The Sacrifice

(attempt at art by author on Procreate)

Once chosen, I am taken to the sea altar, at the bottom of the craggy rocks on the solitary beach. The altar, a wide, flat stone, sits on soft, yet damp sand, against rough hewn, jagged walls, with a high water mark staining the stone white with salt.

They say it’s for my own good.

They say it’s so I don’t run away.

I say it’s because if I did run, then they’d have to choose again from between themselves.

Being a sacrifice is meant to be an honour. Carried out for the common good of the town. But where is the honour in being chained alone in the dark of the night, watching the sea water creep closer? Like it is stalking me with every pulsing wave, trickling rivulets of water towards my shrinking flesh, sinking into every crack between every sand grain, each small wash leaving behind a dark vein of seaweed, or a sliver of cuttlefish, or a bone of something that once was.

But is now gone.

It is like the sea is showing me what I will become.

A remnant. A remain. Nothing but a long forgotten name.

The sea knows all, Mother told me once. We come from the sea and we all return to it. The sea keeps our secrets. Holds our treasures. And when our time comes, it whispers our name.

And it is my sacrifice that will keep the sea witch, Seraphina, at bay.

I don’t recall the first time I heard about her, but I know I was young. I think everyone in the village has been told the creepy bedtime stories about Seraphina. And that was all I thought they were - stories. Told by the elders to instill fear into the youngsters. How every five years, an innocent soul has to be sacrificed to the sea witch for the good of the town. That if no sacrifice is made, then Seraphina will be able to leave the sea and walk the land and feast on the blood of those that refuse to give it willingly..

One life saves many, they say.

So every five years, the town places the names of children on slivers of paper. And every five years, the mayor would put his hand into the sack and pull out a name.

And this day, they pulled mine.

Naia.

The image foremost in my mind is of the way my mother and father looked at each other in the church, their eyes, frightened and grief-stricken. But they did not meet my gaze. It was like they could not look at me. Like I was already gone.

They’d already given up one child to this many years ago. My older sister, Dalara. My memories of her are scant, but I do recall the way the sunlight glinted off her red hair.

Now the water laps at my feet, cold and dark. Coming for me. Tasting me.

I try to inch away, to shrink back against the rock wall, but the manacles hold me in place and so I lie there, gasping as the cold water gets higher and higher up my legs, soaking into the plain shift dress they made me wear. And strangely, as the water washes over my skin, I hear whispering. Soft, sibilant sounds in words I don’t understand. A female voice that gets louder with each pulse of an incoming wave.

Her voice seems to block out the other sounds. The lapping water, the sounds of the seabirds still on the wing.

My skin prickles and goose bumps. The cold water is like icy needles piercing every nerve. I can feel something caressing me. Stroking me beneath the surface and I panic and try to pull away.

Will this hurt?

How will Seraphina come for me?

This part was never in the bedtime stories. Just that the person chained to the sea altar is there one moment and then, when the tide recedes, they are gone. The manacles empty.

What happens inbetween?

Naia …it is you …

I lift my head and look down at the dark surface of the water creeping up my body. A small tentacle breaks the surface, dark and glistening, then disappears again, a brief glimpse of small suckers and blue-green flesh. A spiny fin.

Seraphina? Or just some poor innocent creature that has washed in with the tide?

The water sings a briny lullaby in tune with her whispered song.

My panicked breathing begins to slow as the ballad of the sea witch gets louder and louder in my ears. Not just my ears, my entire being. All I can hear is her and she is beautiful. Ethereal. Like an angelic voicing singing in church, high, pure, echoing and resonant. It almost sounds sad. Heartbroken and then, as the words become clear, I realise she is singing about the sadness of my sacrifice.

Sadness?

Why would she be sad? Am I not a feast for her? Will she not dine out upon my body and my soul for the next five years to save her from having to walk the land in search of food?

I see flickers of red tresses in the water, mixed with dark seaweed and a bloated, deformed figure begins to rise from the water. Hair tangled and knotted with coral and kelp and … faces? Faces that drift in and out of my vision. Haunted visages. Their features come and go like the tides - a girl I played with once. A boy who sold apples at the market. All gone before me, eyes turned toward me, hungry and keen.

But then the sea witch’s face lifts to look at me and I sees that it is Dalara. Her skin grey-green, her body rimed with mussels and seamoss. Her hands hidden beneath a coat of dripping weed. And when she opens her mouth to speak, seawater spills from it like dark ink. ‘Naia …’

‘Dalara?’

‘It is time, Naia.’

‘Time? What are you going to do?’ I fear my sister’s touch. For this is Dalara and it is also not. It has her face, but this thing has all the faces, of all those that have gone before. I can see them even now, in the tresses of my sister’s hair. Or pressing out from the skin of her belly, or her thighs, like a face pressed up against a window. Eyes trying to blink. Mouths trying to speak. There and then gone again.

‘I am complete now.’

‘Complete?’ I hate that I am asking these questions, but the tide is rising ever higher with every pulsing wave, lapping at my skin, tasting me, trying to pull me under and I am resisting.

Dalara reaches out and touches the manacles that drop from my wrists and ankles as if they were never there and with hands of coral and fingers of razor clams, she holds my face and I … dissolve.

Assailed by dizziness and then it is like fog clearing and then all is revealed. The town has never been stopping a monster.

They have been creating one.

Every five years, sacrificing another innocent soul to the sea, thinking they were protecting themselves, but they were, in actual fact, creating their own damnation. Seraphina was a mere woman, weak and at death’s door and a whispered curse spat at a frightened mayor hundreds of years ago, caused the town to create a ritual that has now become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And now the cold is gone. The water is gone and we are part of something else.

Something else that steps from the waves and onto the land with sure legs, not tentacles, towards the town.

We feel full of whispers. Of voices. Of souls. We hear them all, like an orchestral rejoicing, singing a searching song and we are beautiful.

And we are not alone and no longer without a voice.

Instead, we are many.

None of us scream, but we all remember.

Remember what this town and our parents did to us, because they were afraid.

And now it is time to take back what once was ours. And as we stalk closer to the town, saltwater brimming before us, touching, tasting, searching every crack, every hovel, every home, splintering wood, wearing down mud, we find the guilty and once found, they are introduced to the sea.

And we fill them.

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Generous thanks are given to Jon Mountjoy for his assistance in reading this story and providing his expert advice when I got stuck!

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