The first direct encounter was witnessed by a widow who had lived three lives by the harbor and remembered songs the old sailors barely dared to murmur. She saw a shape glide beneath the wave line as if reading the coast like the lines on a palm. It rose only a handful of meters—an arm at first, then another, and the starlight caught on suckers as pale as moons. Each sucker held a memory: a child's toy, a silver locket, a merchant's ledger. The widow watched the tentacles unfurl and then, impossibly, bend down and return these trinkets to the living. They were gestures of trivial mercy wrapped around an intent too vast to parse. Some thanked him. Some knelt. Most fled and warned others to flee.