The sky over the Indoria–Pyrian border turned black at dawn.
Not with storm, but with smoke.
The village of Meridyn, nestled between riverbanks and grain fields, burned like a funeral pyre. No warning. No lightning. Just fire—and fear.
When the flames died, the only thing left untouched was the temple bell.
And beneath it, scrawled in ash, was a serpent's spiral. Charred into the stone.
In the coastal court of Indoria, Duke Caelan Myrr stood on the open balcony, his robes catching sea wind. Before him, the ocean was calm—but his mind wasn't.
"Another village," the messenger reported. "No survivors this time."
Caelan said nothing for a long moment.
"Did they see who did it?"
"No," the man said quietly. "Only that the river refused to rise. As if... it turned away."
That night, Thalassia Nayeli Indoria could not sleep.
The air felt heavy in her chest. She stepped out of her chambers barefoot, robes trailing behind her, and followed the sound of the tide.
She found herself on the palace's lowest platform, where the prayer stones stood half-submerged.
The sea was still. But it shouldn't have been.
She knelt beside the water.
"Are you angry?" she whispered to the waves. "Did something happen?"
Her fingers skimmed the surface. It was warm—too warm.
And then, she felt it.
A pull in her chest.
A thread of sorrow that wasn't hers.
A scream in the distance, but silent—like the water itself had cried out.
Her eyes filled with tears she didn't understand.
"Please," she whispered. "Don't let more people die."
Her hands trembled.
The water trembled with her.
A soft glow pulsed beneath the fabric of her sleeve.
On her upper arm, a mark shimmered into existence—a spiral of waves encircling a droplet, glowing in pale blue light.
It was the mark of Indoria.
A single wave rolled toward the shore.
Then another.
The air shifted. The clouds above thickened. And as Thalassia wept, rain began to fall—first gently, then steadily, then all at once.
From the upper terrace, Duke Caelan watched, unmoving.
He saw her—his daughter—kneeling alone as the sea began to rise with her tears.
The rain fell harder. The waves pulsed outward.
He saw his daughter.
He asked himself, barely aloud—
"What… was that?"
Confused by what he saw, he understood that this was not merely a child's play. It was something more—a power that reached beyond their bloodline. If what he suspected was true, then this was the sign they had been waiting for.
A decision formed in his heart.
"We cannot wait," he said to himself. "Not anymore."
In Meridyn, the fires had gone out.
But the ash remained.
And far beneath the river stones, something moved that should have never been woken.