The fog in Harrow Bay tastes like rust and abandoned promises. Kael stands at the floating market when they notice: Corvus, their companion, has stopped casting a shadow.

The harbour district's mirror-pools are pulling Corvus under—vast reflections filled with every emotion ever spilled in desperation, every secret left like sediment. The district collects them like certain flowers collect light. Corvus is dissolving into mist, merging with broken feelings from exiles who came here because there was nowhere else to go.

"It's like coming home to a place you've never been," Corvus says, knee-deep in the pool, becoming translucent. "All these feelings they couldn't carry anymore. They're making room for me."

This is the pattern Kael recognizes: someone gets close enough to matter, then distance opens up. Kael survives by never staying still long enough for this to happen. They shift, adapt, leave before the world can leave them first.

A merchant appears: "To anchor them, give the harbour something it doesn't already have. A feeling it can't steal from the air. The mirrors take what's broken, abandoned. But they can't take what you're still willing to hold. The cost is honesty."

Kael has spent seventeen years learning to lie—not with words, but with their entire self. They have a gift: touching people floods them with emotions. So they wear gloves, stay distant, survive by never needing anyone.

But to save Corvus, Kael must remember what they've spent every day forgetting: being seven on the docks when their mother said she'd be back. The spreading understanding she was never coming back. Not because she didn't love them, but because love wasn't enough to override survival's weight.

The harbour's lesson: everyone leaves eventually. The only question is whether you leave first.

Kael touches the mirror-pool and breaks open—raw grief of a child who loved without reservation and was left anyway. Terror of learning survival and connection are mutually exclusive. The crushing understanding that in trying to protect themselves from abandonment, they've been doing the abandoning all along.

The harbour shudders. It has never encountered a feeling raw enough to be new.

Corvus rematerializes. Solid. "You stayed. You didn't run."

Kael doesn't put their gloves back on. They discover: the world doesn't end when you stop running. It's just standing. Just staying. Just allowing yourself to be found.

Content advisory: Parental abandonment and childhood trauma, emotional dissociation, body horror (dissolution/fading), grief, self-protective emotional shutdown. Mature content for audiences 16+.

This story explores: Protecting yourself from abandonment by never letting anyone close • Learning that avoiding being left means you become the one who leaves • Whether love and survival can coexist • Choosing connection over self-preservation • Physical manifestations of emotional wounds

A haunting fantasy about someone who survives by shapeshifting themselves, learning that the armor protecting them from hurt also prevents them from being loved—and discovering that the bravest thing is taking off your gloves and staying.

Runtime: 14:05

Recommended for: Listeners who love atmospheric dark fantasy, trauma processed through supernatural metaphor, protagonists learning to be vulnerable. Ages 16+

Part of the Fables Adventures collection.

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