🐟 The Marked: Black Hollow Bay

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📖 The Storyteller’s Library

The scar wasn’t from the fall.  
It wasn’t from the rocks.  
It was from him.  

The Storyteller’s finger traced the jagged line across the page, stopping before it touched. The ink looked less like a wound and more like a thread pulled tight beneath the paper’s skin.  

The book had appeared overnight. Its edges damp, its smell not faint but suffocating—a cold stench of rotting salt and glacial decay that tightened the throat, as if the air itself was turning to water.  

Its title was wetly embossed, letters swollen, reflecting light with the sheen of a fish just pulled from the lake:  

The Marked: Black Hollow Bay  

---

The Tale

They said it was a local legend.  
A cryptid born from lake rot and whispered superstition.  
The Fishman of Black Hollow Bay.  

Scales like weathered armor.  
Eyes like fogged glass.  
A mouth that opened sideways, like a secret meant for no one.  

The protagonist didn’t believe.  
Not until the night they went out alone.  

The lake was wrong.  
Not still—drained.  
No ripple, no sound. The silence pressed in, leaving only breath and heartbeat.  

Then—ripples.  
Soft. Deliberate.  
Not from wind. Not from fish.  
From something watching.  

A single break in the surface.  
Not movement, but disruption—like black glass cracking.  

It rose.  
Not fully. Just enough.  
A silhouette against the moonlight—long, skeletal limbs, gills flaring in slow, rhythmic sighs.  

They ran.  
But the Fishman didn’t chase.  
It didn’t need to.  
Running felt pointless, like thrashing against invisible pressure.  

They tripped near the shore.  
The creature reached out.  
Webbed fingers, strong, unyielding.  

The touch was cold.  
But what came with it was worse:  
A crushing transfer—lungs collapsing, gills opening, green light swallowing thought, the weight of water pressing down until identity itself dissolved.  

The pain wasn’t physical.  
It was the shock of becoming something else.  

They escaped.  
Barely.  

But the scar remained.  
A jagged mark across the shoulder, shaped like a fin.  
It never healed.  
It pulsed under the full moon, hot and angry.  
It ached with a homesickness that wasn’t theirs.  

The mark was a compass pointing toward the dark.  

And sometimes, in dreams, they saw him again.  

Waiting.  

Not angry.  

Patient.  

---

The Library

The Storyteller closed the book.  
The room smelled of algae, rust, wet stone—the lingering scent of the lake.  

On the desk, a damp outline remained—scaled, finned, unmistakable.  

He touched it.  
Warmth surged up his arm.  
And for a heartbeat, he felt not just the scar, but the terrible weight of the lake itself pressing down on his chest.  

Not his.  
But close enough to make him shiver.  

---

Author’s Note

Some marks are earned.  
Some are warnings.  
Some… are invitations.  

If you’ve ever walked away from something you shouldn’t have survived—something that felt like a glimpse into another reality…  

Check your skin.  

You might be Marked too.  

Drop a comment with your favorite cryptid, urban legend, or unexplained encounter.  
Let’s see how deep this goes.  

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