Moon-Bright Tides: Lunar Requiem, #1

By RoAnna Sylver

The night sky is very dark without a moon, and there hasn't been one for decades. Without one to govern the oceans, it falls to Riven, reluctant sea-witch, to sail out alone every night across the midnight ocean to cast a spell to call in the tides.

She hates it. Hates the moonless dark, hates the endless deep, and hates the fact that without a witch to sing in the tides, sea and land alike would fall to ruin. Riven faces her worst fear every night for years - until she meets a mermaid. Her new friend is lost, starving, and just as lonely as she is. And now that they've found one another, neither of their nights on the midnight sea will be the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RoAnna Sylver
• Release date: Jan 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386405306

RoAnna Sylver

RoAnna Sylver is passionate about stories that give hope, healing and even fun for queer, disabled and other marginalized people, and thinks we need a lot more. Aside from writing oddly optimistic dystopia and vampire books, RoAnna is a blogger, singer, and artist. RoAnna lives with family near Portland OR, and probably spends too much time playing videogames. The next adventure they would like is a nap in a pile of bunnies.

Book preview

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

MOON-BRIGHT TIDES

First edition. January 25, 2018.

Copyright © 2018 RoAnna Sylver.

Written by RoAnna Sylver.

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Moon-Bright Tides

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Moon-Bright Tides

Riven could never look at the sea without thinking of drowning. She only had to catch a glimpse of waves, and her heart would constrict, blood running cold and breath rushing from her lungs. Facing her worst fears never got easier, though she’d told herself it would for years. Because every night, she was bound to venture out of her bright, warm house and into the silent water, swaying in her clamshell boat under the stars, the sea as dark beneath her as the moonless sky above. And every night, the tide came in and carried her home.

She did it all with a shell and a song. A spiral shell hung around her neck on a chain, and when she was about a mile away from shore, she raised it to the sky and sang the song, asking the moon—wherever it was—to call the tides.

Riven had never seen its light. Nobody she knew had. Where it should have been was a hole, darker even than the rest of the night sky. Without the moon to guide the tidewaters, the job fell to a witch, singing a song and dreading the black depths. But even if there was no moon to hear her song anymore, the ocean obliged.

Waxing, waning, full and blood,

Harvest, gibbous, wolf and snow.

Flower, worm, corn and cold,

Let your light shine down.

The song and the shell had been in Riven’s family for generations, passed not from parent to child, but to whomever could sing the ocean currents into motion. Her older cousins—a pair of twins, blessed to harmonize and sing in the tide-flow together—had once told her that a fallen piece of the moon itself lay in the center of the spiral shell, but finding out would mean breaking it into pieces, and it was far too precious a treasure.

Too precious a treasure, she thought bitterly, the shell’s sharp edges digging into her palms. Not nearly as precious as hearing her cousins laugh again. Her mother’s eyes, her father’s strong-armed hug that had lifted her off the ground, spinning, flying. But the moon was long gone, and now, so were they, and Riven wanted to smash the thing. These nights, it felt like nothing but an anchor, dragging her down.

We remember

When you smiled above.

We are waiting

Here for you.

From here, she could barely see lights on the beach. Her dock, her house, the only one for