Doran had been the Nightbell’s only survivor for three years, living alone on the wreck where the sea had left it — half-beached, half-claimed by a tree that had somehow taken root in the rotting deck and grown tall enough to hold stars in its branches on clear nights.
He wasn’t alone anymore, not since the octopus arrived. It had come with the third winter, vast and glowing violet against the black water, and settled into the shallows around the wreck as if it, too, had chosen this exact ruin to call home.
“You could leave,” it told him one night, tentacles trailing light through the shallows like slow-moving comets. “The current would carry you south, to land, to people. I’ve felt it change these past few weeks. It wants to take you somewhere.”
“I know,” Doran said. He’d felt it too. “I keep telling myself tomorrow.”
“Why?”
He looked up at the tree growing through his ship’s broken ribs, its branches thick with a galaxy he’d once have called impossible. “Because this is the first home I’ve had since the wreck, even if it’s a strange one. Leaving feels like losing another ship.”
The octopus was quiet a long while, lights pulsing slow and thoughtful in the dark water. “Then bring a piece of it with you,” it finally said. “A branch. A root. It doesn’t stop being home just because it moves.”
Doran left with the current the following spring, a small cutting from the star-tree wrapped carefully in cloth. It took root wherever he finally settled, and grew — slowly, stubbornly — into something that looked, on clear nights, almost exactly like the sky he’d left behind.