The Fog Nights

They came on the fog nights — the quiet ones, when the sea flattened to glass and the air tasted of rust. They were not ships exactly. They were older than ships. They moved beneath the waterline, vast and slow, trailing phosphorescence like cloaks.

She did not know what they were. She did not need to.

She only knew that when the light swept across the water, they turned. They followed the beam like a path. And in the morning, the sea was calm, and the rocks were clean, and no wreckage washed ashore.

“Every light is a promise,” her grandmother had told her once. “You don’t have to understand who you’re making it to.”

She thought of that often. Especially on the still nights, when something vast and unknowable surfaced just beyond the rocks — and waited, patient as stone, for the beam to show it the way home.