The Silent Tide E-Book

C. F. Lark

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 78

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

The Silent Tide is a sweeping romantasy about a young woman bound to the sea by a dangerous secret. When her hidden truth is revealed, she is forced into a struggle between destiny and desire. As love rekindles with someone from her past, she must face betrayal, sacrifice, and a deadly curse that could cost her everything.

Leseprobe

C.F. LARK

The Silent Tide

A Romantasy of Love, Destiny and the Sea

Copyright © by C.F. LARK

Cover design by: CANVA

Publishing label: Favvy_MRC publications

Printing and distribution on behalf of the author:

tredition GmbH, Heinz-Beusen-Stieg 5, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany

This work, including its parts, is protected by copyright.

The author is responsible for the content. Any use without his consent is prohibited.

The publication and distribution are carried out on behalf of the author, who can be reached at: No 13, Balogun Road, 200242, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Germany Contact address according to the EU Product Safety Regulation

: [email protected]

C.F.LARK asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This is a work of fiction and the names and places are not real but entirely coincidental.

Editing by Favvy_MRC Publications Typesetting by Reesdy.com

First edition

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy Find out more at reedsy.com

For every girl who has ever felt torn between the world she was born into and the one her heart longs for.

Beneath the silence of the waves, a heart still beats, waiting to be heard.

Prologue

The Silent Tide

The first time the sea called my name, I was too young to understand.

In the dream, the water stretched endlessly, silver under a moon that seemed far too close. Waves rolled in silence, heavy with a promise I could not yet name. Sometimes I stood alone on the shore, the sand cool beneath my bare feet. Other times I was surrounded by faces—girls with eyes like glass, voices rising in songs that felt older than the stars. Their words were in a language I did not know, yet every syllable lived inside my bones.

And always, always, there was the pull.

The tide curled around my ankles like fingers, coaxing, urging me deeper. My heart raced with equal parts wonder and terror. If I stepped forward, I felt I would belong to something vast and unending. If I turned back, I feared I would never be whole.

Each morning I woke gasping, my hair damp as though the ocean itself had followed me into waking. I told myself it was nothing. A dream. A trick of the mind.

But dreams don’t leave bruises. They don’t leave salt on your skin.

And deep inside, even as a child, I knew the truth: the sea wasn’t just calling me. It was waiting.

I

Part One

INNOCENCE

Chapter 1

The Boy Next Door

Some memories come in fragments: a smile caught in sunlight, the sound of laughter carrying through an open window, the warmth of hands holding yours. Others arrive whole, like a tide sweeping in, and they never let go.

For me, the first memory that feels truly mine is not of my father, though he came home only one weekend a month. It is not even of my mother, though her presence was the steady thread running through every moment of my childhood.

It is of him.

The boy next door. The one whose laughter was always louder than mine, whose footsteps echoed mine even when I tried to run ahead, whose presence I carried like a second heartbeat.

Our mothers had been bound together since their own girlhood—two friends so close they were nearly sisters. Holidays meant there was no separation between our homes. When school closed, I went to his family’s house, and when his parents traveled, he came to ours. Our lives overlapped so often that people stopped asking why we were always together.

We went to the same school, wore the same uniforms, sat side by side in classes when teachers allowed it. He was quick, clever, always ready with a joke that made even the sternest teacher smile against her will. And me—my mother said I had beauty that shone too brightly for a child, though I never saw it that way. I saw only the stares of other girls, the whispered comments in corners, the way envy followed me like a shadow.

Together, though, we made sense. His boldness balanced my quiet. My carefulness steadied his recklessness. And beneath it all, there was a bond so natural it felt inevitable.

I loved him before I knew what love meant. Not the way of fairy tales or whispered confessions, but in the small, ordinary choices of childhood. I saved him the best pieces of food when we shared a plate. I listened when he whispered secrets in the dark. When the world laughed at his mistakes, I laughed too—but only to make him smile again afterward.

“You’re too serious,” he teased once, as we walked home from school, our bags heavy on our backs.

“And you’re too loud,” I shot back, though a smile tugged at my lips.

He grinned in triumph, as if he’d won some invisible game. That was the way of us.

But even in those golden days, shadows touched the edges of my life.

At night, the dreams began. Always the sea—vast, endless, shimmering silver beneath a swollen moon. Sometimes I stood alone on the shore, waves curling around my ankles like fingers. Sometimes there were others—girls with long hair that floated like seaweed, their voices rising in songs that pierced my chest. Their language was strange, older than anything I’d ever heard, but I understood it in my bones. They sang of belonging. They sang of return.

I woke gasping, hair damp, the taste of salt on my lips.

When I told my mother, she listened in silence, her hands tightening around the cup she held. Then she smiled, soft but too quick. Just a dream, she said. You must have overheard one of your father’s fishing stories. Forget it.

But forgetting was impossible.

The boy noticed, of course. He always noticed.

“You stare too much at the horizon,” he said one afternoon, when we sat by the school field, our backs pressed against the same tree.

“I do not,” I argued.

“You do. Like you’re waiting for something. Like you hear things no one else does.”

I didn’t answer. Because he was right.

At school, the others noticed him noticing me. Girls who had once smiled in my direction began to whisper behind their hands. Their envy sharpened each year, cutting deeper as we grew older. I heard them call me names, mocking the way he always chose me for his team, the way his eyes searched for me before anyone else.

I pretended not to care. But envy, I learned, can grow louder than love.

Still, in those early years, I clung to what we had. To the endless afternoons running barefoot until dusk. To the quiet talks under mango trees where he told me his dreams of the future. To the way he said my name—not as though I was ordinary, but as though I was something rare.

Those were the years when everything was golden, untouched. Before laughter turned to betrayal. Before the sea reached out to claim me. Before innocence was swallowed by the silent tide.

Chapter 2

Dreams and Shadows

The dreams did not leave me. They followed like a shadow, silent in daylight but impossible to ignore in the dark.

Some nights I stood ankle-deep in waves, the water pulling at me with the insistence of something long denied. Other nights I drifted farther, until the ocean swallowed the horizon and I was alone beneath a sky too heavy with stars.

But not always alone.

They appeared more often now—the girls of the water. Their hair floated around them like dark ribbons, their eyes gleamed with strange, unearthly light. Their mouths moved, shaping songs that stirred something ancient in me. They would smile when they saw me, as though I belonged to them already.

And when I woke, I carried the proof with me. Salt clung to my skin. My hair lay damp against the pillow. Sometimes, faint welts lined my arms where the tide had wrapped around me in the dream.

I stopped telling my mother. The first time I had, she dismissed it as nonsense. The second time, she pressed her lips together so tightly they nearly vanished. “Pray,” she said, her voice strained. “And forget.”

But she was hiding something. I could see it in the way her eyes flicked to the window when I spoke of the sea. In the way her hands trembled when I asked why she never let me swim.

I wanted to press her. I wanted answers. But I was still a child, and children are taught to obey before they are taught to question.

At school, the whispers grew louder.

“She thinks she’s better than us,” one girl sneered as I passed.

“Of course he likes her—she’s always clinging to him,” another muttered.

Their envy sharpened into cruelty, small cuts delivered with precision: an elbow shoved in the hallway, a book knocked from my desk, laughter that followed me when I turned away.

I pretended not to hear, but sometimes the words burrowed deep. And the worst of it was that I feared they were right—not that I thought myself better, but that he made me different.

Because he noticed me. Always.

When I struggled with a lesson, he leaned over with answers whispered too fast for the teacher to hear. When I was left out of games, he called me to his side. When the others laughed, he scowled at them, his loyalty fierce enough to silence their joy.