Zurich: Trust Amellal, 4:59 AM 

Tarmo leaves the blue-lit command centre on autopilot, muttering something to Sandi about “ten minutes.”

The corridors outside feel colder, emptier—a different planet from the round-the-clock surveillance inside. He bypasses the kitchenette, shuffles into the locker-room showers, and starts the water scalding hot, as if heat and steam could cleanse not only fatigue, but the gnawing sense that he’s lost the only real thing he had left to protect.

He stands under the punishing jets, hands braced against chilly tile, chest burning. His mind replays Elena’s last moments: dodging gunfire, the wild arc of her coat, the impossible way she seemed to disappear below the surface of waist-deep water. Over and over. His jaw aches from clenching it. He lets the water wash grit from his face, his beard.

Memories flood him—a dozen moments with Elena. He can’t help himself; she seeps through even the coldest barricades. The longing isn’t pure, isn’t gentle—it bites and burns, the stubborn ache of wanting what you might never find again.

Her laughter echoed in field tents, her hands darted over maps, and the fierce, exasperated energy she brought to every room. Her voice, always a little mocking, but certain: “If you want to know a country, get lost in its stories, not just its roads.”

He closes his eyes, lets his head thud softly against the tile.

The ache isn’t just in his chest now—it drops, thrumming and restless, heat pooling between his legs. He hates himself for it: the wrong timing, the primitive necessity, all the frustration of watching, never touching. But his hand drifts to his cock anyway, stroking slow and rough. He imagines Elena, not dead, not disappeared, but moving through shallows, water curling around her thighs, hair half-loose—untouchable, uncontainable, fucking radiant with life and mockery.

His breath shortens.

He bites his lip. His hips jerk into his palm, tension mounting—not pleasure, but release demanded after days of sleeplessness and terror. As he comes, hips spasming, he clenches his teeth and a fragment of Mikael’s words floats up—clearer than the streaming water:

Sometimes, the old stories are more than metaphors.

The phrase hits him with the force of a spell, a curse, a prayer. And then another memory: a fisherman’s muttered warning on the lakeshore, half-lost in dialect: “Not all that goes under comes up the same way. Some don’t come back at all.”

Tarmo’s breath catches, post-orgasm shivers racking him not just with release, but a fresh jolt of dread and misery. He sinks against the cool tile, chest heaving. He realises he’s not just afraid for Elena, he’s scared of what she might have become, what old story the water has written her into.

He stays under the spray until the water runs cold, mind wide awake and spinning, surrounded by the ancient truth that for some things—desire, myth, loss, hope—no plan is ever enough.

Zurich, Trust Amellal Operations Centre, 06:10 AM

Rain traced ghostly rivers down the glass, the city blurred, a faint echo of the landscape inside Tarmo’s chest: mapped by riddles and sleepless, gnawing dread. Leaning into the comms mic, he let urgency leak into his voice. Three faces glowed on encrypted channels: allies strung tight by the thread between myth and fact.

“Listen,” he said, fingers white-knuckled on porcelain. “We’ve played that video to death. Physics can’t hold what happened: she didn’t drown, didn’t get shot, just vanished in water that wouldn’t swallow a child. But the locals keep saying it: Not all that goes under comes back the same. Some don’t come back.“

The silence was thick, more belief than doubt, each of them whisper-haunted by stories too old and persistent to dismiss.

Mrs H., London: Her jaw set, glasses flashing with resolve as she tapped her wireless earpiece. Voice carrying steel: “I’ll escalate in Bucharest—insist SRI open their off-record case files on unexplained disappearances. I’ll also lean on my consular contacts in Cluj. If old legends are the only map, we follow. Sandi, loop in our academic liaison immediately.”

Sandi, Field Ops—Lake Team: Already speaking in code, hands blurred over keys, sending encrypted bursts to local agents: “On it—pinging anthropologists at Cluj-Napoca, cross-referencing folklore studies with modern geographic data. Our field agent in Alba Iulia is compiling narratives about river rituals, lake legends, anything that matches the pattern.”

Hasna, EU Agency Liaison, Paris: Voice clipped but certain: “I’ll engage my Romanian surveillance contacts, quietly. No police yet—just SRI and my top cultural informants. The folklorist I worked with last year has mapped regional disappearances going back decades. If there’s been even one other like Elena, we’ll thread it.”

Outside, the world blinked grey. Inside, there was only determination and raw hope. A brief flicker crossed the feeds: Romania’s old leader, Iliescu, had died at 95. Power shifted in rain-slick backrooms. The story was changing; perhaps the rules would, too.

Zurich, Tarmo—The Connecting Thread: Defiant, uneven, every word a plea and a promise: “We treat folklore as evidence now. Myth is just an older kind of data. Mrs H. goes through official channels; Hasna works the back doors. Sandi, get that Cluj team on call—see if they’ll talk to me directly. We follow every lead, no matter how shadowed.”

In the pause, conviction hung like river mist. They’d lost the trail, but not the pulse. Each felt the currents tugging them into the deep—where answers didn’t just reside in fact, but in the half-lit world of story, memory, hope, and fear. The case had slipped the leash of protocol into deeper waters, where folklore became the only compass they had left.

London—Mrs H.’s Shadow Network: Within minutes, Mrs H. has a tremor running through the Romanian bureaucracy. An undersecretary in Bucharest—voice pitched for secrets—whispers about the “priestess incident,” 1987: a disappearance at the same lake, a reappearance months later. She jots notes with steel precision: “Disappeared. Returned, months later. Report sealed by SRI.”

She dictates methodically—never rattled, never letting doubt creep in: “Pull anything from the Securitate era—lakes, rivers, unexplained returns or transformations. Focus on solstice dates, ritual contexts.”

Sandi’s Digital Thread: Sandi’s screen floods with new signals, her inbox flashing urgent updates:

Dr Ioana Popescu, Cluj-Napoca: “There are stories of ‘the claimed’—women taken by rivers, seen again only in different forms, different names. Might be a local initiation rite disguised as legend. Strong taboo against diving in those waters at night.”Field agent, Alba Iulia: “Locals mention ‘the returning’—a rare occasion when someone gone in the lake is found years later, unaged or… altered. They use the phrase like a prayer and a curse.”

Hasna—The Quiet Sweep: Hasna’s folklorist contact responds cryptically, myth masquerading as memo:

“There’s a pattern on the Apuseni lakes—disappearances always at solstice, always at night, always dismissed by police as ‘misadventure.’ Ask your agents: Do the elders keep the old wolf banners? You may be looking for a living rite, not just a body. If so, you’re tracking something performed by living people, not just echoes or ghosts.”

The Convergence: By noon, a team spread over three countries operates on encrypted chats and whispers, official letters and unofficial bribes, data and dreams. Every hand reaches back through time, hunting for patterns darker and older than the news cycle—a sign, a key, anything to cross the threshold after Elena.

Zurich—Tarmo, The Unbroken Thread: Bone-tired and leaning on adrenaline, Tarmo types their next orders—desperate command and tacit warning:

“We chase the myth. Follow every old story into the water. Don’t assume we want to rescue the woman we lost—we may have to greet the one waiting to come out.”

The hunt, at last, had become a chase through legend. Deep beneath the shallow lake, in water cut from river and memory, something ancient and patient waited—a riddle as persistent as dawn, as hungry as loss, hungry to be found.

I.Ph.

Author’s Note:
This chapter’s roots stretch back to Timișoara’s days as Culture Capital of Europe in 2024—a city soaked in myth and reinvention. My daughter’s friendship with a classmate whose family traced descent from old Dacian lines reignited echoes from my own reading life: Katherine Neville’s winding mysteries and the wild, forgotten stories of the Dacians. If you found some resonance with folklore, longing, and rivers, imagine them as living threads, woven from new encounters and old books, moving always beneath the surface. Thank you for reading—myth and memory are better shared.