The reef was quiet, but not in peace.
Smoke-like threads of mana drifted lazily through the water, trailing from the splintered glyph shells embedded in the arena walls. The coral had been scorched and reshaped, no longer singing with current or hum. Every echo was dull. Every motion slow, subdued. What had been a sacred space of celebration now bore the marks of blood and fire.
I swam above the edge of the cracked archway, gaze trailing down the curve of the arena shell. Dozens of Watchers and shellguards moved silently below, repairing what they could, marking what they couldn't. No one spoke unless required. Even the tide itself seemed hesitant to flow through the broken paths.
My arms ached. My gills still hadn't fully stabilized. There was a pulse in my skull I couldn't shake, too many glyphs fired, too much motion, too little rest. But I kept moving. I couldn't sit still. Not after what we'd seen.
The invaders hadn't spoken. Hadn't claimed territory. They'd simply entered, attacked, and tested. That was the part that kept echoing in my mind. They were probing.
I drifted toward the outer ridge, pausing only when I saw two caretakers guiding a damaged nursery pod toward the bloom chambers. A hatchling's shape floated inside, alive, but limp. One of its fins was torn. Another curled tight in pain. The caretakers' expressions were flat, but their movements gentle. It had survived, but barely.
Further upcurrent, triage glyphbeds flickered under makeshift canopies of kelpweave and reefplate. Mana salves floated in solution tubes, siphoning slow pulses of energy into the wounded. I joined the edge of the line and helped lift a tide-runner onto the closest stable cradle. Her tail was severed below the third joint, bleeding faint wisps of blue into the water. Her eyes didn't open. But her breathing was steady.
A Watcher behind me adjusted the flare anchors on the glyphbed. "That's the fifth tail loss today," he muttered, mostly to himself. "If this keeps up…"
He didn't finish the thought.
I didn't ask him to.
Somewhere deeper within the reef, the Council bells rang. Low, sonorous tones that echoed through the entire reef's structure. One after the other, six strikes. Emergency call.
That hadn't happened in my lifetime.
The Council chamber was sealed with seven overlapping glyph barriers, all pulsing at half-strength to conserve mana flow. Only the elders, high Watchers, and caste heads were allowed inside. I wasn't one of them, but the silence in the reef made it easy to hear what little leaked through.
Ashekan passed by me once, carrying a sealed report crystal. He didn't speak. Just nodded once.
I lingered near the speaking vents. Not close enough to be noticed—just close enough to catch fragments.
"…confirmed mana organ mounting, again. That's two bodies now—both fused externally."
"They can't be generating the energy themselves. They don't have the glands. Not from the analysis."
"They're taking it. They're stealing mana the same way they steal resources. This isn't scavenging anymore. It's engineered."
A pause.
"They're becoming something else."
More murmurs. Then Yera's voice, sharp and cutting through the others.
"We found hatchling fragments on the east route. Three bodies. They didn't make it. The Exiles didn't interfere, but they didn't help, either."
"What's their angle?" someone else asked.
"They've stayed out of it so far."
"They watched us fight and said nothing."
"They still feed the god."
That silenced the chamber for a long stretch.
When the bells ceased, I knew something had shifted. Decisions had been made. Paths were forming. Even if no one had the courage yet to speak them aloud. Back at my dome, I didn't undress.
I sat on the cot, seedstone in hand, staring into the half-wilted coral bloom. The recent trimming had regrown into a cleaner spiral, still flawed, but stable. I let my fingers brush its edge, then sat back, letting my thoughts coil and recoil again.
I'd seen one of the invaders up close, seen its mechanical suit, seen the glyph-powered tendrils launch from sockets that should never hold mana. The stolen organ had been pulsing, grafted to stone, forced to function. It was a mockery of life. And yet, the invader used it.
I gripped the side of the cot as my hand trembled. Not from fear. From anger. From the weight of not knowing what to call them, enemies, scavengers, monsters. Or something else entirely.
The shard arrived moments later.
A courier slipped it under the coral flap and vanished before I could rise. The message was short, sealed with the emblem of the Watcher command.
Kaelen,Report to Glyphbay Nine at next cycle shift.Assigned to joint recon with glyphbinders.Southern breach tracking, artifact retrieval, ward vulnerability map.Bring flare spools and backup thread.Commander Yera.
I read it twice, then stood. The reef wasn't giving anyone time to mourn.
Ashekan met me near the drill corridor. He was already geared, his armor scratched and pitted from yesterday's fight. His expression unreadable, but quieter than usual.
He handed me a flare shard. Not standard issue.
"Extra," he said. "In case things go wrong."
"I'll try not to waste it."
He didn't laugh, but a corner of his mouth twitched.
"We're not just tracking the breach," he said. "There's something deeper. Council suspects multiple routes. Too organized for a one-off."
"How many?"
"Don't know. That's why we're going."
We moved through the lower current pass, gliding beneath the old bloom troughs where the mana lines thinned to a trickle. Ahead, the trench marked on our shard flared once, then pulsed dark.
The glyphbinder team followed behind us, quiet and concentrated. One of them murmured the glyph pattern for scanning decay zones. The water shimmered faintly, then settled.
I looked down.
Beneath us, a deep scar ran along the reef floor. Not a natural trench. A collapsed tunnel, reinforced with remnants of coral anchors and scorched markings. And something else, stone residue. Angular. Aligned in patterns that weren't reefborn.
Ashekan pointed. "They didn't come from the ocean."
"Then where?," I whispered.
The glyphbinders muttered something sharp and fast, sealing the discovery into a pulse crystal.
We floated above it a moment longer. Then the current shifted—subtly, but wrong.
A shadow moved below. And I realized…
The reef was no longer the world.
It was the front line.