Watcher of the Reef

A wave slapped the jetty hard enough to stagger a grown man. Elspeth kept her feet by a toenail’s width, toes gripping slick stone, rope-burn stinging her palms. The sea spat salt in her mouth; tar reek and fish-sour cut her nose; gulls shrieked like knives. A coil of wet rope slithered past as if alive. She snatched it, hauled, and a crate—lashed with pitch-black twine—lurched back from the edge instead of smashing to splinters on the rocks.

“Mind your paws, Storm’s Daughter!” a barrel-chested mender barked, flicking rain off his whiskers. “Go on home. The shore’s no place for a stray.”

Elspeth shouldered past, water seeping cold into her shoes, tasting the iron of her own bitten lip. She had no home worth the name, only a low roof patched with tar and a fire that sighed itself out most nights. The sea made the only music she trusted: drum on hull, hiss on shingle, and the deep undermurmur as if something immense slept beneath the bay and dreamed.

Silent Bay had no patience for marvels. Its people knew nets and salt, roofs and the price of rope. They mended and hauled and whispered prayers into raw knuckles, and when fortune failed—as she often did—they blamed the nearest unkindness. Hard-boned folk, quick to scorn what they did not know. And yet, among them, one stood apart: Elspeth, spare of frame and sharp of gaze, forever where no child was bid to go, forever reaching for the next crest as if the horizon owed her a debt.