Tideglass Cove welcomed them like it didn’t know any better.

Sunlight danced on aquamarine waves. The sand was soft and warm. The air smelled faintly of sugarfruit and seafoam.

The beach, in its innocence, had no idea what was coming.

A faint hum broke the silence.
A lone seagull tilted its head.
A nearby crab, with the instincts of something that had seen too much, scuttled sideways at speed.

Then, with a soft thunk, a perfectly ordinary tavern door appeared—hovering three inches above the sand, as though nailed to nothing but good intentions.

It looked… unremarkable. A little battered. Possibly singed. The kind of door that belonged to a place where the ale argued back.

It creaked open.

“LAST ONE IN GETS PUNCHED!”

A blur. A scream. A red comet.

Rika Thunderale didn’t enter the water so much as obliterate it.

Her cannonball triggered a shockwave of spray that drenched a half-mile radius, flipped a seagull mid-flight, and launched a crab into orbit. A passing cloud changed direction out of sheer respect.

She surfaced, grinning. Her hair slicked back, her eyes wide, wild, and possibly vibrating.

“BEST! HOLIDAY! EVER! Wait—hang on—OH NO—”

Her expression twisted. Her arms snapped to her chest.

Something floated past Freya.

Without lifting her head, Freya reached out and plucked Rika’s bikini top from the air like it was a misfiled report.

In the shallows, Rika flailed—her significantly oversized chest bouncing left, right, and possibly into another time zone as she struggled to regain both her dignity and her swimwear.

“Crab got me again!” she howled.

Freya was already on the sand, stretched out on a towel with surgical precision. She wore a black one-piece designed for combat diving or possibly bomb disposal. Reinforced goggles hung from her neck, and her expression suggested she’d already spotted six health violations and was mentally drafting complaints to the universe itself.

Beside her, barely a shadow’s width away, Marie Merriwind adjusted the angle of a wide parasol. Her high-collared swim dress revealed nothing. Her expression revealed slightly less. She clutched a clipboard as if the laws of reality could be rewritten with enough margin notes.

“Two minutes,” Freya said flatly.
“I win the pool.”

“You cheated,” Marie muttered, ears twitching just beneath the edge of her bonnet. “You knew she’d self-destruct before her second breath.”

“She always does.”

Marie didn’t argue. She never did. But she adjusted her clipboard anyway, just enough to hide the faintest smile at the corner of her mouth.
She didn’t sit far from Freya.
She never did that either.

Rika sloshed back from the surf, red-faced, soaked, half-wrapped in a towel, and clutching her dignity like it owed her rent. Her bikini top—now recovered—dangled from Freya’s fingers like a disappointed parent.

Without looking, Freya handed it over.

“You designed the damn thing,” she said. “You’d think you could control it.”

“It has strings and betrayal!” Rika insisted, attempting to resecure it with all the precision of a raccoon doing origami.

“You’re tying it backwards.”

“Am I?” She paused. Looked down. “…It's fine.”

“You’ll explode out of it again before lunch.”

“I love you.”

“I will drown you.”

“Still love you.”

Marie adjusted her seat under the parasol, giving the ocean a look that could curdle weather systems.

“I came here for calm.”

“You came here,” said Carmella, appearing in a breeze of perfume and melodrama, “with us.”

Carmella did not walk. She descended.

The sand didn’t shift beneath her heels—it yielded. Respectfully.

Black-feathered wings arched behind her like theatre curtains, framing her silhouette in divine symmetry. Her halo shimmered overhead, mood-lit and unrepentant—an ever-shifting crown of light that refused to be ignored.

Her swimsuit was midnight silk and cardinal sin, stitched from ambition, heartbreak, and at least three declarations of war. Slender straps traced her form like whispers not meant to be overheard.

A crimson sash coiled around her hips, weightless and threatening. Her heels hovered just above the sand: not floating, simply too elevated to acknowledge dirt.

The sun paused. Somewhere, a bard wept and reached for his quill.

Freya didn’t look up.

“You’re going to give the ocean a complex.”

“It should try harder,” Carmella replied, striking a pose that felt like an invitation to disaster and a promise of poetry.

Her hair danced in the breeze. Her smirk promised ruin. And the sky—like the rest of the world—watched in held breath, waiting for the monologue.

Sylvie cartwheeled past next, trailing sparkles, ribbons, and absolutely no inhibition.

Her swimsuit was pastel chaos. Bows, frills, cut-outs, and suspicious glitter. Nothing explicitly revealing. Everything suspiciously designed. The kind of outfit that obeyed neither gravity nor regulation, probably illegal somewhere for aesthetic reasons alone.

“Who’s up for ice cream and irreversible decisions?” Sylvie sang, twirling a parasol like a wand.

“I’ve made seventeen decisions just watching you walk past,” muttered Marie.

Sylvie flashed a radiant grin. “I regret none of them!”

She spun once more, vanishing into the surf with a flourish of glitter.

Down by the tide, another figure stood motionless—barefoot in the foam, skin kissed by saltlight, eyes half-lidded and unreadable.

Lilith Bloodpetal didn’t move like the others. She drifted.

Her swimsuit was silk-black and blade-thin, clinging like it wanted to whisper secrets. Every line of her was danger in soft focus—elegant, effortless, and quietly wrong in a way no one could explain.

She didn’t try to draw attention.

She simply existed in a state of constant suggestion—like a threat dressed as an invitation.

Carmella glanced over, half-smirking. “Showing restraint, darling?”

Lilith tilted her head, as if considering the word. Then she smiled.

It was not a comforting smile.

They spread out across the beach, each in her own comfortable orbit of careful familiarity.

Rika returned—again—still wrestling with the laws of swimwear and physics. Freya offered her a third bikini top with the weary efficiency of someone who had seen too much and packed accordingly.

For a moment, everything was… good.

The sun was warm. The breeze was soft. Sylvie hadn’t opened a portal yet. Carmella lounged gracefully, inviting trouble. Marie made careful notes, as if scheduling could fend off fate. Even Lilith had drifted closer, quiet but unquestionably present.

No disasters. No monsters. No ancient prophecies.

Just sun, skin, sarcasm, and the kind of company that made entire pantheons nervous.

Not far away, hidden in the shadows of a dune, a figure lowered his binoculars.
He swallowed hard.

And questioned everything he thought he knew about loyalty, sanity, and the physical limits of red swimwear.

A trickle of blood slid from one nostril.

He wiped it away without comment.
Paused.
Then bolted—scrambling back over the dunes with the kind of urgency normally reserved for forest fires and divine retribution.

Far beneath the waves, something vast and ancient stirred.

The beach, in its innocence, had no idea what was coming.
But the sea did.