“Dost thou not know Azathoth, mortal?” said the boy derisively. “I find that hard to believe. Indubitably hard to believe.” He turned around to stare out over the ocean, his hair tossing droplets of water.

I stared intently at him. “Who are you?” I asked carefully, startled by my own bravery.

“Who art I?” He stared into the distance. “That is not a revelation for a weak mortal such as thou.”

“But—”

He turned around. His passionate eyes burned with viridian rage.

“BEGONE, DREAMING HUMAN! LEAVE ME TO MY THOUGHTS!”

The stone beneath me crumbled into slabs and the ocean vanished. The towers fell in upon themselves, and the sun dissolved beneath the grey mist.

And I was falling too; down, down, down, down…

~*~*~*~

Down, down, down…

…straight into my bed with a thump.

I lay still for a minute, panting, drenched in sweat. The dream had felt so real! The crashing of the waves, the smell of the saltwater, the monstrous creature and… him.

The boy. The otherworldly boy, with his bewitching emerald eyes, his shiny black hair, his perfect body. The way he looked out across the ocean, as if all the world were his. The way he looked at me, as if I were his…

“Sigh,” I exhaled aloud. I knew why I’d had the dream, of course. It was because of my stupid, awful name. Andromeda. Ugh.

A sacrifice. A myth. A constellation. And the bane of my existence. I loathed it—and shortening it to Andi didn’t help much. Sometimes I wondered how I ever made friends with a name like Andromeda. The chained princess. Only a hero could rescue her from the terrible monster of the deep.

So that’s what I thought then. My dream had been about that handsome hero vanquishing the leviathan, saving me from certain death.

But I was wrong. So very, very wrong. The dream wasn’t just a dream… It was a vision.

Because names don’t just matter.

Names give you… destiny.

Chapter One: Colorless

I fell back onto my pillow, and heaved another sigh. I stared up at the ancient white wooden beams above me—my parents had been so excited to renovate this old ship maker’s house when we moved in two years ago. They left the ceiling beams exposed because they said it gave the house character.

Personality. Depth.

“This house has more meaning than my life,” I groaned aloud. I rubbed my eyes and groaned again when I rolled over and saw the time. The digital 6:53 a.m. taunted me. Not enough time to go back to sleep, too much time for getting ready for school.

I wrinkled my nose. Ugh. Insult to injury, it was Monday, too. Just another week, another day in ‘quaint’ little Portsmouth, surrounded by water and miserably far from anything interesting beyond the tourist pit stops on the way to Newport’s mansions. My home.