Rake

The Black Kelpies' frontman, Caspian Wemyss, shouldered his way into The Kilted Stag Pub & Brewhouse. He looked like nothing but trouble, kohl liner smudged, black leather slouched over his athletic frame, hair falling in dark streaks that caught light like wet seaweed. He grinned like a wayward heir caught slipping home at dawn, brushing back his dark hair, his eyes, an impossible green, gleamed.

"Christ, it's Baltic out there," he said, Scottish lilt rolling thick as the tide. He slouched across the bar, flashing a grin at the cheeky barmaid. "Pint of heavy, love. None of that watered shite."

She rolled her eyes, but poured it anyway. Caspian winked, kohl smouldering and slid a coin across the counter, then turned toward the crowd. Raising the pint high, he delivered cheers like a sermon.

"To the dead, the drunk, and anyone daft enough to still believe in love."

The gaggle cheered, and Caspian drifted off to a corner booth. He pulled out his battered journal, scrawling lines about the craggy rocks on the shore, about waves that crashed with the violence of love at first sight. When his pint ran dry, he snapped the journal shut, slung his coat over his shoulder, and slipped out the side. He turned his back on the pub and made way to shore, the beam of Wraith Rock Lighthouse swept cross the sea.

On the sand, he shed his clothes, skin translucent against the void, and waded into the freezing undertow. The first plunge was cold as death, but the sea soon welcomed him home. He dove deep, deeper still, until the world above vanished, and only the obsidian silence of the trenches remained. He swam past orcas gliding like shadows, over beds of angelsharks half-buried in sand, through drifting clouds of cuttlefish and squid: past ship wrecks, and podgy cetaceans.

A pair of sharks veered wide, wary of him, though a lone lobster whom Caspian had christened Lem long ago clicked his claws in recognition as he passed. He could only offer a smile, though. At last, he reached the shimmer in the dark, a veil of magic rippling across stone. He tapped out the code on the rocks, and the door yawned open.

The seawater rushed away in a spiral, leaving him dripping in the cavernous foyer of the undersea castle.

Empty. Silent.

Once, these walls had carried his family's voices; now they held only the charred echo of a fire long gone. The only sound was the steady drip of seawater sliding from Caspian's bare skin, striking the cool floor.

He looked around at the long dining hall beyond, the table still set in gold, as if waiting for a feast that had ended in screams. His stomach twisted. He remembered the way the marble had run red, the frenzy, the tearing teeth. Family eating family until nothing remained but silence and bones.

He had escaped it only by striking a deal with a bog witch in Flow Country, far south, who had taken pity on him.

Even returning now was dangerous, he knew that. But homesickness gnawed at him, for a place that no longer existed, while the rest of his bandmates spent the holidays with their families.

He brushed a hand along the wall and felt the energy drain from him. The green fire in his gaze wavered, drained into the stones like an offering the walls demanded. He turned on his heel, careful not to slip.

Whatever haunts lingered here weren't his to keep company with.

He crept to his room, the one at the end of the hall, and pushed open the door. His belongings remained all the same, as if it hadn't been a millennium since he escaped the blood bath. He circled what had once been a bed fit for a king, and knelt by the wooden chest he'd salvaged from a shipwreck back in 1505. Inside, a scatter of gold coins, tarnished jewellery, fragments from everywhere and nowhere.

Caspian reckoned the chest had been stolen from tribespeople and smuggled aboard, only for fate to split the hull apart. The wreck sent men plunging to their deaths, and the sea feasted for weeks, big and small alike.

After fishing gold bars out of the chest, Caspian knew what he had to do: make an offer on the house upshore. Though calling it a house was generous. It was a castle, crumbling at the edges, but once the grandest, most macabre fortress on the coast. There was history in those stones. He'd be damned if it fell into unworthy hands and turned into a tourist trap.

So yes, it was dire that he got his hands on it immediately.

After bidding farewell to a place he knew he might never return to for another millennium, Caspian tucked the relics into an empty shark egg turned pouch and slipped through the door in the floor.

It sealed shut behind him.

A pair of starfish clung to the seabed, waving their tiny arms as he ascended from the trenches. Darkness thinned, the void paling to blue until dawn broke above.

Breaking the surface, he gathered his clothes on shore and made for a sun-warmed rock. There he sat to dry, letting his body return to itself. The weight of the deep lingered so far down, leaving you feeling all sorts of ways.

Caspian lay back in the sun, watching dolphins leap across the horizon while ferries traced their patrols through the water.

Once satisfied, he dressed and lumbered upshore, where his black stallion waited.

Caspian gave Grief a pat on the neck, his way of saying aye, I'm here.

The stallion snorted, tossing his inky mane as though he'd been waiting all along, eyes glossy, dark as stygian. Caspian took the reins, led him from the feed station, and slid into the Vantablack saddle before steering him up the shore road.

Folks turned to watch. He let them.

To them, he was only a stranger on a horse. Not a celebrity. No cameras. No phones.

No endless scroll of headlines dragging him toward a red carpet he never asked for.

Just him, in a natural state, hanging about forgotten corners of Scotland, where silence felt older than God, and rock music carried devil's branding.

Ironic, perhaps. For the town of Wraith had a history steeped in darkness.

The cliffs of Wraith rose ancient and jagged, carved long before men ever named them.

Once, they had been welded to the Appalachian vertebra, back when the world was one body before Pangaea split, and the earth cracked open. Some say hell itself tore loose in that sundering. Half its horrors dragged screaming into the deep, half set free to wander the waking world monsters with nowhere to go but into our sleep, and campfire tales. The sea is said to keep what it takes. But here? The land does, too.

The stones remember.

The waves remember.

And if you stand still on a night when the wind claws the gullies, or the tide chews the rock, you can hear it—the cries of a past not so long ago.