked what he heard in the thunder, nor why the seafoam curled toward his bare feet like an animal greeting its master. The sea, she knew, kept its own time.
One night, when the moon hung full and low, dancing on the water, Belanor dreamed.
He stood on the deck of a ship wrought from light and bone. The stars drifted above him like embers torn from a celestial forge. Across the deck strode a man, tall, broad-shouldered, with eyes like dying suns and a coat black as the abyss. His steps were deliberate, echoing with command.
“Who are you?” the boy asked, though a tremor of recognition already stirred in him.
The man smiled, a flash of sorrow behind the confidence. “A question I’ve asked for lifetimes,” he said. “But you, boy… you are me. Or rather, what remains when the storm has passed.”
Belanor stepped back, heart hammering. “I don’t understand.”
“You will,” said the man. “We are born of the same flame, tempered in the same sea. We are the same blade, reforged again and again.” His hand lifted, stopping just short of the boy’s chest. “And you are not alone.”
“Who else?” Belanor whispered.
The sea around them rose, luminous and furious. Stars fell into the waves, and from their light a woman emerged, radiant and sorrowful, crowned in coral and silver. Her eyes were the deep places of the world.
Calypso.
When she spoke, the ocean itself bent to listen. “My sweet Samuel,” she said.
The boy gasped. The name struck like thunder within his ribs.
“You are not forgotten,” she whispered. “You are not undone. The tides return what they love.” Her cool hand brushed his cheek, leaving a shimmer of moonlight that burned with memory. “When you wake, remember this: love does not drown. It waits.”
The vision shattered.
Belanor awoke before dawn, his heart pounding. The sea outside was calm, yet he could still feel her touch, faint and electric, like the echo of a vanished wave. He stumbled barefoot through the door and down the slope to the shore.
The tide was out, the sands gleaming wet and silver. He knelt, breath sharp, and stared at his reflection in the tidal pools. “I remember,” he whispered. “I remember something…” His lips shaped the word like a prayer. “Calypso.”
The sea stirred. One gentle wave rolled forward, kissed his knees, and retreated.
From the dunes above, Annastriana watched, silent. She smiled faintly, her eyes bright with tears. This would be the second time she had helped her mother with this soul, the first had yet to pass, and as she had promised her then, she would gladly do so again.
By the time the first light of the sun crowned the horizon, the boy stood motionless, his hand resting over his heart. His pulse beat fast, but beneath it came another rhythm, faint, ancient, the eternal thunder of waves breaking against an unseen shore.
The tide had turned once more.
And far below, in the fathomless deep, the Tide Dancer smiled through her tears.
He grew amid gardens of lavender and willow, under Annastriana’s watchful eyes. The other children called him “the driftling,” but not cruelly; they sensed something uncommon in him. When he touched the water, the ripples sometimes shimmered silver. When he listened to old songs, his gaze would turn distant, as though he heard verses not sung in this age.
Annastriana told him of his parents when he was old enough to understand. He wept, of course, but deep down he carried a strange certainty, that loss was not the end, merely another current. He did not bother to ask how she knew.
As he grew, Belanor proved gifted in the crafts of both earth and art. He could coax life from withered vines, and his voice could soothe even the wildest hawk. Yet there was a restlessness within him, a sense that he had lived before, and that part of him still wandered out there, searching.
When he came of age, he journeyed to study under the loremasters. There, amid tomes older than empires, and fevered dreams, fragments of his other lives began to whisper through the cracks of his memory. It started with names.
Samuel Bedlam.
A gunslinger of dust and thunder, whose laughter echoed down the barrel of a gleaming weapon forged in defiance of gods.
Tiberius.
A soldier, and knight, bearing the weight of duty like armor, his eyes ever toward the dawn. Fighting the eternal struggle against the demons and devils of Pentagast alongside Tiamat, mother of dragons.
Katala.
flame-haired and fierce, whose voice had once guided him through shadows.
Decime.
A love whose thirst and hunt for power corrupted her very being.
Eventually, they all came to him in dreams: a woman’s hand brushing his cheek, the scent of black powder and honeysuckle, the rhythmic pull of reins beneath a desert sun. He woke with his heart hammering and tears on his face. Each vision left a trace. A melody, a phrase, a feeling of love so old it could not die.
As years turned to decades, the dreams grew sharper. He began to sketch the faces he saw: Katala’s eyes of storm-gray fire; Samuel’s wry smile beneath a wide-brimmed hat. The loremasters called them fancies of the mind, echoes of story. But Annastriana knew better. “Memory runs deeper than blood,” she told him once. “Sometimes the soul writes its own lineage.”
At a hundred years old, Belanor began wandering. He crossed forests older than the gods, climbed the white cliffs of Aravane, and stood in the ruins of ancient places, long forgotten by all but the eldest of beings. In every corner of the world he sought answers, but none could name what stirred in him.
He did, however, find fragments scattered throughout his journeys. One, a journal buried in a monastery wall, written by a man called Kovacs. The words within were worn and half-illegible, but one phrase burned bright:
“Love is the gun the gods cannot unmake.”
That night, a memory struck him fully. The flash of light, the weight of a revolver in his palm, the feel of Samara’s fingers closing over his own. He remembered the sound of her laughter as she called him Sam, and how it all burned around them when they defied the divine, and sacrificed it all for the world.
He woke up gasping, whispering a single word into the dawn: “Bipp.”
The name rang through him like a song, and with it came others: Hugo, the eternally gregarious Chef du Sang; Bee and DeeDee, twin sparks of chaos, wisdom, and destruction, and the banner they still carried: The Great DestroyerZ™. He didn’t know how he knew the name, only that it burned with belonging.
Annastriana found him that morning, sitting by the shore, the waves hissing around his boots. “You’ve remembered,” she said quietly.
“I’ve begun to,” he replied. “And I think the rest waits for me out there.”
In the next decades, Belanor prepared himself. He studied firearms, rare among the dwellers of the island, and learned to forge and repair them, though no weapon he touched felt quite right. He trained with blades and bows, with the patience of someone who had once wielded both steel and lightning. He mastered the soldier's craft, for he meant to return to the larger world prepared for the trials and tribulations he would face as he sought his former companions.
And through it all, the dreams persisted, not painful now, but guiding. In them, Katala stood upon a windswept plain, her hair a banner of fire, smiling that secret smile that said you’re late, love.
At one hundred and fifty years of age, still young by elven reckoning, but weathered by centuries of remembrance, Talien Elenveil stood once more upon the docks of Elathen. He had finally remembered his true name. The first step of his journey. The morning mist curled around him like a benediction. In his pack lay a journal, a compass, and the faintly humming pieces of past lives he was beginning to fully remember.
Annastriana was there to see him off, gray now but radiant as ever. “Where will you go?” she asked.
“Where the sea takes me first,” he said. “To find the others, Bipp, Hugo, Bee, DeeDee, and the rest of the DestroyerZ. There’s a love I need to find… and a gun that’s waiting to remember me.”
She smiled and touched his cheek. “Calypso saved you twice. She’ll guide you again. Remember, Talien; tides return what they’re meant to.”
He nodded, feeling the pulse of the ocean deep in his bones. As he stepped onto the ship, the wind rose up, soft, familiar, carrying a whisper only he could hear:
“Aim true, Sam.”
He smiled then, not as the boy of the tide, nor the gunslinger, nor the wanderer, but as Talien Elenveil, the sum of all his lives, born again beneath the same endless sky. The sea opened before him, shining like memory, and with the first turn of the sail he was gone, chasing love, legend, and the echo of a gunshot that still hung somewhere between worlds.
