It was just like the vision Hæra had had years ago, when her family attacked her. She’d been ready to give up until, across the miles, Sister Madeleine had called for her aid. Why did she look so frightened now? Was she in imminent danger?

Hæra groaned. One more chance. If she could protect Madeleine from whatever chased her…if she could do the right thing, just once, so it hadn’t all been for nothing…

“Is it real?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Then please.” Hæra dipped her head until her muzzle touched the sand. “I beg you…please, I’ll return afterward…”

“You swear this?” the witch asked.

“I do.” Hæra was shaking.

“You would return,” the witch asked. “For this chance, you would return here to be imprisoned forever. Tortured forever. Why?”

Hæra looked at the dead man clinging to the witch’s hand. The man she had loved and betrayed, and for which crime she was trapped eternally.

The witch looked at him too. Then she laughed, as she had years ago, like the blades of two knives sharpening each other. “You know how they don’t let go of you,” she said.

The words echoed in Hæra’s memory. Where had she heard them before? Oh…she recalled…she had spoken them herself. When she’d first met the witch and pleaded for her life. Had the witch remembered Hæra’s words so clearly for years? Of course she had. Who better than the witch to understand—to empathize—with being bound to the human she loved?

“Then let her hold me.” Hæra yearned to stand but couldn’t rise up without her hind legs, only flop uselessly on the sand. “Ancient One, I surrender…please…”

“You would do this?” the witch repeated.

“I would do anything! It can’t be worse than losing her!”

At this, the witch flung up the two corpses. As she began to spin once more, the currents resurrected, and the whirlpool resumed its shape. Her robes, rotted from the sea, spun with her. Her knobby bare feet kicked up eddies of sand. She was silent, silent, and Hæra wanted to scream⁠—

“Then do anything,” the witch said.

The surface opened. The stars reappeared. Around Hæra, the water roared, creating a tunnel between sea and sky.

“Don’t come back,” the witch said. “You are not ours.”

The current wrapped around Hæra’s fins again. This time, it acted like a lasso, flinging her through the wall of the vortex with such force that she cried out. Then it released her, but it had thrown her so fast that she kept going, spinning until she couldn’t tell up from down. Her tail flailed as she sought to slow down and right herself. But her tail wasn’t working properly. It was growing weaker⁠—

It was shrinking⁠—

So were her front legs. So was her face, along with everything else. Without her willing it, Hæra’s body was enacting a transformation it had done so many times before.