The sea took Fintan’s mast an hour before it took his nerve. He clung to the splintered hull, salt tearing at his eyes, and steered by instinct alone toward the one fixed thing in a world gone entirely to water — the light of Duskmere, burning atop its black rock like a coal that refused to drown.
He was close enough to make out the tower’s stones when the shape unwound itself from around the base.
At first he took it for a trick of the spray, a coil of shadow thrown by the storm. Then a wave crashed white against the rock and the shadow held its form through the wash — scaled, immense, wrapped three times around the lighthouse like a serpent guarding an egg too precious to name. Its head lifted into the wind, and for one unbearable moment Fintan was certain he had rowed his last mile only to be eaten within sight of shore.
But the wyrm did not turn toward him. It turned toward the sea.
A wave rose behind his little boat, tall as a church spire, black-mouthed and hungry — and the creature’s tail lashed out from the rock and broke it before it broke him, scattering the wave to foam and mist. Sunbeams found a seam in the clouds just then and struck the tower gold, and in that light the dragon’s eye found Fintan’s, amber and old and utterly unsurprised to see him.
It did not speak. It did not need to. Something in him understood, the way a compass understands north, that he had not stumbled onto this shore by chance, and that the light had not called every drowning sailor home the way it had called him.
He beached his ruined boat at dawn beneath the tower, and though the wyrm was gone by then, coiled back into rock or shadow or memory, Fintan stayed on Duskmere Point the rest of his days — waiting, without quite knowing for what, to be recognized again.