CHAPTER XVI
The Sea That Remembers Fire
The wind off the Sea of Glass was cold, carrying the taste of salt and something sharper, metallic, as though the ocean itself still remembered the rain of star-forged flame that had once fallen into it. The waves moved slowly, heavily, their surfaces catching the moonlight and breaking it into countless shards of silver and pale blue, as if the water were layered with translucent crystal.
They stood upon a cliff of dark basalt, its edges worn into knife-sharp ridges by ages of storm and spray. Far below, the sea whispered and sighed, a vast, restless body whose depths no chart fully claimed.
Lysa drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders, the cooling wards she had woven in the Realm of Cinders now shifting to protect against chill and damp. "Ashaelion cast us far," she said. "Beyond the borders of any realm I know well. The Shattered Coast lies somewhere to the north, but these waters… they are older than the kingdoms that fear them."
Edrin rose slowly, leaning on his spear. The journey through the Gate and the strain of standing so close to an Elder Dragon had drained what little strength his healing had restored. Yet his eyes were clear.
"This coast once belonged to the Free Holds of Tharion," he said. "Before the first dragonfall turned their harbors into fields of glass and their fleets into legends. Few sailors return from these waters. Fewer still return unchanged."
Alaric looked out across the vast expanse. Beneath the moon's reflection, he sensed something moving—not on the surface, but deep below, vast shapes gliding through darkness that held a faint, inner glow.
"They are here," he said quietly.
Lysa followed his gaze. "The dragons of the deep?"
"Not fully awake," Alaric replied. "But dreaming. And listening."
The pull within him—the quiet gravity of the Crown's awakening—pointed toward the horizon, where the sea and sky met in a blurred line of silver and shadow.
"The anchor lies out there," he said. "In the Sea of Glass. Not on any shore."
Edrin frowned. "Then we will need a ship. And a crew brave enough—or foolish enough—to sail where dragonfire once turned water to crystal."
Lysa managed a thin smile. "I know of one such captain. If he still lives."
They made their way down the winding cliff path to a narrow cove where the water lapped against black sand and shards of translucent stone. There, half-hidden among jagged rocks, lay the remains of an old pier, its timbers bleached and scarred by time and storm.
Beyond it, anchored in the moonlit water, was a ship.
It was not large, but it was sturdy, its hull reinforced with dark metal bands etched with warding runes. Its sails were furled, but even in rest they gleamed faintly, woven with threads that caught starlight and moon-glow alike.
Painted on its prow was the image of a dragon coiled around a star.
Lysa's breath caught. "The Starwind… By all the towers, she still sails."
A lantern flared on the deck, and a figure emerged from the shadows, tall and broad-shouldered, with hair bound in a silver-threaded braid and a weathered face lined by years of wind and sun.
"Well," the figure called, voice carrying easily across the water. "If it isn't the mage who once froze my rudder to prove a point."
Lysa laughed softly. "And if it isn't Captain Kael Thorne, who once tried to outrun a storm spirit and lost half his rigging for his pride."
The captain's gaze shifted to Alaric and Edrin, lingering on the mark that faintly glowed beneath Alaric's tunic.
"You bring strange tides with you, Lysa of the High Spire," Kael said. "And stranger companions. What business draws you to waters even the dragons scarred?"
Alaric stepped forward. "We seek something that lies beneath the Sea of Glass. Something bound to dragonfire and the fate of this age."
Kael studied him in silence, then nodded once. "That is either madness… or the beginning of a saga worth surviving."
He gestured toward the ship. "Come aboard. The Starwind does not turn from deep water, only from hopeless causes. And this does not feel like one of those."
By dawn, they were underway.
The ship cut through the dark waters with a low, steady rhythm, its enchanted hull parting the heavy waves as though they were thicker than ordinary sea. The farther they sailed from the coast, the more the water beneath them changed. Patches of the sea gleamed as if sheets of glass lay just beneath the surface, catching and refracting the light in strange, shifting patterns.
Alaric stood at the prow, the wind tugging at his cloak, his senses stretched between the physical world and the deeper currents of power below.
"They are close," he murmured. "The anchor. And the watchers around it."
Lysa joined him. "What form will this anchor take?"
"Memory, bound into matter," Alaric said. "A place where dragonfire and starlight once met and did not destroy, but preserve. A mirror of what the Crown was meant to be."
As if in answer, the sea ahead began to glow.
Not with reflected light, but from within.
The waters parted, slowly and silently, revealing a vast, submerged formation of crystal and dark stone—ruins of a structure that might once have risen above the waves, now preserved beneath them in a shell of hardened, translucent glass.
At its center, a column of pale fire burned without consuming, visible even through the depths.
The first anchor had been found.
And in the deep, something ancient opened its eyes.