In the icy waters north of Vellun's Reach, where icebergs groaned like living things, fishermen whispered of the whale who sang the dead to rest.
Her name was Althas , and her bones showed through her skin—great arched ribs rising from her flesh like the vaults of a drowned cathedral. She was old when the first ships sailed these waters, older still when the whalers came with their harpoons. But no iron could pierce her, for Althas carried the weight of unquiet ghosts in her belly, and they protected her.
Every winter solstice, when the night lasted twenty hours, Althas would surface near the village of Hrifa. The people would gather on the black sand shore, holding wooden carvings of their lost ones—sailors swallowed by the sea, children taken by fever, elders who walked into blizzards. They would cast these tiny effigies into the waves, and Althas would sing.
Her voice shook the ice from cliffs. It pulsed in the chests of those who heard it, making their teeth ache with memories. As she sang, the carvings dissolved into phosphorescent swirls, and for one breathless moment, the villagers would see them—their dead, whole and smiling, dancing in the green-lit depths before fading into the whale's skeletal shadow.
Then came the year the whalers ignored the warnings and chased Althas into the fjords. When their harpoons struck, the sea turned black with ink and blood... but not the whale's. The men's own wounds bled uncontrollably, their veins weeping the saltwater they'd spilled in lifetimes of hunting. By dawn, seven ships sat empty on a calm sea, their decks strewn with sodden wooden carvings of the whalers' own faces.
That winter, no songs came to Hrifa. But sometimes, when a grieving mother walks the shore at twilight, she'll find a strange figurine washed up—a whale with human eyes, carved from wood that smells of kelp and old tears. And if she holds it to her ear, she'll hear the faintest echo of a lullaby in a voice that is not quite animal, not quite wind, but something older than both.
