I remember the way the reef smelled after a night tide. Briny. Blooming. Alive.
Even with half the shelf ruined from last cycle's cave-in, the gardens still called me up early. The older fronds of the tangleweed curled backward when trimmed right, growing cleaner with each pass. My mother used to say that careful hands made for strong harvests and quiet minds. I don't know if she believed it. I do.
This morning, though, the reef didn't feel right.
The current was sluggish where it should've spun. Not wrong, just… resistant. Like the water was pushing back.
I scraped a cluster of nutrient bulbs from the ash coral's roots, careful not to agitate the feeder barnacles nested deep in the grooves. My fins twitched out of habit, scanning for vibration trails. Nothing unusual. Just another quiet start to another thankless farm rotation.
Behind me, the shimmer-glass path pulsed dimly with directional glyphs—soft blue. All clear.
"Kaelen! You're late to count again!"
Tiruun's voice carried from across the reef channel, sharper than the bone-spike sheathed at his hip.
I turned, bulbs clutched to my side. "I was gathering early. The growth line slipped in the night."
He swam closer, older than me by three hatchings, and more annoyed by that gap with each cycle. His fan-crest flared slightly—a male's habit to posture, even over minor things. "Council's tightening our rations. You want the Exiles getting a better harvest story than us this month?"
The Exiles. Always them. Always looming over us like a shadow we weren't allowed to name.
"No," I said. "I'll triple my rotation. Let me finish the shallow beds and I'll meet you at the intake."
Tiruun gave a tight nod and shot upward toward the overhead lights, leaving me with the silence again. Not full silence. You never get that underwater. The reef breathes. Clicks. Mutters in currents. But today it felt hollowed.
And I didn't know why. I packed the bulbs into a growth-weave pouch and moved toward the shallow beds. The light diffused thinner here, filtered through layers of shifting plankton clouds. Strange patterns danced across the reef wall—like something was pacing on the other side.
Probably just a current split. Probably.
The tangleweed here had frayed tips. Overgrazed. I muttered a curse and got to work anyway, trimming rot and re-scraping barnacles. Every clipped bulb stung my hand with brine, but I liked the feeling. It kept me present. Real.
By the time I finished, the light glyphs had turned amber. Midday.
I pulled myself toward the intake chamber—wide ducts funnelling clean mana-rich water into our storage pools—when a faint tremor passed through the coral shelf. Subtle. Like a wrong note in an old song.
When I reached the upper lift tunnel, I found half the city gathered near the spiral chambers. Murmurs carried through the water in pulses—words too fast to follow. Tiruun was already near the front, his expression locked, unreadable.
"What happened?" I asked, pulling alongside him.
He didn't look at me when he answered.
"A body washed up near the rift channel. Not one of ours."
That made my stomach lurch.
It wasn't rare for a drifter to be lost beyond the kelp line, especially with shadow-beasts haunting the outer stretches. But strangers? Unmarked? That wasn't supposed to happen. Not here.
"Did it… survive?"
"No," he said. Then after a pause: "But it wasn't killed by a shadowspawn. At least not cleanly."
The crowd parted near the outer dock, where Elders from the Harvest and Guard orders stood conferring in silent glyphlight. They had sealed the corpse in a mana-clasp shell—standard for contaminant quarantine. From here, I couldn't see much. Just the outline of armor shaped wrong, and eyes that hadn't been carved for this sea.
"It's not a Nactui," someone whispered nearby. "It came from the surface."
"There is no surface," came the automatic reply. "Not for us."
Not for us.
That's what we were always told. The reef was our boundary. The tide our world. Beyond that—shadow, void, death. Or at least… exile.
But this? This was different. The words echoed in my head—not like prophecy, just… a lesson too-well memorized. One of a thousand phrases passed down through salt-soaked generations. Elders said it when the young asked about the dark columns that rose in the distance, or the old machines buried in reefstone.
They said it gently. They said it with fear behind their teeth.
"Not for us."
I swallowed hard. My fingers curled unconsciously against the pouch of coral bulbs still strapped to my side.
I shouldn't have been here. This was the work of scouts or guards. Not planters. Not farmers. I should've slipped away the moment the glyphs turned amber. But I couldn't stop staring at the shell that held the corpse—at the shape of it, too long in the torso, too narrow in the chest. Its skin didn't shimmer with inner mana-light like ours did.
It looked empty.
Dead didn't feel like the right word. Wrong did.
I felt Tiruun shift beside me. He still hadn't looked at me.
"You hear the stories, right?" he said quietly. "That the exiles have been building things. Metal bones, fire-lanterns. That they still try to reach the surface."
"This isn't them," I said.
He didn't answer.
Neither did anyone else. The longer we watched, the more silent everything got. Even the reef seemed to hush—no dartfish, no current-hum, just the slow, thrumming pulse of our city's core chamber somewhere above. That and the dim flares of emergency sigils blinking red across the shell.
Someone behind me whispered a line from an old tide-hymn:
"Where shadow falls without a source, the tide forgets its depth."
I hated that line.
The Elders finally moved the body deeper into the city. A dozen members of the Guard Order flanked them, spears in hand. They were calm. Too calm. That kind of stillness only happened when fear had already settled in their bones.
When the crowd broke apart, Tiruun turned away without a word.
I didn't follow.
Instead, I drifted back toward the kelp fields, the place where I felt safest, most certain. I tried to sink into the rhythm of labor—scraping, gathering, tying—but I kept glancing toward the western ridge.
Toward the place where the stranger had drifted in.
Something had changed. And even if no one would say it yet… we all knew.
The reef was no longer the edge of our world.
I didn't mean to wander toward the tidehall.
I told myself I was heading to the storage vents, maybe to help stack the coral harvest or check the tide-temperature gauges. But my hands didn't carry the harvest anymore, and my path curved too far left—past the crestway arches, up the coral rise that ringed the sacred hall where the elders met.
Where I wasn't supposed to be.
I stopped near the overhead intake grate—half open, half shielded by barnacle mesh. Old repair tunnels snaked through the upper wall. I'd hidden there once as a child, when I thought the elders would pull me from the planter's caste for tagging the statue coral.
Now I just crouched in silence. Listening.
"…wasn't just drift," a voice growled from below. I recognized High Speaker Vonn. "That thing piloted. It fought the current. It bled corrupted mana. This was no accident."
A pause. Then Elder Shemril's voice—calmer, older, but strained.
"You're assuming it knew what it was doing."
"And you're assuming it's the only one."
A soft murmur rippled through the chamber—elders shifting, muttering, afraid of their own thoughts.
Then another voice. Firmer. Familiar.
"It's not from the reef. Not even from the outer trench cities. The bone density, the armor folds—it's not of our kind. This may be the first... contact."
The word hit like pressure depth in my ears.
Contact.
Not drift. Not ruins from a forgotten war. Not exiles or deepspawn.
Contact.
I leaned in, heart thudding.
"Then we prepare," said Vonn again. "We ready the shield spells, activate the deep-reef watchers, and send the runners to alert every outpost. If this is one—there will be more."
A moment of silence. Then the final word came, sharp and low.
"We seal the egg pools."
I stayed in the tunnel long after the chamber went quiet.
Long after the lights dimmed and the reef currents shifted for rest-cycle.
I didn't remember swimming home. Just the thought that something had broken.
Not loudly. Not with heat or violence. Just a single crack—deep, silent, widening with every breath. By the time I reached the outer spires, the current had turned cool, and the reef was beginning to hum with evening tones. Barnacle-chimes rattled from high ridges, and long strands of kelp glowed a soft pulse of blue and gold. Home shimmered ahead—a half-dome burrow nestled against a sunwarmed ridge, carved from living coral grown in the family pattern.
I ducked inside.
Our quarters were simple. A braided floor of shelf-fronds. A lightvine twisting up the wall. Three amber-shell masks hung near the entry—carved in the likeness of my caretakers, who worked the drop-ridge far to the west. I hadn't seen them in half a turning.
Then I floated to the back chamber and reached for the seedstone.
It glowed faintly under my palm. A warm rhythm. The same mana-seed I'd nurtured since my tenth tide. The ash coral was growing. Still slow, still stubborn—but growing. A tangleweed bloom had sprouted through the cracks. I'd have to trim it in the morning.
My limbs ached. the sting in my fingers still lingering. But the seedstone grounded me. The air felt clearer with it in hand. I tucked it back into its recess, dimmed the reeflight, and curled into the woven cot.
We seal the egg pools.
The words still echoed.
I closed my eyes and listened to the tide and drifted off into a restless night's sleep.