Along the Road and Shorelines

And the journey continued, with an itinerary that had already been decided.

Londonderry.

A name that had been buried in her memory, buried under war, flight and blood.

It was from there that she was taken away, where the Nazis captured her and turned her into one more experiment in their quest for the impossible. Now, she was back, standing on the same ground, with the same gray sky stretching over her as the night she had arrived. But she was no longer the same.

Lizbeth took a deep breath and moved forward. There was no fear in her chest, just the certainty that this chapter, at last, must be closed.

But if she looked for all the answers, she didn't find what she expected.

The two toured the nearby towns and cities. Thanks to the files that had been obtained the same day of her rescue, they knew the exact location where she had been taken. It was a meadow between some hills—quite close to the sea. But nothing else.

Londonderry gave her almost nothing back from her family past. Lizbeth wandered its streets hoping to find an echo of her past in her memory, a mark, a hint, that the Fog Society had been there in the last century. But it was as if they had never been.

There were no records, no traces, not even lost rumors among the local elders. She inquired in libraries, searched dusty archives, even visited cemeteries in search of family names. Nothing. Her parents had never had anything to do with that place, and if they had, it was somewhere very hidden and nowhere to be found.

Only one piece of the puzzle found its place: her great-grandfather, David Poe Sr., had actually been born in Cavan County, further south. That explained the error on the grave in Baltimore, a wrong date, a detail that had remained unanswered until now. But that wasn't what bothered her. What really made her feel she was walking on shaky ground was something else.

Although there were no clues from her parents or the mysterious secret society, there was one clue that for some reason made her uneasy.

Londonderry had its own strange past, one that had nothing to do with her family, but which sent a familiar shiver down her spine. Among the legends and strange events, she found something that seemed to have echoed in her mind at some point.

In 1864, a town had been the scene of mysterious disappearances. Men, women and children vanished without a trace, as if they had gone for a walk and never returned. No bodies were found, there were no witnesses, only the certainty that something had taken them. And, as if that had not been strange enough, that same year something else happened: a Fortean rain.

Blood falling from the sky in fine drizzles that dyed the fields red, fish appearing in cobblestone streets, dead sea creatures in places where they shouldn't be. Officially, they explained it with waterspouts, eddies of water that swept life from the ocean and released it inland. But what was disturbing was not the phenomenon itself, but the details that were never made public.

The fish were not from the region. They were not even from a known ocean. Those who examined them could not identify them, and the few who dared to taste their flesh fell ill for days, suffering from fevers and delusions of nightmares they could not describe. There was no record of what became of them afterwards.

The story faded away like so many other inexplicable things on the margins of reality. Lizbeth read about all that in a small library, in few documents and yellow newspapers forgotten in a corner, as if the world had decided it was better not to remember. And, as she ran her fingers over those pages, she felt something inside her, a deep, almost primitive instinct. She had no proof, but she was sure this had something to do with her her. Maybe she had been involved in it somehow. But there was no way to corroborate it.

There was no record of any Elizabeth Poe there either.

The rest of 1946 and much of 1947 was a whirlwind of experiences and adventures, as if the world was giving both back the time it had taken from them in the war. They traveled through Ireland leisurely, without a fixed destination, following the vagaries of the weather and their own moods. They stayed in a small town in Galway for one winter—in a rented cottage near the cliffs, where storms lashed the coast with majestic fury.

There, Lizbeth met another fey, an old fey woman who had arrived in 1920 and had spent the last few decades hiding among the humans, selling herbal remedies, gathering and telling stories about the world that existed before everything changed. The old-looking fey were rare, but oddly enough, they were more inconspicuous. They spent entire nights in her company, listening to tales of times when magical creatures still walked in broad daylight. Shin even helped her repair her home after one of the storms destroyed part of the roof.

To Lizbeth, it seemed that Shin had always been searching for knowledge about the ancient feys—the lost generation, the ones who had vanished, the exiled. They were called by many names, but the reason behind their disappearance remained absent from the written word. Their story lived mostly in legend, passed down through whispers and memory. Long processions of feys had departed in the last century, fading into the unknown, never to return.

She, too, found the mystery captivating. It was one of the great unanswered riddles that surrounded the fey. Sadly, despite her vast knowledge of old tales and forgotten myths—honed during her years in the library—the woman knew very little about that particular enigma. Ironically, it was her pursuit of answers that had made her into a scholar of all things fae. Searching for one truth, she had unearthed a hundred others.

When they finally departed, the old woman handed Lizbeth a very old magic pendant, and told her that it was a kind of very sensitive compass that she herself had found, assuring her that one day it would guide her back home. The woman's strange message caught Lizbeth's attention, and she explained:

"I had a dream about you. For some reason, you had it with you… and you were looking for something important."

"But isn't it valuable to you?"

The woman simply waved her hand and smiled. "I've already found what I was looking for. Just peace and quiet. And I have that here. Take it, girl."

Lizbeth smiled in return and accepted the gift, studying it briefly. It was… a little strange.

Basically it was a roundel with ancient Chinese writing on it. In the center was a sort of tiny magnetized spoon, while the handle rotated in all directions. She used it for some time, but after a few adventures she opted to store it away. She liked it, but that needle-like spoon made her afraid of breaking it. So she kept it in the RV.

And the journey continued.

In a small town in Cork, Lizbeth decided to try her luck in a tavern singing. Her voice, though loud and clear, now had an ethereal tinge to it that made people look at her as if they had entered a dream. She had secretly activated her siren ability. They accepted her performance without many questions, enchanted by the way her singing seemed to fill every corner of the place. Shin, for his part, won the admiration of the owner after drinking a jug of Hell's Whiskey without batting an eye, so called because no one wanted to drink it due to its taste.

That night ended with the two of them running in the rain, fleeing from a drunken brawl that they themselves had unwittingly provoked. They finally took shelter in an abandoned barn, soaked to the bone and laughing their heads off. Well, at least Lizbeth did, Shin was happy too, even if he couldn't express it. They were together. Not fighting a war, not running from bullets, not remembering the past with bitterness—but enjoying the present as if it were eternal.

It was already more than two years since the war.

Lizbeth had resolved some of her past, even if she couldn't say it.

They had tried some techniques such as sharing dreams or contacting a psychic to arrange a transfer of memories without her having to tell her memories, but that didn't work. Whatever it was, they had plenty of time for that, maybe in the future they would find some method.

They had planned to visit Emmeline, but a phone call changed their minds—she would be away for a few months due to personal reasons. Oh well. The visit would have to wait.

At that point they decided to take a short trip back and spend about two months with Milena and Sari. There they discovered that they were both making plans to leave. Perhaps settling in another country for a few years.

They had already done so on several occasions. They didn't like to stay still and it was common for they to move after a while. Two more months of happiness passed, until the day of farewell arrived—only now, it was the other way around. After a new: see you later, Shin and Lizbeth watched them leave and head out into the ocean in their boat, while they climbed back into the RV to continue on.

Sometime in the spring of 1947, they came across a group of children playing on a deserted beach. They were not afraid of them, not even of Shin, whose presence sometimes made humans who had just met him feel uneasy for no apparent reason. The children invited them to join their game, and Lizbeth could not resist. They spent hours building sand castles and running along the shore, until, in a fit of mischief, Lizbeth decided to show them a trick.

She waded into the water and began to sing—her voice merging with the sound of the waves. To the children, it seemed like a magic trick: the fish came closer to the shore, the sea became calmer, as if listening—while in water a strange symmetrical patterns appears. One of the little ones, amazed, looked at her and asked if she was a real mermaid. Lizbeth just smiled and winked at him. "What do you think?" she replied.

They left and after that it rained for seven days straight at that spot. Fortunately no one lived there, but even the local newspapers echoed the strange rain that fell in a range of only a hundred meters.

July found them crossing the waters into Scotland, where the scenery looked like something out of an old legend. Windswept cliffs, heather-covered hills and lochs that reflected the sky like bottomless mirrors. They felt welcome from the first moment, for both Lizbeth and Shin had friends who had taken refuge there after the war.

In Edinburgh they were reunited with an old battle buddy, a man with graying hair and a shrewd look who used to say that the war had taken many things from him, but never his sense of humor. But Lizbeth was also shaken, when she finally reconnected with one of her instructors and mission commander during her time in Runen: Emmeline was finally back. For several sucessful missions in the war she had come to be called the Claymore of Scotland.

Emmeline and her entourage dragged Lizbeth to her home, a castle, to check if she had continued training. She was not satisfied and, from that day on, she forced her to train with her and they both used Shin as a target—for melee simulations.

They spent weeks in her company, sharing stories and toasts in taverns where music was never absent. The two also met the small, and feared, three-headed poodle named Curly. Shin even suggested that Emmeline should give a name to each head—from that day on the dog never wanted to go near him again.

Beyond the silly anecdotes, it was a peaceful time. Lizbeth even went so far as to dance one night, dragging Shin with her. Though he still had the clumsiness of a soldier, more used to fighting than moving gracefully, he was good at Cossack dancing.

From that day on Emmeline, who was trained in many arts, took it upon herself to teach him some dancing, and he himself discovered another facet of that woman, who he had always thought had only the Art of War instead of brains. After some time Emmeline stopped teaching him dance with a warning. "Never get too close to me." That threw Shin off balance, but Lizbeth had understood.

Lizbeth recalled a theory once discussed during their time at Runen. Some scholars had proposed a strange hypothesis to explain Shin's peculiar aura—that unsettling duality of atracction and repulsion he seemed to evoke in others. It wasn't just the unusual phenomena that followed him.

People who met Shin often found themselves inexplicably drawn to him, yet simultaneously uneasy, as if some quiet corner of their subconscious was whispering: nope, nope, be careful.

Sometimes, when she watched him sleeping, Lizbeth felt a difficult-to-name feel. Shin was... cute to her—yes—but not in a simple way. He could pass for someone normal, true, but there was something about him that didn't seem normal at all and she can not deny that. As if nature had done something when shaping him, overpolishing every flaw until what remained was... something too smooth, too perfect. And that very perfection, so seamless and unblemished, could be… unsettling. Not because something was missing—but because nothing was.

The only things that broke that symmetry were his blind eye and the scars that traced his body like pale handwriting—reminders that he was still, somehow, made of flesh. Those flaws, oddly enough, brought relief. Like cracks in a flawless statue that proved it couldn't come alive.

There was something else, too. A biological murmur, maybe. Some researchers at Runen had proposed that his presence altered chemical responses in those around him. As if he emitted a kind of pheromonal signal—one that awakened atracction, maybe even desire, and at the same time, quiet alarm. A hook and a warning, both at once. With Emmeline, with Mari, even with Milena and Sari in the beginning, Lizbeth had noticed it: the lingering stares, the hesitant touches, the way attention stretched a few seconds too long before snapping back like a rubber band. Like a magnet, attracting—and repelling—depending on the angle.

She remembered clearly: the first time she saw him, she had felt something stir in her chest. Not just fascination, but something closer to dread.

There had been a psychologist at Runen who once compared Shin to das Unheimliche—the uncanny. The familiar made strange. Lizbeth had understood that perfectly. Shin was someone she knew, someone she loved… and yet sometimes, when he stayed silent too long, or when his expression grew distant, something would tighten inside her. Not fear. Not mistrust. But the eerie sense that reality itself bent slightly around him. That he carried something beneath the skin—something that wasn't his armor. Not a secret, but a fracture. A hairline crack in the world. And for some reason, she had chosen to remain right at the edge.

Emmeline had known Shin for a long time, but that didn't necessarily mean there were romantic feelings involved. If the scholars' theory held any truth, then maybe it was all just chemistry—pheromones triggering responses beyond conscious control. For his part, Shin wasn't particularly happy about any of it. Not happy at all. That strange pull had caused him enough trouble in the past. And when added to his curse, it meant he could never stay too long in one place. Never be just another person in the crowd.

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The only way to be someone who could exist in this world seemed to be the same as always: to keep moving. Although, well… that was true for the feys too.

Lizbeth sighed, her thoughts drifting with a smile. The things we do for love.

During one of the practices Emmeline also asked him if he hadn't by any chance learned ice skating. He was taken aback by the question, but Emmeline had figured it out by the way he sometimes moved to fight, almost sliding. Shin admitted, he had tried ice skating in the past as a form of training to use his armor particles on his feet. But he had problems with the conductivity of the ground to use it, so he had never used it much.

Also during that time they learned all the ins and outs of what was going on outside. While they read, listened to the news, and communicated with their former Armitage Initiative friends by radio, Emmeline had first hand information. The world was moving to a strange place in the coming years. Rumors of a new war, where espionage would be the key, would also take place in the now divided Germany, but would undoubtedly spread to the whole world.

The atomic and space race were now the new objectives between the United States Kingdom and the Soviet Union. There were also the projects that were now using Nazi scientists on both sides. There was also the hunt for those who had escaped the Initiative and were continuing their research in South America. There were rumors of a Nazi settlement in Antarctica, searching for something that had been discovered by the Pabodie Expedition years earlier. And the strange rumors that there were certain parts of the U.S. military that had their own agenda in the spy war, using feys as spies or guinea pigs.

Shin and Lizbeth wondered if they shouldn't do something, but Emmeline put it out of their minds.

Intervening now would be madness. There were too many feys moving around the world, and if anyone did anything wrong it could endanger the rest. If they wanted to move, they would have to do it when the waters of the war had calmed down a bit, and without associations to the organizations that had united them in the war. So as not to drag the others down. Shin in particular, with so many ties to Miskatonic University, could generate friction. Emmeline warned him that if he were to act, he should act as he had before the war. As a lone wolf.

But Scotland not only brought friendships, good times and news from abroad. It also brought trouble some time later.

In the Highlands, while staying in an inn by a loch for a week, strange lights began appearing on the water's surface every night. At first, the locals thought it was an illusion—reflections of the moon or a prank by the kids. But when the lights drew closer and took on humanoid shapes, they knew it was no joke. Something strange, maybe forgotten, was awakening in those waters. The rumors spread in the town.

Some of the people who lived in the area knew about the feys thanks to Emmeline and so they didn't look at them strangely and didn't need to hide their identities. But the phenomenon had almost begun to manifest itself when they arrived.

Shin visited the local library, small but packed with old tomes, and learned that centuries ago, battles had been fought near the loch. He didn't like the idea but suspected his presence might be linked to the disturbance. On their last day, his fears were confirmed: a spirit—or perhaps a remnant of a time when the supernatural and the mundane coexisted without fear—lived in the loch.

The presences and winds appeared early and with more strength than the previous days.

A collective elemental, he called it.

Shin explained to Lizbeth that what they had witnessed was similar to an artifact they had once encountered—but unlike that object, this phenomenon wasn't crafted by hands. It was tied to the natural forces of the land itself. In this case, it had been born from the echoes of ancient battles.

The presences they saw could have been ghosts, yes, but they had remained dormant for centuries. Over the years, the sheer number of souls that had perished near the loch had given rise to something else—something collective. A being not of flesh or spirit alone, but of memory, grief, and energy tied to the place itself. It manifested as a windstorm over the water, and the lights were nothing more than the glow of raw magic from the hearth similar to swamp gas or piezoelectric phenomena.

Most likely, a ley line ran strong beneath that place as well, feeding the elemental like roots feeding a buried tree.

Shin prepared to leave—there was no one nearby who could help them deal with whatever was awakening in the loch. But Lizbeth insisted on trying something first.

"A cleansing."

"A what?"

"A cleansing ritual. I want to try it."

"But—"

"Please, trust me. If it doesn't work, we leave and find a proper mage who can handle it. But I need to try."

Shin scratched his chin, reluctant, but agreed. He wasn't sure what she was planning, but if things went wrong, he'd have to fight, one way or another.

That night, near the waters, Shin had already drawn protective sigils around her, preparing for the worst. The loch churned with unnatural energy, and the lights had begun to spiral in patterns that twisted the air, warping sound and temperature. But Lizbeth stepped forward, quiet but determined. She didn't believe this was something to fight—not yet. It was time to put her skills to the test.

Her voice, resonant and haunting, slipped into the spaces between the wind and the water, threading through the rising howl of magic like silk through thorn. It wasn't a song with words, but something older. A vibration, a call. Something that didn't come from her lungs, but from the marrow of her bones—from the part of her that remembered fear, and the stillness of being underwater.

Shin opened his eyes wide, truly seeing her skill in action for the first time. He had heard her train her voice, had seen her hum through half-forgotten melodies—but he hadn't known she could be that powerful. He felt a strange tingling deep in his bones, as if the particles of his own armor were vibrating in resonance with her voice.

The lights faltered. The water stilled. Her song reached the elemental, not as a language, but as a frequency that soothed, diluted, and softened the edges of the storm. The wild energy of the ley line pulsed once—then again—before thinning, diffusing like smoke in open air. One by one, the glowing figures dissolved, their forms unraveling into harmless sparks. The wind died down. The loch returned to its quiet, dark mirror. Lizbeth stood there in silence, her breath visible in the cold, her voice fading like a ripple. She hadn't reasoned with the elemental. She had simply reminded the place how to rest.

When silence finally returned to the loch, Lizbeth felt a strange stillness within herself. She thought back to what had happened in the submarine—how her voice had taken lives then. But now, it had served another purpose. The months of training with Milena and Sari had brought her to this moment. Yes, she had taken lives during the war—but she had also helped. Her voice wasn't just a weapon anymore.

Afterward, Lizbeth felt a rawness in her throat—a dryness that no tea could quite soothe. It wasn't pain, exactly, but a hollowness, like something inside her had been rung like a bell. She remembered, not without irony, that she didn't possess magic in the traditional sense.

No spells, no glyphs, no inherited power. And yet, her voice had done something. It had affected the ley line—Shin confirmed it with a pendulum the next day, the wild energy beneath the loch had calmed, like a storm passing. They stayed a few more days, just to be sure. During that time, Lizbeth found that sweets—particularly honey—helped soothe her throat. That, and a bit of well-earned sex, which, as she told Shin with a half-smile and a raised eyebrow, had always been good medicine for just about anything.

They continued their journey, stopping in small villages and losing themselves in the vastness of the Scottish countryside. They stayed for a while in Dumbarton, where Lizbeth took a liking to a stray dog that followed them for weeks before disappearing as mysteriously as it had arrived. The animal was found dead several days later under Overtoun Bridge—something had eaten it from the inside out. Shin didn't want to accept it, but he suspected it might be his fault.

A dwarf who had been living there for about ten years warned them it was better to stay away from that bridge. Apparently, it was dangerous for some creatures, especially dogs and feys. Rumor had it that, back in 1910, a very peculiar fey had taken its own life there—an extremely rare thing. Feys could experience depression and exhaustion, yes, but suicidal urges were almost unheard of. Shin tried to investigate but found nothing solid. Just to be safe, they decided not to go near the bridge again.

It was time to move. And when the year finally began to draw to a close, they felt that Scotland had given them more than just scenery and memories: it had given them a home—if only for a while.

On the first of December, the news arrived. Shin wasn't surprised, though it saddened him: Aleister Crowley had died at his Sussex residence. Emmeline came looking for them. Just for a couple of days, both she and a few others went to the wake. Shin was deeply irritated by some of the faces he encountered there.

They saw Gehirn again, which caught both of their attention. What kind of connection had he had with Crowley? Gehirn still wasn't growing anything—but he had become considerably more refined, even approaching snobbery. In spite of that, he was glad to see them again: Shin, whom he almost treated like a brother, and Lizbeth, whom he had started to call big sis.

After a funeral filled with strange reunions and distant memories, Emmeline took them back through a ley tunnel. But the passage almost collapsed around them, the tunnel groaning as the ley line connecting Edinburgh and Sussex destabilized mid-transit. It was the closest Shin had come to losing his legs since the war.

After a couple more adventures, in February 1948, Lizbeth and Shin crossed to the Isle of Skye on Emmeline's recommendation, a place away from the hustle and bustle of the mainland, where they felt calmer, almost as if time had decided to slow down again. They lived in a small cottage they rented near the sea, on an island south of Skye, surrounded by the dramatic landscapes of the main island: mountains that seemed to touch the sky, deep valleys and cliffs that plunged into the ocean, next to black sand beaches where the foamy waves went to die.

In that natural wilderness, Lizbeth found something she had hoped for thanks to Emmeline.

She met the local mermaids and tritons, a large group that lived among the rocks, in a hidden village where humans never reached, at least those who did not know about the secret.

These mermaids, with hypnotic voices and penetrating gazes, accepted Lizbeth as one of their own—understanding her nature as one of their own. There, away from the struggles and problems of the past again, Lizbeth found a connection she needed since their separation from Milena and Sari. The mermaids in this case had, for the most part, the fish tails of the legends, but they could change to legs on land just as Sari did. Among the tritons, on the other hand, there were very few who could do so.

It was in the tranquility of that village that Lizbeth began her apprenticeship, more thorough than the one she had with Milena and Sari. The mermaids taught her to use her voice in a way she had never imagined, not only to sing, but as a means of defense. They taught her the art of projecting her singing so powerfully that she could break through invisible barriers, manipulating the sound waves to destabilize, stun or even knock down her opponent.

It was a slow, arduous, but also fascinating process. For months, Lizbeth practiced and—in her spare time—Shin would accompany her on cliff walks or island explorations. Together, they hunted along the coast, gathered shellfish, got lost in the nearby woods, or just sat and watched the sea in silence. The peace they found gave them something that they only found with Milena and Sari: stability and peace.

As the days passed on the island, Lizbeth not only honed her singing as a means of defense, but also as a way to explore new ways to connect with Shin. Her voice, laden with nuances that ranged from soft to enveloping, took on new meaning in intimacy.

She no longer used it only to soothe or release tension, but also to ignite a new spark. A deep spark. Maybe too deep. Such spark that could cause trouble for Shin, if Lizbeth ever did that in public. On lonely nights–when the moon illuminated the island with its silvery light—Lizbeth would sing softly, guiding her caresses with her notes and letting the sound dictate the rhythm of their union. It was as if her voice could make the air dense, provoking new and shimmering sensations.

Shin, caught in the spell of her voice, began to respond with equal fervor. Sometimes, when the tide crashed against the rocks and the wind howled through the crevices of the hills, they both gave themselves to the moment, as if time itself stopped to give them just that connection. Lizbeth used whispers to intensify the desire, and Shin, sensitive to every change in the tone of her voice, was lost in the melody they both created.

At times, their intimacy was broken by the others in the group. At that point they had become accustomed to it. That community was quite open in their relationships too and they used to say that the union of bodies should be done facing the evening sun and the moonlight at its zenith.

They didn't need words, not even glances, just the vibration of their presence and harmony. It was their unique way of connecting, something so deep and personal that they felt oblivious to the world around them. Shin doubted that the public morality committees would approve, but well, they were hidden, for the moment there was nothing to worry about.

But soon he would have something much more serious to worry about.

Despite the apparent peace, the island was going to wake up to someone's presence.

One afternoon, back in 1949, while exploring a cave that only the locals knew about, Lizbeth and Shin found a small subterranean spring of crystal clear water that seemed to have a strange energy. They swam in its waters, enjoying the calm, but something in the cave was not right. A distant echo, like a whisper of voices, echoed off the walls, but they never managed to locate its source. Despite their uneasiness, the incident passed quickly, but Lizbeth could not shake the feeling that something else lurked beneath the surface. It gave her the same feeling than they found that strange collective elemental.

Over time, she began to notice that the animals on the island were behaving strangely, especially when Shin approached. The deer would flee, the birds seemed disturbed, and something in the wind carried with it a murmur that had not previously been present in the peace of the islands. Although the others did not mention it much, they all knew that all was not as quiet as it seemed.

During the rest of the year, strange anomalies continued to appear on Skye. There were even some that the feys and Lizbeth herself dared not tell Shin about.

One day Lizbeth moved stealthily, intending to startle Shin from behind, her mischievous smile ready to appear at any moment. But just as she lifted her hand from the water, a sharp cold cut through it like an invisible blade sweeping across her wrist. She felt her hand detach, as if a silent guillotine had severed it from her arm. Her ability to resist pain had changed since her time in captivity but due the shock there was no scream—only a deep silence that wrapped around her as the world shrank to a stabbing emptiness where her fingers had been.

The shock didn't freeze her, but the pain—or rather the absence of it—was disorienting. Her breath grew shallow, her eyes watered without shedding tears. She brought her other arm to her chest, feeling the hollow where her hand had been. Without a word or a sound to betray her alarm, Lizbeth submerged herself again, seeking the cold that would restore her senses, calming the unease swelling in her chest. She searched for her hand and prepared for regeneration. She guessed it would take a good couple of hours. But the cut was so clean that when she reattached her hand to her arm, it took barely fifteen minutes for the wound to vanish.

She knew she couldn't afford to fall apart there. She clung to the calm she had left, promising herself to heal and move forward. But somewhere in a dark corner, that silent wound was already weaving a fear she dared not name.

But soon, more problems began to arise, albeit subtly at first. Despite the harmony on the island, rumors of two feys traveling together in a vehicle began to spread around among the islanders who did not know about the secret of the hidden world. No one knew much more, but those who lived in the areas near the roads, where Shin used to travel to stock up or simply explore, began to report strange events. Some spoke of shadows moving along the edge of their field of vision, figures that could not be explained. Others claimed to have seen strange lights in the night, as if a vehicle had the ability to pass through the fog and disappear before reaching its destination—there was talk of ghostly apparitions of old, of sounds of armies marching in the middle of the night or in the misty days.

Fear spread across the main island and where the two were staying, they knew something was not right. There was something about Shin's presence that attracted the attention of forces they did not fully understand. And that could not only endanger the entire community living peacefully in the waters, but also the islanders who did not know the secret.

As the year progressed, events began to intensify. The feys living on the island became increasingly wary of hiding their secret, the mermaids whispered of an something that seemed to have awakened, and the tranquility Lizbeth and Shin had known for months was slowly crumbling. The nights were filled with restlessness, and though they both tried to maintain their routine, they knew something was about to happen at any moment.

The strange events that accompanied the presence of a fey, though so far only whispers, were taking shape. Something, or someone, was following them. And now, more than ever, they had to be prepared to face whatever was coming.

It was at a new incident, involving the presence of several feys, Shin and Lizbeth, and the islanders in a bar, that Lizbeth felt it was time to leave.

The roof of the bar simply crumbled as if something heavy had fallen on the place. But there was nothing there. The ceiling collapsed on everyone and the sound of large invisible wings could be heard flying away in the middle of the night. In the midst of the chaos there were more than fifteen injured. Feys and humans alike. Including Lizbeth—who had an iron bar through her stomach. The feys and Shin were barely able to hide the incident, and remove the rod before the others saw the regeneration.

Then there were a few days where no fey, nor human who knew the secret, wanted to get close to Shin, and thus to Lizbeth, who wanted to stay by his side, assuring him that it was not his fault. Meanwhile, Shin seemed more tense every day and looked at her with more concern. Two more incidents occurred in the RV, which Lizbeth tried to hide, saying that it had been her fault and with a smile she had tried to take the heat off the matter.

But Shin had looked at her sadly.

It seemed that the peace they had worked so hard to build was about to be shattered.

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