Lapis Lazuli did not sleep. Not truly. He drifted, suspended in the hush of salt and pressure, lulled by the slow heave of undercurrents and his own remembering.

  The gypsy woman came to him often in these drifts.

  She walked along the ocean floor as if it were dusted marble. Her bare feet never disturbed the silt. Her shawl floated behind her like ink spilled in water, and her dark eyes — gods, her eyes — they burned as if they had never drowned.

  She never spoke, but her gaze always told him the same thing:

  You failed.

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  You forgot me.

  You are alone because you made it so.

  Lapis would press his hands into the sand until they vanished to the wrist, jaw clenched tight. He never asked her to stay. He never asked her to leave.

  And then, once, as he crouched in the hollow of a coral cliff, something in him split.

  “There is no gypsy woman,” he said aloud.

  The ocean did not move. The water trembled slightly — or maybe he did.

  “There is no gypsy woman,” he said again, as if saying it twice would make it real. “I made you. You are no more real than the shipwrecks I claim as memory. No more real than the tides I pretend still listen to me.”

  Silence swelled in the deep, heavy and complete.

  And then — a laugh. His own. Rusted and soft.

  “You were only ever the shape of my guilt,” he murmured. “Woven from fragments of every face I failed to save.”

  The gypsy woman did not appear that time.

  Instead, Lapis sat in the cradle of the reef and let the current tug gently at his hair. He looked up toward the surface — a thousand miles and a lifetime away — and wondered how long it would take to forget her completely.

  Or if he ever truly wanted to.

  He rested his head against a stone ledge, eyes half-lidded.

  Some illusions are more faithful than the truths we run from.

  But now, at least, he knew her name.

  It was Loneliness.

  And he had been speaking to it all along.