At the deepest part of the sea, where light could not trespass and the bones of ships rested like forgotten prayers, there lay a creature of old.

  He called himself Lapis Lazuli.

  Not because it was his name — not truly — but because the stone matched the veins in his skin, and he had long since forgotten what he was before. The ocean had taken much from him. His breath, his memory, even his shape. What remained was myth and voice and silence.

  Lapis lay belly-down on the seafloor, nestled in silt and salt. Every few seconds, he released a slow stream of bubbles, letting them drift upward like sighs. They broke toward the surface where he would never follow. He blew bubbles, he sometimes said, because he could not smoke — though there was no one left to laugh at that sort of bitterness.

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  He did not speak often, but when he did, it was always to her.

  “I sigh at you, gypsy woman,” he muttered once, his voice a low ripple through the dark. “You make my blood boil like bubbles in a pot unwatched.”

  There was no answer.

  There never was.

  Still, he continued. “You do not know who I am. That is your mistake.”

  In the weightless hush, his chest swelled with something more ancient than anger — older than the crusted shipwrecks around him. “I am Lapis Lazuli. I have more authority than you, gypsy woman. I once commanded tides. I once turned men to coral with a whisper. And yet—” His jaw tightened, gills flaring faintly.

  “And yet, I speak of you as though I still care.”

  A bubble broke from his lips, carrying the last of the sentence upward. He watched it vanish into the dark. Watched it like it might carry the weight of everything he’d lost.

  And then he laid his head back down, chest still, the sea pressing around him like a tomb too fond to let go.