The sea should have taken him.
In a world without land, that was the only law that never failed.
Platforms broke. Ropes snapped. Children slipped between planks slick with salt and algae. Fishermen vanished beneath the waves, their names spoken once, then never again. Entire districts were lost when chains failed, dragged screaming into the depths as the ocean closed above them without mercy.
The sea always collected its due.
Except for Kael.
He was seven years old the first time he fell.
He remembered the moment with cruel clarity—not as a memory of fear, but of realization. The platform lurched under his feet as a wave struck the lower pylons. He had been running, laughing, careless. Then there was no wood beneath him. No warning. Just air, rushing past his ears, and the sudden understanding that nothing waited below.
Water swallowed him whole.
Cold crushed against his skin. Sound vanished. The world narrowed to pressure and darkness. Kael kicked instinctively, arms flailing, lungs already burning. The surface above fractured into shifting light, retreating farther with every second.
He expected pain.
He expected teeth, or claws, or the violent pull of a current dragging him down.
Instead, the water slowed him.
Not gently.
Not kindly.
But deliberately.
He sank as if suspended, held upright in the dark blue vastness. Something vast moved below him—too large to see, too patient to fear. A presence pressed against his thoughts, not as a voice, but as a certainty.
Not this one.
When they pulled him from the sea minutes later, Kael was barely conscious, coughing brine onto the planks. His skin was pale, his lips blue, but his heart beat steady and strong.
Alive.
The elders stared at him in silence. His mother wept and clutched him so tightly he could barely breathe. The priests arrived with ash and salt, marking his forehead while whispering prayers that sounded more like warnings.
"The sea refused him," they said.
Not blessed.
Not cursed.
Refused.
That was worse.
Twenty-five years later, Kael stood at the edge of the platform and listened to the chains sing.
The city of Tareth hung above the endless ocean like a wound held open by iron and prayer. Towers of wood and rusted steel swayed gently with the tide, bound together by massive sky-chains thicker than watchtowers. They descended at sharp angles into the water, disappearing into depths no diver truly understood.
The priests claimed the chains reached the heavens.
The engineers insisted they anchored the world.
Kael knew better.
Nothing that old was still obedient.
Wind tore at his cloak as waves crashed against the lower structures, sending spray high enough to sting his face. Salt clung to his skin, worked into every crease and scar. The sea was restless tonight. It always was when the tide grew heavy and the chains groaned like something breathing in its sleep.
Kael flexed his fingers around the hilt of his curved blade.
In his other hand, wrapped carefully in oilcloth and bound with twine, he carried the relic.
It was small. Heavy. Unremarkable to anyone who did not know what it was.
A fist-sized clump of hardened earth—dark, cracked, and dry.
Soil.
Real soil.
The last thing in the world that should not exist.
He could feel it even through the layers of cloth, a faint warmth against his palm, like a heartbeat that did not belong to him. The first time he had touched it, the sea currents around him had stilled. Creatures had fled the ruins. The water itself had recoiled, as if remembering something it wished it had forgotten.
Kael tightened his grip.
Behind him, bells rang once.
Not an alarm for storm.
Not a call to prayer.
A warning.
He turned as Wardens emerged from the shadows between pylons, their armor reinforced with chain-links and anchor sigils etched into steel. Their faces were hidden behind masks shaped like waves frozen in iron.
"Kael Chainbreaker," one of them said. "You were ordered to surrender all recovered artifacts."
Kael did not face them.
"You never ordered me to tell the truth," he replied.
The sea surged below, slamming against the pylons with sudden force. The chains vibrated, a deep metallic hum traveling through the platform and into Kael's bones.
The Wardens stiffened.
They felt it too.
"You disturb the balance," the Warden said, voice strained. "You bring things up that were meant to stay buried."
Kael finally turned.
His eyes—dark, metallic gray—reflected the churning water. There was no anger in them. No defiance.
Only certainty.
"The balance is a lie," he said quietly. "And the sea knows it."
For a moment, no one moved.
Then the water below the platform began to withdraw.
Not violently.
Not in rage.
It pulled back slowly, exposing darkness where ocean should have been. The lower pylons groaned as pressure shifted. The chains tightened, links screaming as ancient tension awakened.
People screamed across the platform as the sea continued to retreat, revealing shapes beneath—stone, arches, the broken silhouettes of structures no doctrine allowed to exist.
Ruins.
Proof.
One of the Wardens stumbled back. "This isn't possible…"
Kael felt it then.
Recognition.
Not fear.
Not hunger.
The sea's attention settled fully on him, heavy and unmistakable. It did not speak. It did not command.
It acknowledged.
Far below, something immense shifted. The chains rattled violently now, iron shrieking against iron. A deep resonance rolled through the water, felt more than heard, like a breath drawn by something far too large to be named.
Kael's hand trembled around the relic.
This was the moment.
Not prophecy.
Not destiny.
Choice.
He took one step forward, toward the edge of the platform.
The Wardens raised their weapons.
And the sea exhaled.