Whisper Willow Ferryman's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Whisper Willow stood on the dock and watched the singing thread keep pulling at the water around her boat. The hull was safe. The lake was not. She needed to know what was following her before she crossed again. She went inside, pulled a dark purple book from the shelf, and opened it to a blank page. The cover read Ferryman's Log in faded gold. She would log every place the singing touched, every cove, every hour. A map of the thing, before it mapped her. She rowed out at the next moonrise with the log on the seat beside her and a stack of woven kelp markers in the bow. The markers were trellises she had braided from lake kelp and vine, light enough to float, heavy enough to stay. Each one carried a tag with a number and a date. When the singing reached her in the first cove, she stopped. She wrote the time, the depth, the pitch as best she could name it. Then she dropped a kelp trellis at the spot and rowed on. By the fourth cove the pattern showed itself on the page. The singing was not chasing her. It was circling. Every mark she had set ringed one stretch of water she had been avoiding for months. The flat black cove. She closed the log and turned the bow toward it. The singing rose as she crossed the line into the dark water. Blue moon petals drifted past the hull, more and more of them, until they began to turn. A wide whirlpool opened ahead of her, slow at first, then steady, petals spiraling in toward a black center. She shipped the oars. The boat would not tip. She leaned over the gunwale and looked down. A face looked back. Black fur, white eyes, a small crown of coral, a tail that vanished into the dark below. Selune Depthsong floated just under the surface, mouth still shaping the song. She stopped singing when their eyes met. "You finally came over," Selune said. "I have been calling for weeks." Whisper gripped the rail. "You were trying to sink my ferries." "I was trying to get your attention." Selune tilted her head. "The souls you carry. I want them. I keep them. Every single one." She said it the way someone names a color. Then, quieter, "I get lonely down here." Whisper wrote the name in the log before her hand could shake. Selune Depthsong. Flat black cove. Singer. Soul-taker. She corked her ink and rowed back toward her dock with the whirlpool closing behind her. She had her answer, and a worse problem than before. The thing in the lake was not a thing. It was a person, and it wanted what she ferried. The route she was building now had a mouth in the middle of it.