The city's current shifted with the weight of unspoken fear.
You could feel it everywhere, threaded through the outer lanes, hanging low in the spires, pressed like silt against every coral archway. The reef wasn't humming anymore. It was waiting.
I hadn't spoken since the breach. Tiruun hadn't either. After the shellbinder's orders, we went separate ways, and I didn't see him again until next rest-cycle. Even then, his eyes never quite settled on mine.
The glyphlights across the upper rise pulsed in tighter intervals now. Red patterns overlapped the usual work cycle glyphs, forming layered warnings and motion limits. Guards in shell-carved plating moved between patrol lanes with tighter formation, two at a time, minimum.
And beneath it all, a deeper worry: the fruit lines.
They hadn't said it out loud, not in public, but we all knew. The tidefruit harvest had already been delayed by two days after the outer grove vents were sealed. That grove was the largest yield bed for the sacred bloom. The fruit was slow-growing, vulnerable to light shifts and temperature dips. And if it didn't make it to the central basin on schedule…
The Demi-God would begin to starve.
No one called it that. They said it needed "ritual nourishment," or "cycle-based sustenance." But we all knew what that meant. The creature might be a god to the Elders, a legend to the young, but in truth, it was alive. And it had needs. It guarded the egg pools of every bloodline in the reef, even the Exiles. It didn't discriminate. It only watched. Waited. Protected.
And when unfed?
It had destroyed reefs before.
That was what made the worry stick deepest. Not just the breach, not just the rising shadows or the sealed dome rumors, it was the sense that if things slid any further, the one guardian we all depended on might turn from protector to threat. Not out of rage. Out of hunger.
And hunger, in a being like that, was not something any of us wanted to face.
The call came just before rest-shift: I had been reassigned.
Not to planter duty. Not even to the harvest runners. They'd pushed me directly to Watcher track—barely one cycle after reporting the breach. I found out by glyph shard, sealed and marked with Vonn's own personal crest.
Tiruun found me before I could leave the outer dome.
"You didn't even get the option to refuse?" he asked, fins tense, arms folded tightly across his chest.
"It wasn't a request," I said. "It's temporary. A scan shadow until the shellbinders finish review."
He looked at me for a long moment, then shook his head. "They're scared."
I didn't answer. I didn't need to.
My first shift began in the coral rise under the basin shelf. The air tasted sharper here, tinged with compression salts and tideflame residue from old glyph layers. The armor I was issued was light—a partial plating set marked for junior Watchers, with a split-channel mask and mana-threaded crestplate.
My trainer was a woman named Yera.
Older. Scar-shelled along one fin. No ceremony in her greeting—just handed me a short-blade hook, adjusted my crest straps, and motioned toward the tunnel with two fingers.
We swept the outer wall in silence.
"No talking during glide pass," she said finally. "Just watch. If your glyphthread buzzes, don't panic, pull back, keep one hand to coral. Let the water tell you where it's weakest. You feel anything burn behind your gill line, you surface immediately. That's bleed-spill."
I nodded. "Understood."
She didn't look at me. "I doubt it. But you will."
The shadows were thicker in these passages, not darker, just denser, like the current had less room to breathe. Twice we passed shellcast scars along the reef wall, places where defensive magic had flared, burned, and cooled in tight pulses. Silent battles. Training glyphs never prepared you for the quiet of real breach paths.
Near the second turn, we passed an open chamber, used to be a mineral cradle. Long since abandoned. But something about the coral growth along the floor felt off. Warped in rings. Pressed outward in petal-like fractures. Yera saw me pause.
"Scanner rig ruptured there two days ago," she said. "No source. Mana residue still active."
"Residual magic?" I asked.
She hesitated. "No. Mechanical."
I frowned. "From the Exiles?"
Yera turned toward me for the first time. Her eyes were sharp, focused. "They don't have that kind of tech."
"Then who..."
"Keep moving."
We ended our patrol near the lower intake roots, where tide vents bled pressure from the mid-trench. From here, I could see the distant glow of the fruit grove domes—still partially active, but dim. A pair of harvesters floated near the access gates, arguing softly with two guards.
"I was cleared for sweep-cycle," one said, gesturing with an open palm.
"We're sealed past first bloom line," the guard replied. "No one in without shellmaster clearance."
"They need feedfruit," the other harvester said, more desperately. "You want to explain to the Spire what happens if the god doesn't eat?"
The guard didn't answer. Just tightened their grip on the spear.
Yera watched for a moment, then nudged me gently and drifted off. I followed, but not before catching one last whisper from the harvesters:
"If the Exiles still have a grove, we'll be begging them by next tide."
I reported for my second rotation early.
Yera met me at the shellpost and wordlessly handed me a second hook-blade. No commentary. Just a gesture toward the western flowpaths—new route. Unstable ground. Low glyph coverage.
We swept in silence again. No anomalies. No movement.
Until the hum started.
It was faint, so soft I thought it was my heartbeat again at first. But then the current shifted. And the hum came again. Thicker this time. Not sharp. Not hostile.
Just… searching.
Yera stopped in place.
Her fins flattened against the wall. I mirrored her.
The hum continued—then pulsed outward like a sonar beat.
She mouthed a single word: "Mapping."
I didn't understand how she knew.
Not until we saw it.
A small, pod-like device drifted just above the reef floor, no visible propulsion, no mana glow. Its surface was smooth, gray-black, studded with glass nodes that spun slowly as it hovered. Glyphlight reflected wrong against it, bending around the edges. It made no sound but the hum.
Yera raised a signal beacon, but before she activated it, the device stopped moving.
Its nodes turned toward us.
It didn't attack. Didn't flee.
It watched.
And then, slowly, it folded in on itself, like a collapsing shell, and vanished with a ripple of displaced water.
No mana trace. No noise. No flash, Gone.
We stood there, silence between us stretched tight as glass.
Finally, Yera exhaled. "That wasn't ours."
"No," I said quietly. "It wasn't."
Back at the shellpost, we filed a breach report.
Yera typed it herself. Didn't mention me by name. Just a junior present for scan shadow duty. I didn't mind. I wasn't looking for credit.
I was trying to make sense of the shape.
That device hadn't shimmered like anything reefborn. It didn't bleed shadow like the beasts in the outer trenches. And it didn't feel like the Exile tech we were warned about as initiates.
This was different.
A scout. A lens. A question, drifting closer.
That evening, I returned to my family dome.
It was quiet. Too quiet.
I sat at the seedstone for a long time, fingers brushing the base of the coral bulb. The bloom had begun to wilt, too little light from the overhead vents. I'd have to replace it. Or not. Maybe it didn't matter anymore. Maybe planters didn't go back after Watcher cycles. Maybe that life was already behind me.
I curled into the cot and watched the reeflight flicker.
No dreams came that night.
Only silence.
And the memory of eyes that weren't made for this world.