The southern ocean was not a battlefield for men. It was a dark, heaving expanse of crushing pressure and unpredictable violence, where the true powers of the world moved unseen beneath the waves.
Admiral Kaelen of the Kesseth Hegemony stood on the deck of his flagship, the Tidebreaker, staring out at the blockade line. Fifty heavy galleons, reinforced with deep-sea ironwood and armed with aether-cannons, formed an unbroken wall across the primary shipping lanes connecting the Dominion to the southern archipelagos.
For two years, they had strangled Zephyr's maritime trade. The Dominion's navy was small, focused on coastal defense rather than blue-water projection. They had tried twice to break the line with their new steam-powered ironclads, and both times the Kesseth fleet had driven them back with superior numbers and heavy bombardment.
But Kaelen was not looking at the horizon for ironclads. He was looking at the water itself.
