"We thought the sea was wild and untamed, but we forgot that it remembers. And now, the Deep One has risen, not to conquer, but to reclaim what was never ours to command."
We all felt it before we saw it, something shifting deep beneath the sea, older than time, blacker than void, and hungry in a way the living could never comprehend. The water did not ripple. It recoiled, and A low groan echoed from the trenches far below the Pearl Castle, as if the ocean floor itself were cracking open under the weight of something it had long tried to contain.
Then the stench came, rot, ancient and unrelenting. The smell of bloated corpses trapped beneath sunless waves for centuries, of drowned bones ground into silt and churned into rage. Even the winds hesitated. The waves that had danced at our feet earlier now withdrew like frightened children, exposing a wide maw of black water that pulsed with unnatural life.
Lysander muttered beside me, "By the Tides…"
