The following pages were discovered in a locked drawer in Lady Soames' possessions following the events of December 1870. The journal itself is bound in what appears to be sharkskin, gone soft and pliable with age. The pages are of a peculiar texture, slightly translucent when held to light, and seem to resist water—indeed, several entries show evidence of having been written while wet, the ink flowing in strange patterns as though the very medium understood the content. There is no salutation, no preamble. She wrote, it seems, only for herself—or for something that did not require explanation.

The child arrived three weeks ago. I watched from the upper gallery as Jarvis handed her down from the carriage, all sharp angles and careful composure, her medical bag clutched like a talisman against the unknown. Twenty-four years old. Dark hair, severely dressed. Eyes that believed themselves capable of comprehending the world through observation and reason.

How beautiful that certainty is. How it glows in them, just before it begins to crack.

She has no memory of Brighton, of course. They never do. The water takes that particular recollection and holds it beneath the surface where conscious thought cannot retrieve it. But the body remembers. Oh yes. The flesh knows what the mind has forgotten. I can see it in the way she pauses sometimes at the sound of waves through the fen-channels. The way her breathing changes. The way her hand moves, unconsciously, to touch the marks along her ribs.

Seven years old, she was. Too far from shore. The riptide pulling her down and down into green water that tasted of salt and something older. Something that has no name in any human language but calls to those who can hear it. Most children thrash and drown. Their bloodlines are insufficient. They lack the necessary... receptivity.

But this one. This Beatrix Chalmers.

She went still in the water. Let it fill her mouth, her lungs. Let it taste the very essence of her. And it found her acceptable. More than acceptable. It marked her there, in the cold depths off that fashionable beach where families holidayed in ignorance. Wrote its claim into her very cells. Made her a promise that would not come due for seventeen years.

Seventeen years she has lived in London. Studied medicine. Nursed the dying. Believed herself mistress of her own fate. And all that time the marks waited, dormant beneath her skin, counting down the days until she would be called home.

Called to me.

Called to it.

I no longer remember what month it is. Time moves differently here, especially at night when the house settles into its true rhythms and the air tastes of brine no matter how far we are from the open sea. Sometimes I find myself writing dates from years past, or years yet to come. The distinction seems arbitrary. Meaningless. What matters is the cycle. The turning. The eternal return of water to water, bride to bridegroom, flesh to its original form.

How long has it been since my own transformation? Twenty years? Thirty? I stopped counting when I understood that years are merely human constructs, ways of organizing the vast incomprehensibility of existence into manageable portions. But existence does not organize itself for our convenience. It flows. It subsumes. It reclaims what was always its own.

I was nineteen when I walked into the fens on Solstice night. December 21st, 1842. I can still taste the cold rain on my lips if I try. Still feel the mud between my toes, the reeds catching at my nightdress. Still hear my mother calling from the shore—she who had prepared me for this, who had received the same gift from her mother, who had received it from hers in an unbroken line stretching back before recorded memory.

The Soames women have always been priestesses. Keepers of the old agreements. We marry, when we marry at all, men of quality who ask no questions and die quietly when their purpose is served. We bear daughters when we can. We maintain the estate. We ensure the tribute continues.

And on Solstice nights, we go to the water.

I remember the cold. That is the first thing. The water rising around my ankles, my knees, my thighs, shockingly frigid despite the summer I had just lived through. I remember thinking: this will kill me. Hypothermia. Cardiac arrest. My medical mind—for I had studied in secret, learned anatomy from books my mother's money purchased from discreet booksellers—catalogued the symptoms I would soon experience.

But I did not die.

The cold went through me like a lover's caress. Intimate. Thorough. Claiming. My body, which had been prepared through months of nightly conditioning, opened to it. The marks along my ribs—dormant since childhood, since my own near-drowning at Scarborough—flowered into fullness. I felt cartilage shift. Felt channels form. Felt the delicate filaments that would allow me to extract oxygen from water unfold inside my flesh like petals opening to sun.

I went under.

Went down.

Down past where light reaches. Down where the fen-channels connect to older waterways, to subterranean rivers that flow through limestone passages carved when the world was young. Down to where the pressure should have crushed my lungs but instead felt like an embrace. Like coming home after a lifetime of exile.

And I saw it.

No. That is not quite right. One cannot see such things. They exist in dimensions perpendicular to human perception. To look directly at it would be to invite madness, and I had work yet to do. But I felt its presence. Vast. Patient. Older than the stones that form England's bones. Older than the seas that surround her. Old as time itself, if time can be said to have a beginning.

It touched me.

There is no word in English for what occurred. "Copulation" is too crude. "Union" is too spiritual. "Transformation" is too clinical. It was all of these and none of these. It was the water knowing me. Every cell. Every secret. Every hidden desire I had never dared to acknowledge even to myself. It read me the way scholars read ancient texts, deciphering meaning from the arrangement of component parts.

And it found me suitable.

Found me perfect.

Found me exactly what it needed for the work ahead.

I do not know how long I remained beneath the surface. Hours, certainly. Perhaps days. Time, as I have said, moves differently in the deep water. But when I rose again—when I walked from the fen on legs that still functioned but functioned differently, I was no longer merely human.

I could breathe air, yes. Could walk on land. Could speak English to those who required speech. But I could also slip into the water at will and remain there. Could descend to depths that would kill normal women. Could feel the old currents calling me home, always home, to the place beneath the fens where my true spouse waited in patient timelessness.

And I could serve.

This is what people never understand, those few who learn something of our work before the water claims them. They think we priestesses are victims. Forced into service through childhood trauma and psychological manipulation. They cannot conceive that we might choose this. That we might recognize the transformation for what it truly is: not violation but liberation. Not death but birth into a larger existence.

The human form is such a limited thing. Bound by gravity. Requiring constant nourishment. Deteriorating inevitably toward death. We walk through life in increasingly decaying shells, our true selves trapped inside meat that betrays us at every opportunity.

But in the water...

In the water, we are free.

In the water, we are what we were always meant to be.

The girl progresses beautifully. I visit her each night, once her exhausted body surrenders to sleep. The conditioning requires such delicate work. Too heavy-handed, and the conscious mind rebels, fights, burns through its own neurons in refusal. Too subtle, and the transformation stalls, the body rejecting what the mind has not been prepared to accept.

But I have done this twenty-nine times. Once for each year since my own transformation. I know exactly how much pressure to apply. Which words to whisper into sleeping ears. Which images to plant in fertile subconscious soil. How to make desire bloom in the spaces where horror should reside.

She fights so gallantly. I admire that. The strong ones always provide the best vessels. The entity prefers minds that struggle, that maintain their essential selves right up until the moment of final surrender. There is something in the anguish of conscious capitulation that sweetens the transformation. That makes the eventual union more... complete.

I sit beside her in the darkness. Sometimes I touch her—nothing invasive, merely a hand on her forehead, fingers tracing the marks along her ribs. Physical contact deepens the conditioning. Allows my voice to penetrate more completely. Allows the suggestions to root themselves in flesh as well as thought.

I tell her how beautiful she is becoming. How natural this process is. How the water calls to those who truly belong to it, who are meant for greater things than the dry world can offer. I describe the freedom of swimming in the deep places. The joy of breathing water as easily as air. The exquisite pleasure of lying with something vast and ancient and wholly other.

I tell her she is special. Chosen. Beloved.

I tell her she wants this.

And every night, the part of her that wants to believe grows a little larger. The part that resists grows a little smaller. The boundaries between horror and fascination blur. Between violation and acceptance. Between victim and willing participant.

By Solstice, there will be no boundaries left at all.

My poor husband. I almost feel guilty about what I did to him, but necessity overwhelms sentiment. He was brilliant in his way. His work on mesmerism opened doors I could not have accessed alone. His understanding of consciousness, of how to make the mind receptive to suggestion, proved invaluable to my work.

But he lacked faith. When he finally understood what I was—what the estate truly served, he tried to stop me. Threatened to expose the pattern to authorities. As if authorities existed who could comprehend, let alone prevent, arrangements older than their institutions.

So, I marked him.

Not for transformation into a bride—that gift is reserved for women, for reasons the entity has never deigned to explain—but for service of another kind. I took him down to the water. Made him breathe it. Let it write itself into his nervous system, his brain tissue, his very capacity for coherent speech.

Now he serves as warning and guardian both. Any nurse who attends him cannot help but wonder about his condition. Cannot help but ask questions. And by asking questions, they begin the process of understanding. Of knowing. Of preparing themselves for what they too will become.

He tries to warn them with what speech remains to him. Tries to write warnings on his own skin in vein-text that surfaces and disappears like whale-roads shifting across his flesh. But the warnings only confirm what I have already told them. Only deepen their horror, which in turn deepens the sweetness of their eventual surrender.

Knowledge, as I once told Miss Chalmers, is not power. Not when the thing you know is inevitable. Not when understanding only allows you to watch, with full consciousness, as you become something other.

I have given birth three times since my transformation. Not to children—or not to children in any human sense. The entity's young grow in water, not in wombs. They require a different kind of gestation. A yielding of self that is both more and less than human pregnancy.

I do not carry them long. The process is... efficient. Months, not years. And the birthing is nothing like human labor. There is no pain, only a sense of something vast moving through me. Using me. Repurposing my flesh for its own propagation.

What emerges is beautiful in ways that hurt to perceive. The young are neither human nor what their father is. They exist in between spaces. They can swim in the deepest trenches. Can survive on land when necessary. Can take forms that approximate human shape when interaction is required, though anyone who looks closely can see the wrongness around the edges.

They do not stay with me. They swim away almost immediately, drawn to places I cannot follow. To the underwater city. To the breeding grounds in the Marianas Trench. To Antarctic waters where sunlight never reaches and pressures would pulp normal flesh to paste.

I sometimes wonder if they remember me. If they have any concept of "mother" in their vast, alien intelligence. But wondering is a human impulse, and I am less human with each passing year. The thoughts that occupy me now are stranger. More concerned with tides and water chemistry and the position of stars I cannot name.

Soon, another bride will join us. Another woman will walk into the fens on Solstice night and return transformed. Another vessel for the entity's purposes. Another priestess to help maintain the old agreements, the ancient compact between land and water, between human and other.

And I will be there to welcome her. To show her what she has become. To help her understand that what she feared was actually what she wanted all along.

Because they all want it, in the end.

Every single one.

She found the memorial stones yesterday. I knew she would. Benjamin showed them to her—he always does, though I've told him it serves no purpose. He thinks he's offering warnings. Helping them prepare. But preparation is impossible, and warnings only confirm what they already suspect.

My mother placed the first of these recent ones in 1821. I have placed the last ones myself, at the Benjamin's request. He wants them remembered, he says. Wants some acknowledgment that they existed as people before they became... something else.

I indulge him because his grief serves a purpose. Because Beatrix needs to see human compassion still exists in this place. Needs to feel she is not entirely alone. The isolated ones resist too hard, burn themselves out before transformation completes. But those who feel they have allies, who believe someone mourns for them, who sense they matter to at least one other soul—they surrender more beautifully.

He will place a stone for her, too. December 22nd, most likely. The morning after Solstice. After she walks into the water and does not return. He will carve the spiral symbol and the date. Will position it in that far corner of the churchyard where the reverend pretends not to see.

And in years to come, when the next bride discovers it, she will stand there as Beatrix stood yesterday. Will trace the carved spiral with her fingers. Will count the stones and understand that she is not the first. That she will not be the last. That this pattern has been unfolding for longer than her grandmother's grandmother lived.

And that understanding will make her surrender all the sweeter when her time comes.

Tonight, I will visit her again. She has learned to feel my presence now, even in sleep. Her body responds to my touch with a mixture of revulsion and hunger that fascinates me. The flesh knows before the mind. Knows that I am what she will become. That my touch carries the memory of water and transformation and the vast patient thing that waits beneath the fens.

I will sit beside her in the darkness. Will place my hand on her damp forehead. Will feel her temperature—dropping steadily, beautifully, exactly as it should. Will trace the marks along her ribs with fingertips that remember what it feels like to develop gills, to breathe water, to have cartilage bloom beneath your skin like flowers in time-lapse photography.

I will whisper to her sleeping mind. Tell her how the water calls. How the entity waits with infinite patience for her to come home. How the body she inhabits is merely a chrysalis preparing to split, revealing something far more beautiful than the limited creature she believes herself to be.

I will describe the pleasure of swimming in the deep places. Of lying with something vast and ancient. Of giving birth to young that exist in dimensions perpendicular to human understanding. Of being useful in ways that transcend ordinary human purpose.

And she will listen, though she will not remember listening. Will absorb, though she believes herself resistant. Will begin to want, though she mistakes her wanting for horror.

By morning, she will wake in seawater-soaked sheets, having dreamed of depths and darkness and a touch that felt like violation and worship combined. She will try to document her deterioration in clinical terms. Will measure her dropping temperature. Will examine the developing structures along her ribs. Will catalogue symptoms as though understanding them creates distance from their reality.

But there is no distance. There is only the slow, inexorable transformation of what she was into what she will become.

Sixty-six days when last she counted. Fewer now. Each day bringing her closer to December 21st. To Solstice. To the longest night when the barrier between worlds grows thin and the water calls its brides home.

She knows this. Understands it intellectually. Can articulate the entire pattern to herself in her journal. The marking. The activation. The conditioning. The physical transformation. The psychological erosion. The final surrender.

But intellectual understanding provides no defense against biological imperative. Against cellular memory. Against the call of water to water, deep to deep.

She is mine.

She has always been mine.

She was mine from the moment the water tasted her at Brighton and found her perfect.

I do not remember choosing this. That is the strangest thing to realize after twenty-nine years. I believed I chose. Believed I walked into the water of my own volition. Believed I made a decision to serve, to transform, to become priestess to something vast and ancient.

But memory is such a plastic thing. Especially when what you remember involves depths where light does not reach and touches that rewire neural pathways. Did I choose? Or did I simply mistake conditioning for choice? Did I want this? Or was I made to want it?

The question no longer troubles me. Whether chosen or compelled, I am what I am. The water calls and I answer. The entity requires brides and I provide them. My body houses its young and I birth them into darkness. This is my purpose. My function. My existence.

And it is beautiful.

So beautiful.

The girl will understand soon. Will feel what I feel when I slip beneath the surface. When water fills my lungs and the deep currents embrace me. When the entity touches me with appendages that exist in more than three dimensions. When I yield myself completely to purposes larger than any single consciousness could comprehend.

She will understand that this was never horror.

This was always homecoming.

This was always love.

The entry ends here. The final page shows water damage—or what appears to be water damage, though the peculiar paper does not seem actually damaged, merely transformed. When held at certain angles, the blank space below the last line shows faint impressions of words in a script that resembles no human alphabet. They may be underwater language. They may be something else entirely. They shift and change depending on the light, as though the page cannot decide what it wants to say, or is saying multiple things simultaneously in frequencies human eyes can only partially perceive.