The Watersprites Chapter 13 – Dr. Therese Varn knows
Stockholm. The office in the University’s Department of Evolutionary Biology is quiet. Its mid evening. June. Few people are around. Mid-summer twilight fills the room.
Dr Therese Varn sits at a window. At her elbow, a faded edition of Myth as Memory lay open to a chapter titled The Drowned Child and the Singing Bone.
On the screen, a video from Bruges played in the loop: Freya emerging from the rest pool like something surfacing from time itself. A shimmer along the shoulders. The slight elongation of the arms. Her pupils—when caught in the Belgian sun—had slit vertically, feline or cetacean. And there, above the browline: a rippling arch of muscle or cartilage, flexing like the crest of a breaching whale.
Varn paused the frame. Zoomed. Pixelated. Still, it was unmistakable.
She sipped her lukewarm coffee.
“They’ve reached the surface,” she said quietly, as though speaking to the ghost of her mentor. Her voice held no triumph—only confirmation.
She leaned back and tapped her stylus against the tablet’s edge, bringing up old files.
Project Aegir. The 1999 Lake Mjøsa Incident. The unconfirmed Orkney resonance. The child was found near Białowieża Forest with partially fused toes and an unknown haemoglobin subtype. All cold cases. All reopened now.
She drew a breath through her nose. Not fear. Not excitement. Something stranger. Recognition.
“And they’re not alone,” she added. Not a warning. A witnessing.
Varn touched a soft key on her device. A satellite map bloomed to life—infrared pulses from southern Sweden, freshwater signals she’d been tracking for three years, not in the visible spectrum, but in ways her instruments understood.
She removed her headphones and made a note in her analogue journal:
Vertical pupils confirmed. Cranial crest developing. Mimics deep-sea hunter physiology.
Social mimicry is intact. But autonomy is growing.
They are not experiments. They are emerging.
Then, in ink darker than science ever requires, she wrote:
We are not their creators. We are their descendants.
She closed the journal. Pulled her coat tight. And made a single call to a journalist she’d once mentored, a woman who still believed in off-record stories.
“Ask questions at Folkestone” she said. “But don’t touch them. Not yet.”
Then she hung up, her gaze fixed on the rain-slick glass, where the street outside blurred like a shoreline receding.
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