The Tidehaven Codex
Chapter 1: Low Tide at Midnight
Rule One: Never touch velvet books barehanded.
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1. The Thirteenth Minute
The sea recoiled like something ashamed.
Liora Vale stood at the ragged edge of the Nova Scotia shore, her boots sinking into sand that breathed. Each grain pulsed faintly, as if the beach itself remembered the weight of her sister’s body twenty years prior.
Twenty-eight years old.
Twenty-eight breaths.
Twenty-eight steps to the staircase.
Her suitcase—stuffed with a mother’s last letter, antiseptic-dusted gloves, and a spool of sea-glass green thread—dragged at her wrist like an anchor. The tarnished lighthouse key in her other hand burned with cold.
She checked her watch.
00:13.
The thirteenth minute.
Today was her twenty-eighth birthday.
The same age Marinne had been when the tide had taken her, exactly twenty years ago.
Some cruel symmetry had pulled her back here. To the place that had swallowed Marinne first—and, if she wasn’t careful, would swallow her too.
A gasp of wind shoved her forward.
The tide had peeled back too far, baring a spiral staircase carved into the cliffside. Barnacles crusted the steps, their mouths gaping in silent screams. The stone glistened, not with water, but with a substance thicker, darker—ink. It oozed between the cracks, swallowing the moonlight whole.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Liora’s throat tightened. She’d seen this staircase in dreams.
The descent took twenty-eight seconds.
Her boots slipped on the steps. The algae wasn’t just slick—it gripped, tendrils curling around her ankles like pleading fingers. Halfway down, the air changed. Salt gave way to the stench of diesel and rotting paper, a smell that coated her tongue and made her teeth ache.
Then, the singing began.
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2. The Barnacles’ Song
At first, it was almost beautiful.
The barnacles’ voices wove through the mist, harmonizing in a language that slithered between Old English and something older. The melody was familiar—Happy Birthday—but the notes were wrong. Too slow. Too wet.
As Liora reached the final step, the song fractured.
Guttural Aramaic consonants stabbed through the tune. The cliff face trembled, dislodging barnacles that burst like rotten fruit on impact. Their innards weren’t flesh, but ink. Black droplets hissed where they struck the stairs, etching tiny runes into the stone:
Ask why, and you will drown.
Liora’s pulse hammered. She knew this place had rules. Marinne’s journals had warned her.
But the journals hadn’t mentioned the door.
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3. Tidehaven’s Maw
The archway ahead wasn’t stone or wood—it was whalebone, yellowed with age and strung with kelp like cobwebs. Beyond it, Tidehaven Library rose from the mist, its shelves curved like ribs around a hollow heart.
Liora crossed the threshold.
The ground moved. Not the sway of tides, but a peristaltic shudder, as if the library had swallowed her whole. Books half-buried in the silt twitched as she passed. One—bound in wax—snapped its covers at her ankles, whispering:
"She left the gate open. You know she did."
Liora kicked it aside. Her eyes locked onto the center of the atrium, where a single book pulsed on a pedestal.
Jane Eyre.
Velvet covers shimmered unnaturally, throbbing in time with her heartbeat. The gold-stitched title flickered between fonts:
Comic Sans: "Take me."
Old English: "Run."
Her mother’s voice sobbed from its pages.
"Liora… please…"
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4. Rule One Broken
Liora’s gloves were in her suitcase.
Too far. Too late.
Her bare fingertips brushed the velvet.
The book screamed.
The cover split like a wound, vomiting tendrils that stabbed under her nails. White-hot pain shot up her arm as the fibers burrowed, knitting through muscle and memory.
Then—the theft.
Not images. Not sounds. The texture of her mother’s embrace—the scratch of her wool sweater, the warmth of her collarbone against Liora’s cheek—was ripped from her neurons. The void left behind itched, swarming with whispers:
"You let Marinne die." (Comic Sans)
"Salt remembers." (Old English)
Liora wrenched her hand free. The tendrils snapped, spraying ink that stank of vanilla and blood.
Jane Eyre sighed and sealed itself, now heavier by exactly one memory.
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5. The Door That Hungers
Liora staggered backward. Her right hand was numb, the fingerprints blurred into pale smears. The barnacles’ song crescendoed, the Aramaic syllables now forming visible runes in the air:
"NEVER TRUST SLOW-MOVING REFLECTIONS."
Ahead, the library’s heart-door loomed—black seawood warped by centuries, its surface etched with:
Rust patterns that resolved into Latin palindromes when stared at too long.
A vertical crack that pulsed like a vein.
Liora pressed her numb palm to the crack.
The door unzipped itself with a wet chuckle, exhaling air that reeked of saltwater taffy and gunpowder—Marinne’s favorite scents.
Behind her, the barnacles fell silent.
Before her, the shadows twisted into something with too many teeth.
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