The next tide came heavy.
Not in speed, but in weight. It pressed against the reef like a held breath, thick with silt and the quiet groan of shifting shelves. The usual rhythmic push and pull felt off-beat—as if the sea itself had forgotten its part in the song.
I rose before first light. Couldn't sleep. Not properly. The dreams were strange—half-formed shapes gliding just outside the reach of reeflight, voices speaking in chords too old for my ears to parse. When I woke, I couldn't remember the words, but the feeling clung to my gills like sediment.
The outer dome was still dark. Reef-glow barely touched the upper spires. But already I could feel the hush hanging over the city like fog. No chimefish clicks. No morning glyph-song from the temple halls. Only the occasional thrum of patrols pulsing light through the spiral chambers—warning signals, not greetings.
I didn't go to the eastern beds. The planters' rotation had been suspended after yesterday's gathering. Everyone knew it. But my limbs didn't know how to rest. Not when everything around me felt like it was balancing on a hairline fracture.
So I swam.
Not toward the gardens, not toward the tidehall or vents. I went lower. Beneath the outer channels, past the basin ridges and boneweed forests, into the disused collector tunnels.
Most reef-kin avoided this place.
Too close to the Exile lines. Too many old vent-shafts and collapsed memory-arches from the last shellquake. But the current here was familiar—sluggish, but honest. It didn't try to hide its movement. It just flowed, slow and deep.
I passed half-buried glyph markers on the walls, most too corroded to read. A few blinked weakly as I passed—residual mana charges, unmaintained and nearly dead. This tunnel hadn't been formally patrolled in at least ten cycles.
But I knew it. As a child, I used to sneak here after harvests to hide from Tiruun and the others, especially during the bloodgames when our caste was expected to cheer for the scouts. I always found it quieter down here. Older. As if the reef remembered more in its deeper veins.
I reached the split shaft near the old chime well and paused.
Something had changed.
It wasn't obvious. No fresh damage, no cracks in the shellstone. Just… a scent. Thin. Oily. Like rust and dead magic. It clung to the edge of my tongue.
I flicked forward slowly, fins tight, staying close to the wall. My eyes adjusted to the gloom as the narrow shaft widened into a dome-shaped hollow—a defunct growth chamber, long since abandoned. Coral shelves lined the perimeter, their surfaces overgrown with strandmoss and brittle shellweed. In the center, a large intake pipe—sealed decades ago—sat like a throat closed against memory.
And in front of it: a pile of torn driftcloth and three pale claw marks burned into the coral floor.
Fresh.
I didn't breathe.
My hand went to the scrapper-tool in my satchel, useless though it was. I scanned the shadows along the far walls—nothing moved. No glyphlight. No flicker of inner mana glow from a fellow Nactuai. Just that scent again, stronger now, leaking from the old pipe.
Something had come through.
Or tried to.
My mind reeled. The patrol glyphs had failed in three sectors—Vonn had said so himself. But this chamber wasn't one of them. It was outside the normal routes, off-record. Not important enough to guard. Not worth the mana to shield.
Which made it the perfect opening for something that didn't belong.
I backed away slowly, never turning my back to the pipe. As I passed the threshold of the tunnel mouth again, I flicked a silent glyph to mark the wall—basic warning sign, taught to initiates: shadow breach possible, do not enter unarmed.
It pulsed once, then faded to a faint red glow.
I swam hard, not up toward the city, but across the middle channel toward the driftbeacon plateau. If I could reach the tidehall before full light, I could report the breach to one of the shellbinders or—if I was lucky—catch Tiruun before his next assignment.
Halfway to the mid-ridge, the current stuttered.
That was the only word I had for it. One moment, the water pushed forward, strong and steady. The next, it jittered—like an echo had passed through it and bounced back in the wrong direction.
I stopped mid-stroke. Listened.
There it was again. A pulse. A thrum that wasn't natural tide rhythm. It vibrated up the coral wall beside me, faint but deliberate.
I pressed my hand to the reef, closed my eyes, and let the sound come.
Low. Mechanical. Cyclical. Not reefborn.
Not ours.
Then a whisper of something older, beneath the mechanical rhythm—a thrum in the bones, in the silt, like a voice exhaling between the walls of the world.
I opened my eyes, heart hammering.
The sound faded.
But it had been real.
Not a drift echo. Not some artifact of pressure fluctuation. This had direction. Pattern. Will.
I pressed my palm against the reefwall again, hoping—absurdly—that it had vanished. That my nerves had twisted it into more than it was. But the stone felt different now. Vibrating, almost imperceptibly, like it was remembering something it had no words for.
And underneath the cold of it—heat. Not fire, not lava, but something deeper. Presence.
I backed away slowly, the current suddenly colder at my back. My tail brushed against a driftvine, and I flinched harder than I should've. Every instinct screamed to flee—to shoot upward into the protected channels and never look down again.
But I didn't.
I stayed just long enough to feel it again. That rhythmic hum, far beneath the silt and coral. Not random. Not natural.
It was… a signal.
I didn't know how I knew that. Only that it pulsed in time with my own heartbeat, just slow enough to feel deliberate. Like something was listening.
I turned, no longer caring how much noise I made. My limbs worked on instinct—thrust, roll, glide—cutting fast through the lower trench corridor. Every motion echoed louder than it should have. Even the water felt thinner, like it had been stretched too far and left hollow.
By the time I reached the mid-spire current, my gills burned.
The city proper shimmered ahead, glyphlights flickering across support arches like dim constellations. A few sentries moved through the upper lanes, their mana-pikes pulsing with the dull red of an active watch rotation. I spotted Tiruun near the southern column, mid-conversation with one of the shellbinders. His fins shifted sharply when he saw me approach.
"You look like you saw a deepspawn," he muttered as I skidded to a stop beside him.
"Not a deepspawn," I said, breath ragged. "Something else. A breach. Unmarked. No patrol glyphs."
His crest flattened. "Where?"
"Old collector shaft. Past the basin ridges. The one near the chime well."
"That tunnel's not on the active cycle," the shellbinder said—gray-skinned and older, glyph-marked along the side of his neck.
I turned to him. "It should be. Something came through. There were claw marks. Burn residue. A scent like… rusted mana."
The shellbinder's expression didn't change, but he flicked a silent glyph to the nearby wall. A pulse shot upward—coded alert.
"Show me," he said.
We moved fast—Tiruun beside me, the shellbinder behind. We cut a sharp arc down into the disused growth sectors, past several dormant conduits and a faded memory vault. I didn't speak. Neither did they. But I could feel Tiruun's tension mounting, and the shellbinder's calm growing thinner the deeper we went.
When we reached the marked wall, the red glyph was still faintly glowing.
"I didn't touch anything," I said.
The shellbinder nodded and glided forward. His hand hovered above the claw marks, then shifted to the air near the sealed intake pipe. He let his fingers hover over the damaged coral, then pressed lightly—just once.
A dull tone rang out. Not from the pipe—but beneath it.
"Void resonance," he muttered.
Tiruun looked at me. "That's not even supposed to register this far up."
"I know," I said.
The shellbinder turned slowly. "You did well to report this. And quickly."
He studied me a moment longer, as if trying to decide whether to say more. Then he tapped a glyph on his bracer—coded call to the watchers' core.
"This area is under sealed scan protocol now. Neither of you are to speak of this to anyone else until clearance is given."
Tiruun stiffened, but nodded. I did too.
The shellbinder looked back once more toward the intake pipe. Something in his posture shifted—subtly. A slight tilt of the head. A pause, too long for comfort.
"Whatever touched this," he said quietly, "wasn't hunting."
He met my gaze. "It was mapping."