She did not come in supplication.
She came to banish it.
To cast light into the dark and watch the shadows scatter.
She thought it would fear her, the thing from the deep.
The one that was whispered about in temple ruins and salted margins.
She thought she had earned its fear.
The one that asked for no worship, and received it anyway.
Faith had never believed.
Not in gods.
Not in oceans.
Not in herself.
⸻
She stepped into the chapel at low tide.
A ruin of stone teeth and rotted pews, half-consumed by the sea.
They said the creature nested there, in silt and silence.
She brought a torch, and a blade.
Both shook in her hands.
She lit the flame.
And the sea did not recede.
Instead, it rose.
Not violently.
Not even with purpose.
Inevitable. Obvious, really.
As if it had been waiting. As if it were tired of pretending it wasn’t listening.
Something shifted behind the altar.
Wet sound. Velvet mass.
A ripple of impossible movement.
Faith lifted the torch.
It died.
Darkness pressed against her, not like an enemy, but like a hand on the shoulder of a child too frightened to sleep.
“You came,” it said, without speaking. “Yet you doubt?”
She opened her mouth—to pray? To scream? To agree?
“I am. You are. What is there to doubt?”
She wasn’t sure.
The torch hit the floor, forgotten.
⸻
The tendril brushed her cheek.
Like a blessing.
Like a benediction from a faith she never wanted.
She realised she was crying, her body’s salt becoming one with the ocean.
Crying, but not from fear.
From recognition. From finally being seen. Known.
The thing she never believed in… it had always believed in her.
It believed, and it had waited.
Not for her obedience.
For her arrival.
⸻
She did not leave the chapel.
She remains. Still, and not alone.
Her torch lies rusted at the altar.
Salt crusts its edges, like it tried to burn underwater.
She no longer brings the flame to this place.
No more does she speak of gods.
She no longer speaks in ways most people understand.
She listens. To things that do not speak in sound.
Sometimes she hums—not songs, but tones.
Low, impossible frequencies that make the bones behind your ears ache. Non-tunes that make you close your eyes and dwell inside them.
The villagers come sometimes.
They sit in the shallows, wet to the waist in the drowned pews.
They do not ask questions.
They bring no offerings.
Sometimes they cry.
Sometimes they sleep.
Sometimes they leave with their hands stained faintly blue or green, with salt rime crusting the corners of their mouths.
No one knows why.
They call her Faith, still, but not as a name.
As a condition.
A state of being one can enter, briefly, if they sit very still, and let the water touch their lips but not their tongues.
She does not pray.
She does not command. She simply is.
And that is enough.