The Calling Tides

Chapter 1

When the scales tip, even the ocean holds its breath.

The song chose me. Not the other way around.

I felt it rising in me from somewhere deeper than the way muscle memory kept my hands continuing their practiced rhythm on my seasoned harp strings. What burst from my lips was something older than the careful melodies my mother taught me–older than memory itself, flowing through me while my left pinky cramped against the sharp edge of the c string.

Was I singing to something vast and patient beneath the waves, or was something singing through me?

Each note felt deliberate and foreign at once. My throat should have felt raw fron the intensity, but instead I felt hollow. The melody seemed familiar. Like one of the deep-sea frequency patterns that appeared in the ocean songs I was studying. But hearing it come from my own lips made the academic data feel suddenly, personal.

The crystal glass shattered against the marble floor with a sharp, splintering sound that cut through the air like a gunshot.

I jerked back from the harp, my fingers still trembling. Around me, two hundred of Newport's elite had gone silent—not the polite, expectant quiet of an audience, but something that made the air itself feel thick with tension.

"What—" someone whispered, the word barely audible in the sudden stillness.

A woman in head-to-toe Chanel touched her cheek, fingertips coming away wet with tears she didn't remember shedding. She stared at them, then at. Me, then back at her fingers. Her lipstick smudged slight at the corner of her lip.

"Did you feel that?" Another voice said shakily.

Then the first guest fell.

Mrs. Adelaide Thornton—Newport society matriarch, patron of three museums, survivor of more charity galas than anyone had a right to endure—simply tilted sideways in her gilded chair with a soft whoosh of expensive fabric. Her champagne flute hit the marble with another crystalline crack.

Then another guest crumpled forward, their knees hitting the ground with an audible thud.

And another. And another. And another.

Five patrons in the front row were suddenly unresponsive, breathing but slack-jawed with that particular sleep-like look on their faces.

"Help!" someone nearby shouted.

The mansion's alarm screamed in three piercing bursts before settling into a continuous annoying wail. As if the wiring itself had been assaulted by sound.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ocean—which had been mirror-calm for the entire evening—surged against the cliff face below. Waves that shouldn't exist in this sheltered harbor surged in an orchestrated crescendo, pounding relentlessly against the cliff faces. Meanwhile, servers froze mid-stride, their eyes fixed and mouths ajar.

I had been hired to provide gentle background music—Irish lullabies and Celtic arrangements that would complement Mr. Harrison Blackwood III’s charity gala without demanding attention. Safe. Predictable. The kind of performance that paid well enough to keep my student loans current.

Instead, I'd just... What exactly had I done?

The melody still hung in the air like morning mist over water, though I couldn't remember choosing to sing it. An ode to something I'd never seen—shores I'd never walked, depths I'd never explored. The kind of song that pulls at something deeper than memory, older than conscious thought.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Mr. Blackwood's voice cut through the strange quiet, sharp with practiced authority. He moved through the crowd with the confidence of a man who'd built empires on his ability to control situations. "My apologies—we seem to be experiencing some sort of electrical interference. These old mansions and their wiring, you know how it is."

A few guests nodded immediately, relief evident on their faces. Already eager to accept any explanation that didn't challenge their sheltered reality. But I caught the way Mr. Blackwood's eyes found mine across the room—not confused, but calculating. He pulled out his phone, with practiced ease, the flash of a camera brief but unmistakable.

Earlier in the evening, before the performance began, I'd noticed him speaking with a man I didn't recognize—someone tall and lean, moving with predatory grace through the crowd. They'd stood near the marble columns, voices low, and I'd caught fragments: "...the girl with the harp..." "...worth watching." The stranger wore a navy suit that probably cost more than my rent, but he kept checking his watch, an old silver one, not the usual Rolex crowd favorite. Mr. Blackwood had gestured toward me with obvious pride—his discovery, his investment. The stranger’s attention felt different. His eyes tracked my eyes with the focused stillness of a predator circling prey.

The exhaustion hit me then, sudden and all consuming. My shoulders ached from holding position, and I realized I’d being gripping the my harp frame hard enough to leave indents in my palms.

"Perhaps we should move to the west terrace?" Mr. Blackwood continued smoothly. "The harbor view is spectacular tonight."

As staff appeared to guide bewildered guests toward the French doors, I forced my trembling fingers to find safer melodies. Simple scales that wouldn't accidentally summon anymore fainting spells. My fingers felt tender against the strings, wrong somehow.

"Lyra." The voice came from beside me, low and musical with an accent I couldn't place.

I looked up to find the man from earlier—the one who'd been watching me. His cologne was subtle, expensive, with notes of cedar and something I couldn’t place. Seawater? The scent me along with something wilder, like storm winds carrying promises of deeper waters.

"I'm sorry, do we know each other?" I managed, my voice barely working.

He smiled, and something about his expression made my pulse skip a beat. "Not yet. But we will." His gaze flicked toward the windows, where moonlight painted the restless ocean silver. "Soon, I think."

"I don't understand what just happened," I whispered. "The music, it was like... I haven’t sung like that before. Ever.”

His eyes held mine for a moment that stretched longer than it should have. "The ocean remembers what we forget," he said finally, voice barely above a murmur. "Some songs were never meant to be lost."

"You study the songs," he added, as if answering a question I hadn't yet formed. "You have been listening for patterns. Different from most." His smile promised both danger and recognition. "There are people who would very much like you not to listen."

I should have asked him who didn’t want me listening, demanded to know how he knew about my dissertation research. Instead, I found myself leaning in closer, drawn by something greater than curiosity, “Are you one of them?”

His eyes, darker than the ocean beyond the windows, held mine for the longest five seconds of my life. “That depends,” he said softly, “on what you choose to become.”

The words felt like a challenge and a warning all in one finely wrapped sentence.

“I don’t understand”, I barely whispered.

“You will.” He glanced over his shoulder to the windows where a gathering audience watched the surging waves. “The ocean has been searching for a very long time. Tonight, something finally answered.”

The antique lamp nearest us flickered, and I felt the oppressing weight of something vast and patient pressing against the edges of my consciousness.

“This is all my fault,” I whispered aloud before I could stop them.

The terrible clarity of it hit me like a bucket of ice water. Whatever I'd opened, whatever I'd called—the unconscious guests, the surging waves, the wrongness that still hummed in the air—it had poured through me like I was nothing more than a conduit.

Before I could respond, his hand brushed mine. The tips of our fingertips grazing each other sending something electric through to my bones before he melted back into the crowd.

Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the ocean stretched endlessly under moonlight, its surface holding an unnatural stillness. Not the artificial calm of a wind-sheltered bay, but the profound quiet of deep water. Waiting water.

I'd been performing at these high society events for over a year, making the two-hour drive from Boston to Newport because Mr. Blackwood's connections paid better than anything I could find locally. The gas money alone was worth it—my Honda Civic's tank took forty-three dollars to fill, and I usually managed two gigs per tank. The income funded my doctoral research into marine acoustic patterns. The irony wasn't lost on me now—studying how sea creatures communicate while I apparently used my voice to... what? Enchant humans?

"Remember, honey," the memory of my mother's voice whispered—my adoptive mother, though I'd never known any other—"mystery intrigues them, but intensity frightens them. Always choose intrigue."

But tonight, intensity had chosen me.

I packed my harp mechanically, muscle memory taking over while my mind reeled. The case latch es made their familiar snapping sounds, three quick clicks that usually signaled the end of a successful evening. Every failed relationship, every person who'd pulled away from my "overwhelming" emotions, every academic advisor who'd found my research "ambitiously unconventional"—had it all been because of this? Because I was something other than human?

The thought should have terrified me. Instead, as I stepped out onto the manor's terrace and felt the salt tinged wind against my face, something that had been coiled tight in my chest for twenty-six years finally began to unfurl.

The ocean seemed to call to me with a voice older than civilization, and for the first time in my life, I understood what it was saying.

Welcome home.

The drive back to Boston was along two hours, I check the clock dashboard twice. Antsy to get home. As Newport's gilded mansions gave way to highway darkness, then the university district's coffee shops and late-night study spots, the salty coast lingered on my tongue—metallic and unexpected, like I'd been breathing underwater.

My hands still trembled as I parked outside the converted brownstone that housed our tiny two-bedroom apartment for perpetually broke graduate students. The harp case felt heavier than usual, weighted with more than carved wood and stretched strings.

Light spilled from our second-floor window—Sage was still awake, probably buried in Jung or tarot cards or whatever combination of psychology and mysticism was occupying her brilliant mind this week.

Dr. Sage Winters, my roommate and polar opposite in almost every conceivable way. Where I studied the quantifiable patterns of marine life, she dove headfirst into the unmappable territories of the human psyche. Where I collected data, she collected dreams. Where I sought scientific proof, she trusted in synchronicities and star charts.

We'd been paired randomly by university housing two years ago—a cosmic joke that had somehow evolved into the most stable relationship in my life.

The stairs creaked on the usual fifth and eighth steps—predictable. I found her exactly where I'd expected: cross-legged on our thrift-store couch, surrounded by textbooks on archetypal psychology and a spread of constellation cards that probably cost more than my monthly stipend.

With a halting glance, she said, “What’s wrong?”

Looking down at my harp case, busying my self with stowing away my harp case to hide my unease, “Nothing.” I said too quickly.

"Your aura is different," she said without looking up from her cards, her dark hair falling in waves around her face. "Whatever happened tonight shifted something fundamental. Your chakras are out of balance,” she stated as if I should understand her chatter.

She glanced up then, her amber eyes—the kind of eyes that seemed to see straight through to places you didn't know you were hiding—studying my face. "And you smell like salt water, which is interesting considering you were performing at a mansion, not swimming in the harbor."

I set down the harp case and stared at her. "I smell like salt water?"

"Energetically speaking." She wiggled her fingers, all fingers studded with rings catching in the lamplight, each one inscribed with symbols I'd never bothered to learn.

"Also literally. There's brine in your aura. Very... oceanic. Very old." She paused, head tilted like she was listening to something I couldn't hear. "Very you, actually. Like whoever you were tonight is who you've always been underneath all that scientific skepticism."

My stomach dropped. "Sage, I—"

"Sit." She patted the couch beside her, sending her cards scattering. "Tell me what the universe decided to reveal tonight. And don't even think about giving me some rational explanation involving acoustics and emotional manipulation. Your whole energy field is singing, Lyra. Literally singing. I can hear it."

Sage reached for my hands, her cool palms grounding me as my pulse picked up, “Talk to me,” she said.

"It was a gala," I said, and my voice sounded too thin, stretched like wire. "I was hired by Mr. Blackwood again to be background music. No theatrics. Just—"

"—you didn’t just perform background music? It feels like you absorbed a lot of energy, from someone else or something else. " She laughed, but there was concern in her eyes. "Okay. Show me your hands."

She closed her eyes as she took my fingers between her cool palms and closed her eyes for a heartbeat. When she opened them, her expression had shifted to something I'd never seen before—part wonder, part worry. "There's something different about your pulse tonight," she told me.

"Five people fainted," I whispered. "The mansion's alarms went off. The ocean—Sage, the ocean responded to whatever song came out of me."

She squeezed my hands tighter. "And you’re feeling scared that it was your fault?"

"Terrified, actually," I admitted.

I pulled out my laptop, needing the familiar anchor of my research. The spectrogram on my screen showed the complex frequency patterns of humpback whale songs, haunting, layered, and impossibly beautiful. I had been analyzing this particular recording for months, trying to decode what previous marine biologist called “the unknown sequence.”

“Look at this,” I said, turning the screen toward sage. “What if it wasn’t just communication between whales, but something else entirely?”

She leaned forward, studying the wave patterns. “You sang these frequencies?”

“I got close enough to make me wonder if I’ve been studying my own voice all along.”

My phone buzzed. A text from Dr. Miranda Chen, my research advisor:

How was the gig??

I stared at the message, my fingers hovering over the keyboard ready to type something, anything.

Instead, I set the phone aside and pulled my mother’s journal from the bookshelf, the inheritance of a woman who’d loved me fiercely but could never quite answer my questions about why I’d always felt like I belonged somewhere else entirely. Irish poetry, pressed flowers from the shore, she’d never let me visit.

On the last page, written in her careful script: "The sea does not reward those who are too eager, too greedy, or too impatient... Patience is what the sea teaches."

Below it, in different ink, like she'd added it later: "But the ocean remembers."

I'd read that line a hundred times, never understanding what she meant. Tonight, with salt still lingering on my lips and the stranger's words echoing in my mind, it felt less like poetry and more like prophecy.

Outside my window, Boston might as well have been a thousand miles from the ocean, but I swear I could still hear it—that vast, patient presence calling to something in my bones. Something that had been sleeping, waiting for the right song to wake it up.

My reflection caught the lamplight at just the right angle and for a moment, I could have sworn I saw something else looking back. A faint glow flickered at the edge of my pupils, not bioluminescence, but something that pulsed to the rhythm of my own heartbeat and made my green eyes appear nearly translucent.

The lamp flickered once, as if responding to my jumpy heartbeat, and when the light steadied, my phone lit up: unknown number.

No message, just a single photo—the gala terrace from across the room, my harp case circled in red. The angle was wrong for the man I’d spoken with—this had to have been taken from where Mr. Blackwood’s table was. The photo was grainy, but he had focused on me. Under it, three words:

We'll talk soon.

I stared at the screen until the image burned itself behind my eyelids. Someone had been watching me—not just during the unknown disruption of tonight but documenting it. Planning. The photo felt like proof of an affair. The level of surveillance was an open invitation to a game whose rules I didn’t yet understand.

My reflection in the phone’s black screen showed the same luminescent flicker in my pupils, and I realize with a crystal-clear focus that there would be no going back to footnotes and the safety of my academic theories. Whatever had happened tonight had awakened something. Mr. Blackwood, whatever his intentions, had marked me as surely as the ocean had claimed me.

I set the phone face-down, still feeling the hum of the threat, I just received, a promise.

We’ll talk soon. Not a question. A demand.