Notes from Mist Reef

The fog in Fog Reef Town is always smelling of rust - like a dead fish soaking in the deep sea, or like scales scraping against rotten iron. The day Lin Yan took over the family archives, he should have known that this was no ordinary town: the oak shelf contained his great-uncle's cowhide notebooks, with words like "Dagon" and "Blood Sacrifice" crawling across them, as well as webbed footprints on the beach and fish scale prints on the wrists of villagers. She is the seventh generation guardian and a sacrifice to the ancient gods. Knowing that three "pure-bloods" would be selected every twenty years to be fed to the deep sea under the altar, and knowing that resistance would only make Silver Scale crawl faster, he still clutched his hands and remembered to tear apart the mist's disguise. But the seaweed at the post office swallowed the distress letter, and Aunt Chen's wounds oozed silver mucus, and even her own heartbeat gradually became in tune with the whispers of the deep sea. When the fog was so thick that it blocked the light, and when the scales stuck to her wrists, Lin Yan finally understood: the guardian's "guarding" was never to guard the town, but to guard the countdown to the next festival for Dagon. And her notes are just another page destined to be submerged by rust. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.