The pressure outside the viewports deepened from twilight blue to an eternal inkwell black, the only light the twin beams of the submarines cutting through water thick with suspended silt. Inside Marya's vessel, the air hummed with low-grade anxiety and the scent of Eliane's simmering soup. Galit, propped in the pilot's chair, was a study in suppressed pain. His face, usually alive with darting intelligence, was drawn tight. Every adjustment of the controls came with a faint, pained hiss of breath.
"You okay?" Marya asked, her eyes not leaving the depth gauge. Her voice was calm, a steady counterpoint to the groaning hull.
Galit nodded, a sharp, jerky motion. "Fine."
Atlas and Jannali, sprawled in passenger seats, were silent sentinels of misery. Atlas's usually proud lynx-ears were flat against his head, his rust-red fur matted and dull. Jannali, her vibrant afro somehow deflated, muttered something in her sleep that sounded like "bloody fossilized kelp" in a thick, pained drawl.
Vesta, cross-legged on the floor, was a rainbow-colored island of focus amidst the gloom, thumbing through a weathered stack of Wanted posters. "The print quality on these is atrocious," she mumbled to no one. "Brook's fro would never be that pixelated. Criminal, really."
From the galley, the comforting clatter of a ladle against a pot was punctuated by a high-pitched, wobbly voice. "The fishy goes glug-glug, the carrot goes snick-snack!" Jelly chanted, his translucent blue form bobbing as he 'supervised' Eliane. The young Lunarian chef, a smudge of flour on her cheek, smiled patiently, expertly dicing vegetables while ignoring the gelatinous finger he'd morphed into a spoon and was tapping on her shoulder.
Galit's gaze cut to Marya, sharp despite his pain. "This Bianca girl. You trust her?"
Marya finally looked at him, a single brow arched. "About as much as I can trust anyone who names her tools after desserts. But if you want that thousand-year-old lump of scrap to float, she's the only game in the deep."
"You're that confident?"
A ghost of a smirk touched Marya's lips. "Yes, Galit. That 'thing' has been sleeping down here longer than your entire civilization. It won't wake up just because we ask nicely." Her golden eyes, so like her father's, flicked to Atlas and Jannali. "After this, we find you three a proper doctor."
Galit swallowed hard. "It's getting better."
"You're worthless to me if you're dead," she stated, the words blunt but lacking malice. "We should probably be looking for that doctor right now…"
He shook his head, stubbornness overriding agony. "This first."
Bianca's voice, crackling with static and a very specific vocal tic, erupted from the comms. "Like, approaching coordinates! Prepping for the final deep dive. You guys steady back there?"
Marya keyed the mic. "Copy. We're your shadow." She released the button and glanced at Galit's questioning look. "I was doing stuff like this with them long before this… curse," she said, flexing a hand, the black void-veins snaking up her forearm. "You don't have to trust them. But you'll see their value."
The descent became a swallowing. The world outside vanished, replaced by a profound, crushing darkness. The only sounds were the creak of pressure-tightened metal, the hum of life support, and Charlie's increasingly frantic, muffled commentary from the other sub.
"Sit down, Charlie! I can't see the sonar with your big head in the way!" Bianca's shout over their open comm line was clear.
"Sit down?" Charlie's offended squawk was priceless. "How can one sit when we are potentially moments from the single greatest archaeological rediscovery since the Poneglyphs of Shandora? The stratification alone could rewrite—"
The submarine lurched violently to port. There was a thud, a yelp from Charlie, and the sound of someone sliding across a metal floor.
"See?" Bianca crowed. "Like, that's why you should sit! Aurélie, what was that?"
Aurélie's calm, measured voice came through, cool as a blade in the dark. "Sea King. A big one."
In the background, Ember's soft, lucid voice repeated, "Sea King," with a childlike curiosity.
"Do not be alarmed. The hull is lined with seastone. To them, we are just… unappetizing rocks."
"Like, no way…" Bianca breathed a moment later, her engineering zeal momentarily overriding her speech pattern. The sonar pinged a rapid, complex rhythm.
"What is it? What do you see?" Charlie's voice was back, crammed with desperation.
"Do you realize? Do you comprehend the historical significance?" he continued, not waiting for an answer. "The only other documented settlement with a concentric radial design of this scale pre-dating the Void Century is the theoretical blueprint for Alabasta's capital! The water-resistant masonry suggests—!"
"If you can't like, tell," Bianca interrupted, her excitement bleeding through, "we are like, really excited over here!"
Marya chuckled, the sound warm and genuine in the cold, pressurized cabin. "Copy that. Brings back memories." She could almost smell the dusty tomes and feel the cool, damp air of forgotten ruins from her Consortium days.
"Like, copy! Moving in, keeping the line open," Bianca confirmed.
Galit watched Marya. "Is he right?"
"Probably," she said, her smirk returning. "He's a pompous windbag, but he's a windbag who's almost never wrong about dead things and old stones."
As they drifted closer, the submarines' lights began to paint fragments of a dream drowned.
It wasn't just a city. It was a memory in stone, a ghost imprinted on the ocean floor. Aethelred didn't so much appear as unfold from the gloom. First came the outlines, vast and geometric, grids of streets that defied the crushing depth. Then, details swam into view: buildings with graceful, curved walls that looked less carved and more grown, their surfaces smoothed by millennia of gentle, abyssal currents. The architecture was a love letter to an impossible idea—a city that belonged to both land and sea. Wide avenues, now canyons for deep-sea eels, spiraled out from a central point like a colossal stone nautilus shell.
The light here wasn't the harsh, artificial beam of the subs alone. From cracks in the seabed, faint, geothermal glows seeped upward, a witchlight that stained the water a sickly, beautiful green and cast long, dancing shadows. Towers, some intact, most sheared off as if by a god's cleaver, stood sentinel. Their surfaces were covered in intricate carvings—spirals, serpents, and patterns that echoed the natural flow of water and wind, now home to gardens of ghostly white tube worms that pulsed gently.
And there were the statues. Enormous figures, their features eroded into vague nobility, stood at intersections, their outstretched arms now perches for colonies of blind, skittering crustaceans. One held what might have been a sheaf of grain, another a set of scales, their symbolism lost to time but their silent vigil eternal.
"Aethelred…" Charlie whispered over the comms, his voice hushed with a reverence that silenced even his own pedantry. "The Golden Cradle. The texts spoke of it in fragments… a trading nexus where the knowledge of the sky, the sea, and the earth converged before the world was fractured. Look at the alloy in those support columns! You can see the precursor to Seastone-weave metallurgy in the crystalline structure!"
The submarines glided over a colossal plaza. The sea floor was a mosaic of millions of fitted stones, depicting a map of stars and ocean currents no sailor today would recognize. A giant, petrified tree—or perhaps a sculpture of one—stood in the center, its stone roots clutching a tangle of what looked like fossilized, metallic cables.
"It's… sad," Eliane said softly, having come to stand behind Marya, wiping her hands on her apron. "It's so beautiful, but it's so quiet."
"Quiet's good, chef," Atlas grunted from his seat, not opening his eyes. "Means nothing's trying to eat us. Yet."
"Like, totally got a massive energy signature reading from the central dry dock!" Bianca reported, her focus snapping back to the practical. "It's like, a festival of power signatures buried under all that rock. The Dreadnought's gotta be there."
"Then that's where we go," Marya said, her hand resting on the worn leather of her Heart Pirates jacket. Her eyes, however, were fixed on the viewport, taking in the sublime, heartbreaking ruin. For a moment, her guarded expression softened into something akin to wonder. It was the same look she got when she saw a particularly fluffy island rabbit.
The subs moved as one, two tiny, brave sparks of light descending into the heart of the sunken dream, leaving the silent, stone song of Aethelred to echo in the dark behind them. The challenge wasn't over—it was just beginning, and it was waiting for them in the dark, wrapped in ancient metal and legend.
The two submarines, like cautious deep-sea fish, nosed their way through the silent avenues of Aethelred. The city was a cathedral of stillness, their spotlights carving tunnels of visibility through water thick with the sediment of ages. Schools of pale, sightless fish, like living shards of bone, scattered at their approach. The buildings here were grander, their flowing, organic lines hinting at chambers that once thrummed with life. Now, they were empty shells, their wide windows dark mouths open in a perpetual, soundless gasp.
In the lead sub, Bianca's voice was a constant, staticky stream of consciousness over the open comms. "Like, keep it steady, Aurélie… the sonar's painting a picture of a massive obstruction ahead, but, like, the definition is all fuzzy, like a watercolor left in the rain…"
"It's not an obstruction," Charlie whispered, his voice hushed with a reverence that bordered on mania. "It's a deliberate structure. The energy signature is concentrated, contained… Ahem! The metallurgical readings suggest a crystalline-adamantine alloy that—"
"Would you like, just for a second, stop narrating my instruments and sit your butt down?" Bianca snapped.
Charlie, practically vibrating in his seat behind her, was beyond reach. "I must bear witness! This is the moment! The culmination of a lifetime of theoretical cross-referencing!"
In the other vessel, Galit, his jaw tight, piloted with a careful, pained focus. Marya listened to the chatter, a faint smirk playing on her lips. "He's more excited about this hunk of junk than you are."
Galit managed a weak chuckle that turned into a wince. "Yeah, well. At least the guy has good taste in historical relics."
The cityscape suddenly fell away, opening into a vast, hemispherical cavern within the trench wall. And there, nestled in a cradle of carved black stone and twisted, petrified docking clamps, it lay.
The Dreadnought Thalassa wasn't merely a ship. It was a mountain of dark metal sleeping. Its hull was the deep, silent black of a moonless night sky, a surface that seemed to swallow their spotlights rather than reflect them. The shape was sinuous, a predator's form even in repose—a tapered nose flaring back into a powerful, graceful midsection before tapering again at the stern. Along its spine, a colossal, fin-like structure lay folded, like the dormant sail of some cosmic manta ray. The scale was incomprehensible; it made their submarines look like minnows beside a whale.
"THERE IT IS!" Charlie's shriek over the comms was so sudden and high-pitched that Jelly, back in the galley, yelped and momentarily dissolved into a quivering puddle. "THERE! THERE! BY ALL THE FORGOTTEN TEXTS OF OHARA, THERE IT IS!"
"Charlie, I, like, swear to the ancient engineers, if you, like, don't sit down—" Bianca's threat was cut short by her own gasp. "Whoa. Like… whoa."
Even Marya's stoic calm was pierced. She leaned forward, her golden eyes wide, taking in the sheer, silent majesty of the vessel. It was terrifying and beautiful. It was hope, wrapped in ancient, terrifying metal.
"Bianca," Marya called, her voice cutting through the awed silence. "Do you see anywhere we can dock? A hatch, an airlock?"
"Like, negative, Captain Serious," Bianca replied, the nickname slipping out from old habit. "Like, the external architecture is, like, smoother than a Sea King's belly. We're, like, gonna have to go old school. Pressure suits. We've got extras over here."
"I HAVE TO GO!" Charlie announced, as if declaring a holy pilgrimage.
"You have to like, CHILL," Bianca groaned.
Marya keyed her mic. "Copy that. Think we still have one functional suit in the rear locker." She unstrapped herself and stood. "Galit, you're on driving duty. Don't crash my sub."
Galit gave a pained nod. "Just don't get yourself flattened by a thousand-year-old door."
As Marya moved toward the back, Eliane was on her heels like a worried duckling. "You're… you're going out there?" Her voice was small, "is it safe?" Her eyes darting to the viewport and the monstrous silhouette beyond.
Marya stopped before the suit locker, a bulky, worn thing of reinforced rubber and brass. "It's not safe at all," she said plainly, beginning to unzip her leather jacket. "But if we can get inside, find the main docking bay controls, and figure out how to wake this beast up a little, then we can all come aboard. Then we decide if it can be resurrected."
Eliane chewed the inside of her cheek, her small hands twisting the hem of her apron. "It looks… scary. Maybe we should…"
Marya paused, her jacket half-off. She looked at the girl's fearful face. With a movement that was almost gentle, she reached out and patted Eliane's flour-dusted head. "Bianca took a look at our sub's engine back in Vintana Cove. She said it has maybe one or two more jumps in it before it gives up the ghost and sinks to the bottom of some random sea. It needs a full rebuild. We're lucky it's lasted this long." She offered the simple, brutal truth, her tone matter-of-fact. "This thing," she nodded toward the Thalassa, "is our best shot. It'll be fine."
The three pressure suits—clunky, antiquated things—made Marya, Bianca, and Charlie look like deep-dwelling crustaceans as they emerged from the airlocks. The water was profoundly cold, a chill that seeped through the layers. Their helmet lights became the only points of warmth in the abyss, painting shaky circles on the Dreadnought's impossible hull.
Bianca, in her element, immediately clomped over to the hull and placed a gloved hand on it. "They like… don't make 'em like this anymore," her voice crackled in Marya's helmet. The metal was seamless, cold as the arctic, and etched with faint, swirling patterns moving in the shifting light.
"A valid, if painfully understated, observation!" Charlie chimed in, his voice trembling with excitement. "The metallurgical technique is entirely lost to history! This is a living fossil of material science!"
"Like, is it in remarkable condition," Bianca continued, running a scanner from her belt along the surface. "I mean, I expected like, rust and giant dents and like, elephant -sized barnacles. But this? This is more than serviceable. It's like it was put to bed yesterday."
"Find the hatch," Marya's calm voice directed. "The main ingress for crew has to be accessible."
They found it not as an obvious door, but as a subtle, elliptical depression on the starboard flank. At its center was a panel of dark, glass-like material. Bianca fiddled with her scanner. "Like, no obvious mechanism… maybe it's voice-activated? Or keyed to a specific energy signature?"
Charlie leaned in, his helmet almost touching the panel. "Perhaps a linguistic trigger? A phrase from the Void Century tongue? Ahem! If I might attempt a reconstruction based on comparative root languages—"
Before he could begin what would undoubtedly be a lengthy and incorrect recitation, Marya simply reached out and pressed her bare hand—her glove removed at the wrist seal—against the cold panel. The black veins on her forearm, the mark of her curse, pulsing faintly.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, with a deep, resonant THUM that vibrated through the water and up their boots, the elliptical depression irised open with a silent, oiled smoothness, revealing a dark, airless chamber within.
"Or," Marya said dryly, retracting her hand, "that."
The interior airlock was a tomb of frozen air. Their lights revealed walls of the same seamless, dark alloy, curving overhead. As the outer door sealed behind them, powerful pumps groaned to life with the sound of a giant clearing its throat after a long sleep. The black water drained away with a deafening roar, leaving them standing in a pool of slush. A hiss of stale, ancient air replaced the vacuum, smelling of cold metal, long-static electricity, and something else—a faint, ghostly hint of ozone and old paper.
"I am… without words," Charlie breathed, fogging his helmet visor.
"That's like, a first," Bianca said, popping the seal on her helmet with a hiss-clunk. The air was breathable, but it tasted flat and dead, like the air inside a sealed sarcophagus.
Marya removed her own helmet, her black hair clinging to her neck. "Where to?"
"Like, the command deck," Bianca said, her eyes already scanning the smooth walls for clues. "That's, like, the brain. We can, like, assess power, life support, and like, you know, see if the steering wheel still works from there."
The corridors of the Dreadnought Thalassa were wide and disorienting. There were no sharp corners, only flowing curves that felt less like a ship and more like the inside of a gigantic, metallic seashell. The floors were springy underfoot, made of some resilient material that muffled their steps. Doors, when they found them, were seamless parts of the wall that slid aside without a sound. It was unnervingly quiet, their breathing and the squelch of their wet boots the only sounds.
Galit's voice, tinny and strained, came over Marya's suit comm. "Your air mix was reading low. Status?"
Marya keyed the mic on her wrist. "Copy that. We're inside. The atmosphere is stable, just old. We should have this figured soon."
"How's it looking in there?" Galit asked.
Marya shone her light down a corridor that seemed to stretch into forever, the walls etched with more of those faint, swirling glyphs. "Let's just say," she replied, a hint of dry awe in her tone, "you won't be disappointed."
They found the command nexus at the ship's forward peak. It was a vast, circular room with a ceiling that arched high overhead. Instead of windows, the entire forward wall and much of the dome were made of a single, continuous dark material. Consoles with surfaces of etched crystal and dark stone rose from the floor like mushrooms after a rain. In the center, a single chair, wide and imposing, waited.
"Found it!" Bianca announced, hustling to the main console. Her fingers, stained with nut butter and engine grease even now, danced over the crystalline surfaces. "Like, the interfaces are intuitive… almost like they're anticipating thought… okay, main power is on a trickle feed. Here goes…"
Without further ceremony, she twisted a large, faceted crystal knob and brought her palm down on a series of glyphs.
The ship shuddered. It wasn't a violent lurch, but a deep, visceral tremor that ran through the very bones of the vessel, a giant stirring in its sleep. Lights—soft, cool, and source-less—bloomed from the walls and ceiling, illuminating the chamber in a gentle radiance. The dark forward viewport flickered, then cleared, not to show the black water outside, but to display a perfect, holographic projection of the cavern, their two submarines, and the city beyond, as if the wall had simply vanished.
Aurélie's sharp voice cut over the comms. "Status report! We have movement from the derelict!"
"Like, all good!" Bianca called back, her eyes glued to the console where streams of unfamiliar script flowed like water. "I'm pressurizing the main habitation decks and getting a power reading now! Stand by to dock!"
Outside, they could see through the viewport as a massive section of the Thalassa's belly, near the stern, began to slide open, revealing a warmly lit hangar bay large enough to swallow both their subs whole. Water began to churn and recede from the opening.
"Can we… take off our helmets?" Charlie asked, his voice filled with wonder as he stared at the miraculous viewport.
"In like, five…" Bianca muttered, her brow furrowed. "Engaging primary life support… now."
A deep, resonant hum built within the ship, a sound of power stretching its limbs. Then, a loud, blaring alarm echoed through the chamber—a jarring, discordant sound of malfunction.
Aurélie's voice came again, tense. "What is that noise? Report!"
"Like, it needs more oomph!" Bianca said, her hands flying. "The life support grid is drawing too much from the stabilizers… rerouting auxiliary power from non-essential systems… come on, you beautiful relic…" She slammed her hand down on another glyph.
The alarm died abruptly. The hum smoothed out, becoming a steady, comforting background vibration. The lights brightened a fraction. Bianca let out a long breath, a strand of black hair escaping her bun. "Okay. Like, okay. Readings say we have… maybe ten hours of full life support before the core needs a proper cycle or a new power source. After that, things get real dark and real airless, real fast."
"Copy," Aurélie responded, her voice all business. "Are we clear to dock?"
Marya, who had been watching Bianca work with a mix of respect and amusement, keyed her mic. "Clear to dock. I've lit up the path on your scopes. Docking bay is open and pressurized." She looked over at Bianca, who was wiping her forehead with the back of her hand, a wide, triumphant grin on her face. Marya gave her a small, genuine nod. "Engine room next?"
Bianca's grin turned fierce. She looked around the awakened command nexus of a legend, at the ghostly, perfect image of the sunken world outside, and then back at Marya. "Like… hell yeah."
As she said it, the crystal panels on several consoles flickered. Two figures, one of shimmering blue light with a graceful, aquatic tail, the other of solid amber light with the sturdy build of a smith, flickered into existence near the main console. They took one look at each other.
"I told you diverting power from the tertiary environmental processors was the logical choice," the amber one (Telchines) grumbled, his voice like grinding stones.
"And I told you that would cause a cascade failure in the archival climate controls," the blue one (Halia) replied, her voice a melodic sigh. "You never listen. You never have."
They both seemed to notice the three living, breathing humans for the first time. They turned in unison.
"Oh," said Halia, her large eyes blinking. "Visitors."
"About time," muttered Telchines.
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