Nobody knows why, but one misty morning, the sea suddenly returned all the husbands and boyfriends she'd swallowed whole.
As the world woke to a rolling wave of men out of time filling beach after beach, blinking brine out of their eyes in the soft light of dawn, crying for their gods and their loved ones, some in languages not spoken in aeons, it had no concept yet of the horrors to come...
When the first fishing vessel tried to set steam after, and its crew suddenly found themselves back on shore, watching it disappear over the horizon, they thought it a fluke, another unexplained miraculous wonder on a day of many.
But when every single of the men crewing any kind of vessel, down to the tiniest rowboat, suddenly ended up right back where they started... that's when the dread set in.
When the message set in.
When the world changed.
