She was born on a night when the tide rolled back so far it left the seabed bare, like the ocean had taken a breath and forgotten to exhale.
They named her Quinta Quiz , because she arrived just before the fifth hour of the morning, screaming like she remembered where she came from.
Her mother died in childbirth. Her father vanished three days later, leaving only a note that read: "She is not mine."
By the time Quinta turned five, the doctors stopped trying to explain her. She didn't grow like other children. Her limbs stretched too long, then snapped back. Her eyes changed color with the moon. And most unsettling of all—she had four breasts.
Two sat high on her chest, soft and symmetrical, as nature might suggest. But beneath them, hidden unless you looked closely or touched deeply, were two more—smaller, paler, almost like scars. Or secrets.
The villagers called her Aberration. Some whispered Witch. Others, Blessing.
But no one dared touch her.
So Quinta grew up alone, raised by the sea and the stories told in hushed voices around fires. They said the ocean used to birth things—before maps were drawn and borders made. Things with many hearts, many mouths, many names. Creatures that walked between tides, neither god nor beast.
And once every hundred years, they returned.
She believed it, somehow—not as myth, but memory.
At twenty-two, Quinta lived in a crumbling cottage at the edge of the world. It perched on jagged cliffs overlooking the restless Atlantic, where storms came often and stayed longer than they should. The lighthouse behind her home hadn't worked in decades, its glass shattered, its light extinguished.
She kept it alive anyway.
Each day, she climbed the tower's rusted stairs and polished what remained of the lens until it gleamed like a star pulled from the sky. She oiled the gears, rewound the clockwork mechanism, and lit the oil lamp inside—even though no ship would see it through the fog.
It wasn't for ships.
It was for something else .
She didn't know why she did it. Only that the dream always came after she skipped a night.
In the dream, she stood on the shore while the sea opened like a mouth. From it rose a figure—tall, pale, and watching. Its eyes glowed silver, like coins dropped into deep wells. It never spoke, only pointed to her chest and smiled.
Then the tide surged, and she woke gasping.
Tonight, the wind howled like a warning. The sky churned with clouds shaped like claws. Quinta stood at the cliff's edge, her coat snapping in the gale, staring down at the black waves below.
Something was coming.
She felt it in her bones. In the twin pulses beneath each breast.
She went inside, lit the lamp, and waited.
And soon, the knock came.
Not on the door.
On the window .
She turned slowly, heart drumming in triple time.
There, pressed against the glass, was a hand—long fingers, webbing between them, nails like pearls.
Behind it, a face.
Smiling.
Waiting.
"Finally," it whispered through the storm.
And Quinta knew: this was not the beginning.
This was the reunion .