They say the ocean forgets no pain. It cradles every ruin in its belly, every cry caught in the salt, every broken hull turned grave.

  Long before he named himself Lapis Lazuli, before his mind stitched illusions to keep him company, the creature had a name he no longer remembered — and a purpose he still felt in the ache of his bones.

  He had tried to save them.

  The ship — rust-flecked and trembling against a violent wind — came down hard in the midst of a midnight squall. Its lanterns blinked out one by one like stars drowning in ink. He remembers the sound: splintering wood, screams swallowed by thunder, and the frantic heartbeat of humanity, trying not to die.

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  He had risen from the deep that night, dragging limbs made clumsy by centuries of solitude. He hadn’t seen a ship in years. He hadn’t seen people.

  He wanted to help.

  But he didn’t know how.

  He reached out to cradle a lifeboat and crushed it by accident. He tried to pull a child from the waves and slashed her with his claws. One man screamed upon seeing him and slipped beneath the current.

  They died — all of them.

  And he, overwhelmed by guilt and seafoam, thrashed in the shallows until a jagged coral shelf kissed his temple hard enough to split it.

  He sank after that. Not just his body — his mind. Something dislodged. Something vital and anchoring.

  When he awoke on the ocean floor, he was no longer himself. The name Lapis Lazuli occurred to him like a joke or a curse. The gypsy woman appeared soon after — vibrant, imagined, and cruel in her seduction. She was no more real than the voices of the drowned, but she filled the silence.

  He had failed so completely that madness became the only place left to live.

  And so he did.

  In the quiet halls of the trench, among shipwrecks that whispered his name and barnacles that grew like tumors on his chest, he muttered stories to the bubbles, drew poetry in the sand with clawed fingers, and told himself he had never tried to save anyone.

  But he had.

  And that, above all else, is what haunts him.

  And he became lonely.