Yet the more the blood inside me decreased, the more clearly I could see it.
The colors, I mean.
For so long, my world had been red and blue.
Nothing else.
The endless shades of blood and sea.
Even the girls—their broken bodies, their torn lives—they had been nothing but shapes in red to my cursed eyes.
Flickering ghosts.
Except the merman.
Only the merman had shown up different, a bright anomaly in a drowned world.
But now?
Now the colors came pouring back.
And they were brutal.
I could see the blue of the sky through the cracked beams above.
I could see the sick, wet red of the blood pooling around my shattered ribs.
The pink-grey smear of my own brain matter decorating the deck like spilled food.
The pale, yellowish tint of bone where my skull had been broken open, gnawed on, devoured by the monster above me.
The demon’s mouth moved greedily, tearing, crunching, swallowing chunks of me.
But I barely felt it anymore.
Because for the first time in what felt like years, I was seeing the world again.
Not the broken version through blood-filtered eyes.
The real world.
And it was...
It was worse.
Because now I could see exactly how hopeless it was.
I had no strength to fight back.
No leverage to twist free.
No chance to claw my way out of the nightmare gripping me by the skull.
The blood inside me—the only thing keeping me stitched together—was running dry.
Each breath I took was a mercy granted by a dying, exhausted parasite.
I could feel the end brushing up against me, casual and certain.
And yet—
I moved my hand.
Barely.
Weakly.
Enough to pull out the locket I had found buried in my flesh.
That stubborn little thing that had dug itself near my heart as if it had been waiting there for me to find it.
The clasp was broken.
The surface scratched and bloodstained.
But when I pried it open—
There they were.
A girl and a man.
Smiling.
Real smiles.
Not the fake, haunted ones people wear when they’re scared to death but trying to pretend they’re not.
Genuine.
They looked...
Happy.
Friends?
Family?
Lovers?
I didn’t know.
Would never know.
But it didn’t matter.
Because their happiness was real.
Captured.
Frozen in that tiny, rusted cage of a locket.
It hit me harder than the demon’s fists ever could.
I looked up at the ritual again.
At the half-eaten remains strewn like garbage across the deck.
And there—
There, among the butchered bodies—
I saw her.
The seventh girl.
Or what was left of her.
Nothing but a head and an arm.
Mangled.
Incomplete.
Tossed aside like waste.
But I recognized her.
Even through the blood.
Even through the rot.
It was her.
The girl from the locket.
The one who had smiled so brightly.
So freely.
Looking at the man beside her like he was the only thing that mattered in the world.
She had looked so peaceful in that picture.
So alive.
And now—
Now she was nothing but pieces.
My heart didn’t clench.
My chest didn’t tighten.
No.
It was something colder than that.
Something deeper.
Like a part of me just...
Fell away.
Something important.
Something human.
I could feel my eyes widen.
I could feel the broken rhythm of my breathing hitch once—just once—before settling back into the ragged, exhausted pattern the blood could barely maintain.
I etched her face into my memory.
Not the ruined one lying before me.
No.
The one in the picture.
The one who smiled like she had never known pain.
I would remember her.
I would remember all of them.
The girls who had been promised to the sea, torn apart by cruelty, forgotten by the world that should have protected them.
I would remember their faces.
Their hopes.
Their smiles.
Even if I died here.
Even if the blood gave out.
Even if this monster cracked open my chest and ate my heart with his filthy, rotting teeth.
I would remember.
I would carry them inside me.
Carve them into whatever was left of my soul.
And maybe—
Maybe that was enough.
Maybe memory was the only defiance left to the broken.
I stared at the girl’s face in the locket.
Her red hair like fire trapped in metal and glass.
Her smile wide and blinding.
I etched every line, every shadow, every glint of light into my mind with savage, desperate determination.
No matter what happened next—
I would not forget her.
Not her.
Not any of them.
Because someone had to remember.
And if that someone had to be a blood-soaked, skull-broken corpse of a man halfway devoured by a laughing demon?
Then so fucking be it.
I smiled.
Broken.
Shaky.
Real.
And I whispered, voice too soft to hear but loud enough to matter:
"I see you."
Then I closed the locket.
And waited for the next bone to break.