We’ve never been so busy.

The cave where we work used to be calm and, if not entirely devoid of sound, then split only by the crash of waves at high tide and the occasional cry of a woman who didn’t listen when we said listen this will hurt this will hurt this will hurt. Or maybe she did listen, but she thought we meant physical pain, when what we meant was your heart your heart your heart.

Now they are lined up outside the small entrance—not so small that even the late ones can’t slip through—but small enough that it is overlooked by those who do not recognize the tiny things, like sand and salt and nuance. They are lined up and their fear smells like the sea gone wrong and their panic is the silence of the drowned. They know to pretend they are here for the beach, the bodies buried in the sand, the sting of the jellyfish, the selection of stones for their pockets, anything but this. They talk about the weather and the waves, the shells upon the shore and the distance you can swim before drowning, but not about why they’re here. That’s obvious in the eclipses beneath their eyes, in the low exhales, in the rising swell of their bellies.

Before this year, we thought we were dying out. We were dying out. Who needed slippery-skin tales of shifting shore beings when they had sterile rooms and bright lights and drugs that sat in the gut like stones. Yes, we saw their hospitals, their doctors, their laws. We helped them way back, when salt made this cave sterile and the sun was light and drugs were algae and foraminifera, bitter and ground. We watched them recede from us, disbelieve in us, scorn us as some came to us still, in secret and silence.

We aren’t like gods. We don’t need their belief to stay present. But we do need their need. Without need, what are we but specks floating aimlessly in the sea? This is what we’ve been asking ourselves all these years. And we’ve been divided, true. Some went back to our beginnings. Others, like those of us in this cave and other secret pockets around the world, stayed. We have been alive a long time, and we know that need ebbs but it never truly disappears.

This one who needs us now is tender, so tender and furious and loud. Even walking in, she wails, a siren-song bouncing from wall to wall to wall and diving, finally, into the water below. We are not the ones hurting her body or her heart—that was before us, that is always before us—but the pain comes out here because it is safe and because those who come to us are worn down to their last layer of skin, their armor gone, their bodies laid trembling and bare before us. She asked for her friend in here with her, but we explained they couldn’t enter. Not because we want her to be alone—never that, alone is the worst, alone is how they get themselves into trouble again and again—but because we need her to need. That’s how the magic works.

We lay her down upon the stone, worn smooth and flat from use. We talk to her through the shells and the hag stones and the wind-whistled places in between.

It will only take a moment, we murmur, and we don’t know if that’s entirely true but we know it helps to hear it. What is time for creatures of the sea? The ebb and flow of nations, laws, rules, customs. We have seen them all. We remember them all. Listen this will hurt.

“I know,” she says, and we know she knows about hurt. We can see it in her tremble, in her wide eyes, in the stones she carries in the pockets of her heart.

We will do our best.

“I know,” she says again, and we know she’s heard that before, in better circumstances and worse. But she has come all the way here, listened to her gut, hid her travels, walked alone into this cave where nothing lives. So many never make it.

We begin.

Our magic, whatever you may have heard, is not kind or easy. It is teeth and tear, it is hard to look at and harder to hear. It is not her fault, and it is she who bears the brunt. Because that is the way it’s always been, and we can do many things, can change many things, but we cannot change that. Through it all, she does not turn away. Most of them don’t these days, and that, too, is a sea change. When the monsters of the myths are your saviors and your last resort and your worst nightmare and still you don’t blink or slam shut your eyes and turn away from what you’ve heard is magic and in truth is just a spell made of hunger and heartbreak.

“I’m sorry I didn’t think you were real,” she gasps between bouts of salt and swearing. We are done, but she doesn’t know it yet. To be a creature of blood and bone is to be disembodied sometimes. There is no helping it.

We have always been here. We will always be here. Tell the others.

“I will. I promise.”

We let her rest and then help her rise with apologies for the rush. We have never been so busy, we are sorry, there are so many.

So many things have left her now, but not her fury, not her ire, not her heart, coiled and beating fierce inside its shell. “I’m going to be a nurse,” she says as she pulls her coat around her. “And help people. Just like you.”

And we wonder, again, at the cycle from monster, murderer, nightmare to protector, hero, safekeeper. We wonder again at the rhythms of the moon and tide, of men and monsters, of how stones turn to sand turn to salt turn to sea. We remember being young, fearless, and afraid—always. We remember why we went to the caves and the crevices, grew tooth and claw, carved gills into our throats and taught ourselves to descend.

Before she goes, she kneels at the door, pulls every stone from her coat pockets, the big and small, the smooth and jagged, the holed and whole. She builds a small pile next to all the many other piles. She whispers a name to it, secret and silent.

The sea will come for it someday, just as it comes for us all. But not yet. Not yet.

For now, we stand firm. We ebb and flow. We rid ourselves of that which would pull us under.

We sink.

We rise.

We remember.