Time passed.

  Somewhere between days and tides, the storm ended. The water calmed, as if nothing had ever happened. The cliffs stood the same, the seaweed still curled lazily in the shallows. But beneath the surface, something had changed.

  Eli no longer came in the same way.

  He drifted now—quietly, without purpose. His strokes were uncoordinated, and sometimes he forgot to blink. The boy who had once giggled while throwing stones now whispered to himself and traced spirals in the silt. He murmured strange poetry in a voice too old for his age. He spoke to things that weren’t there.

  Sometimes, he’d surface and return home. He still had a home, technically. His friends wouldn’t come near him anymore. His parents whispered behind closed doors.

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  But the boy himself belonged somewhere else now.

  Deep beneath the reef, Lapis watched him.

  No longer hiding. No longer afraid.

  The madness—the spiraling, frothing, endless fog that had clouded Lapis's mind for decades—was gone. As though Eli had taken it from him, willingly or not.

  At first, Lapis tried to return to solitude. To sink into the silt and forget again. But something in him had shifted. He felt the clarity in his mind like a wound. He saw the world too clearly now. He saw Eli, drifting like sea-foam across the ocean floor, smiling at anemones that didn’t speak back.

  It was unbearable.

  And so, one day, Lapis rose. Not with grandeur or fury, but with aching resolve. He approached the boy who had taken his madness—and gently cupped Eli’s face in one clawed hand.

  “You shouldn’t have,” Lapis said softly.

  Eli blinked. “I know,” he whispered. Then giggled. “But I did.”

  They sat together beneath the arch of coral, saying nothing.

  It didn’t undo what had happened. Lapis was sane. Eli was not. But in the eerie balance of the deep, they had found something strange and terrible and almost holy: a transference. A trade neither of them had meant to make.

  Above them, the bubbles rose—

  And broke soundlessly against the surface.