The hydration machine's drip click-clacked like a broken metronome, each droplet striking Mynta's cracked lips with cruel precision. Brine and stale oxygen stung her nostrils—the Auquan station's signature reek, now fouled by the Pyrestone faction's sulfurous body odor. Her sister Myrith sagged against the cell's pulsating coral walls, their iridescent blue dimmed under House Pyrestone's scarlet occupation banners.
"Still… alive?" Myrith rasped, her gill slits fluttering weakly. The golden chains binding their wrists hummed with containment runes, their cold leaching into bone.
Mynta tilted her head to catch a trickle from the hydration tube. Tasteless. Sterile. A mockery of their people's sacred fluid rites. "Barely."
Boots squelched down the hall—a wet, aggressive sound. The twins tensed in unison.
Red scales first, glowing like embers in the cell's bioluminescent gloom. Then the stench: burning kelp and overcooked minerals. The Pyrestone interrogator loomed, his double-jointed fingers trailing sparks across the energy bars. The twin fire orbs hovering above his shoulders cast jagged shadows, revealing fresh scars across Myrith's cheek where yesterday's "persuasion" had gone too far.
"Seaform chum," he sneered, mucus dripping from serrated teeth. Each sizzling drop evaporated before hitting the floor. "Still chirping about coups and forgiveness?"
The interrogator's laugh sounded like a drowning man's final gasp. He gripped the hydration tube, twisting the valve until Mynta choked on a sudden deluge. "Your precious priest hides among mudskippers. Primitive. Soft." He leaned closer, his breath reeking of deep vent geysers. "We'll burn their world to ash before his sanctuary song finishes."
Mynta spat brackish fluid at his eyes. "Xiaxo's Dryads have felled greater fools."
The backhand sent her skull cracking against the wall. Bioluminescent spores burst from the coral, drifting like dying fireflies.
"Dryads…" The interrogator wiped his face, scales smoking where her spit had landed. "Let them come. Our fleet's cores hunger for greenblood."
He stomped away, boots leaving glowing orange prints that faded like dying coals. The hydration valve squealed back to its agonizing drip.
The twins' cell hummed with the station's failing life support, a subsonic groan vibrating through the coral walls. Myrith's chains chimed faintly as she shifted, the sound echoing the distant drip of leaking pipes. A cluster of bioluminescent barnacles pulsed weakly near her foot—Seafoam bio-tech, long starved of proper nutrients. Mynta pressed her palm to one, its cool surface thrumming a morse code only their house knew. Alive. Waiting. She tore her hand away before hope could root.
Myrith pressed their foreheads together—an old Seafoam reassurance. "The signal?"
"Uncertain," Mynta breathed. "But the hydromancer's mark… still glows." She shifted her shackled wrist, revealing faint bioluminescent swirls beneath her skin—their last embedded message from the resistance, slowly fading.
The twins slumped together as the cell's coral walls wept slow amber tears—a station's grief for its captured Seafoam crew. Mynta licked salt from a trickling fissure, the mineral tang sharp against her parched tongue. Somewhere in the station's organic circuitry, she swore she felt the Yellow-Fin's pulse—three quick vibrations against her palm, their childhood code for hold fast. Or maybe it was just the war engines charging.
Admiral Vyr'kess tasted the station's fear like copper on her tongue. Her serpentine tail lashed as she floated before the holographic war table, its projections staining her scaled cheeks bloody crimson. Five figures attended, their forms distorted by steam rising from the overheating reactor cores.
"Progress?" she hissed, clawed finger tapping the snakehead pommel of her ceremonial dagger—a relic from the coup that had drowned House Seafoam's throne in ichor.
The officer with burning shoulder orbs bowed, his red scales clattering like shaken armor. "Three sectors scoured. No trace of the priest's resonance."
A merlin-crested strategist slammed webbed hands on the table, making liquid mana slosh in its containment sphere. "Every hour risks exposure! If the remaining Seafoam loyalists—"
"—Will choke on their own paranoia," interrupted a hunched technomancer, his voice buzzing through gill-mounted amplifiers. He gestured at the flickering image of Xiaxo rotating above them—a marble swirled in blues and greens. "Our proxy reports the primitives already slaughter each other over grain disputes. Perfect cover."
Vyr'kess's forked tongue tested the air. "And the Dryad infestation?"
The merlin-crested one bared needle teeth. "Their Grove-Spires remain dormant. No blooms detected since the last orbital scan."
"Good." The admiral's dagger carved a glowing line across the hologram, bisecting continents. "Burn the southern jungles first. Let the smoke mask our true hunt."
The hologram's southern jungles pixelated as the admiral's dagger passed through—a glitch revealing the projection's true source. Behind the green canopy illusion, Xiaxo's northern ice plains flickered. The technomancer stiffened, webbed fingers dancing over concealed controls. None remarked on the error. None ever did. Vyr'kess's thermal pits flared, drinking their silence like wine.
Admiral Vyr'kess's tailtip twitched, scraping a hairline crack into the war table's obsidian surface. The merlin-crested strategist's gills flared at the sound, his webbed fingers tightening around a data crystal etched with Seafoam markings—a trophy, or a threat. Steam from the reactors condensed on the technomancer's brow, tracing glowing glyphs down his scaled neck. None remarked how the glyphs matched those now banned in Seafoam territories. The admiral's dagger hovered over Xiaxo's southern coast, its edge singeing pixels into ash-scented static.
Three decks below, a Pyrestone engineer adjusted the hydration cells' flow rates. Her gills flared at the metallic aftertaste—Seafoam pheromones lingering in the pipes. When the alert sirens blared, she "accidentally" overrode the twins' nutrient suppressors. Let the Sublime sort traitors. Her cousin had served aboard the Tidal Vindicator before its purge. Some debts required no authorization.
Mynta dreamed of their last dive through Seafoam's liquid citadel—the way sunlight fractured through cathedral kelp forests, the click-whirr of messenger crustaceans scuttling across bone-white coral. The hydration valve's drip slowed, syncing with the twins' labored breathing. Mynta's eyelids fluttered shut, dragged under by memories of their initiation dive—the weightless plunge into Seafoam's baptismal trenches, her mother's voice singing through hydrostatic comms. "A leader floats first." But here, weightlessness meant chains, not freedom. Her dreams fractured: kelp forests became Pyrestone interrogation rooms, messenger crustaceans scuttled with Admiral Vyr'kess's face. She woke choking on a scream that died in the station's oxygen-thin air.
"The Dryad pact… broken?"
"No." Mynta pressed their shackled hands against the wall, feeling the station's vibrations. Somewhere deep, engines groaned like wounded leviathans. "They'll sense the orbital strikes. Intervene."
Myrith's laugh became a wet cough. "Too late. Always… too late."
A sudden tremor shook the cell. Hydration fluid sloshed as klaxons wailed. Through the energy bars, they watched Pyrestone soldiers sprint past, weapons flaring with unstable mana cores.
A burst pipe sprayed nutrient gel across the hall, its saccharine stench clashing with the Pyrestone soldiers' caustic sweat. Myrith's gills flared instinctively, filtering traces of selenium and lithium—engine coolant, not saltwater. She memorized the cocktail. If they survived, it might map the station's layout. Mynta's shackles glowed hotter as the engines surged, branding her wrists with fractal burns. "Anchor spires," Myrith murmured, watching a soldier slip in the gel. Their house's old defense protocol: destabilize the station's gravitational core. A suicidal play, unless… Unless the Yellow-Fin already sings.
The station shuddered again, dislodging a barnacle-like growth from the ceiling. It burst against the floor, releasing a dozen bioluminescent polyps that skittered toward Myrith's chains. She froze. Not barnacles—Seafoam messenger pods, dormant since the coup. The largest polyp pressed against her ankle, its gelatinous body forming brief glyphs: Anchor spire compromised. Skyfall imminent. Then it dissolved into blue foam.
Myrith strained against her chains. "Fleet mobilization…"
Mynta closed her eyes, seawater memories burning. Xiaxo's forests aflame. Their strange little warriors—Larin with his human stubbornness, Zakop's barked laughter—crumbling under plasma fire.
"We need—"
"—A miracle," Myrith finished.
The twins fell silent as the station's ancient hull creaked around them, its coral bones protesting the war machines waking in its belly. Somewhere beyond the steel and spite, the Yellow-Fin's song whispered through cosmic tides—too faint, too far.
For the first time in forty-eight drips of the hydration valve, Mynta prayed to gods her house had long abandoned.
Let the Dryads be wrathful. Let the earth remember.
Deep in the station's underbelly, a cracked Seafoam insignia glowed beneath layers of Pyrestone graffiti. The engineer who'd adjusted the twins' hydration settings pressed her palm to it, whispering the Litany of Tides. Three decks above, a dormant mana core flickered—once blue, now streaked with Pyrestone orange. It shuddered, coughing black smoke into the air recyclers. No alarms sounded. Yet.