Ankyra Sound saltwater blood

The pearl didn't know what he was in his mother's eyes. How could he have known? She had carried him up from the deepest sea, had pried open his shell, and had found not one, but two poisoned treasures inside.

Incomplete without each other. They had made themselves ready for her.

A cry split his throat. As his mother drew him in, his cry subsided, comforted by her touch, swimming in the tension of what the pearl would come to call love, and oblivious, in his simplicity, to the whirlpool swirling through the mind who had given them breath, life, through the crashing waves.

He didn't know what he was in his mother's eyes, nor his part of the nightmare brought down on her silvered head. The boy nestled against her, too weak to do much else, searching for food until he drifted off in the crook of her arm and her restless dreams.