On June 28, 1038, the morning in Ria Iberia was characterized by an uncanny, oppressive silence.
The mooring ropes at the harbor did not sway in the wind; the flags hung limp and motionless as if drained of life.
Even the gulls had ceased their crying.
In a city that breathed through the sea, the disappearance of the ocean's rhythm did not go unnoticed. The inhabitants sensed the void immediately.
Men on the docks huddled together, their voices hushed by an instinctual dread.
"This... I have a terminal feeling about this."
As noon passed, the anomalies began to chain together into a logistical nightmare.
Signals from the distant horizon vanished. The courier ships that ferried messages between the coastal hubs failed to return. Telegraph lines went dead for no discernible reason, and the transmission towers began to vomit nothing but static.
The signaling lamps flickered and died.
Radios that played music one moment were swallowed by a sudden void of sound the next, leaving behind only the rhythmic, hissing breath of white noise.
Along the coastline, the earth itself began to shift.
It was not the violent upheaval of a standard earthquake, but something far more macabre—a persistent, low-frequency tremor. Window frames rattled with a microscopic frenzy; the water in glasses trembled with an invisible vibration.
Plaster fell from the walls like white dust.
Crowds gathered in the squares, the murmur of anxiety growing into a roar.
"The sea is wrong."
"Maybe... is this because of those Aegirians who came from the deep?"
People sought reasons to anchor their terror, and as always, the marginalized were cast as the anchors of blame.
[The Royal Navy is currently investigating the anomalous conditions. Citizens are ordered to remain at their posts and continue their daily—]
The Naval Command initially dismissed the events as coincidence or hyperbole, but by the afternoon, their bureaucratic composure had hardened into a mask of frozen grimness.
The Port Authority barred all exits and entries. The police moved in to drive the desperate crowds back from the waterfront.
Meanwhile, the windows of the Royal Palace were shuttered against the sea.
Alejandro I stopped mid-page as he leafed through a stack of reports.
The words on the parchment blurred before his eyes. Only the numbers remained stark and legible.
Communication blackouts. Harbor functionality degraded. Seismic anomalies. Lighthouse visibility negated.
Reports arrived from various ports: in one, the tide had suddenly retreated into the abyss; in another, fishing vessels had capsized for no reason at all.
His ministers implored him.
"You must pacify the masses, Your Majesty."
"The military must be mobilized."
"The people await the word of the Crown."
The King lifted his gaze.
He remembered the words of that Aegirian technician.
'A catastrophe will strike from the sea. You must prepare.'
And he decided. If a tide was coming that could not be outrun, he would meet it with the edge of a blade.
"We shall go to war with the sea."
The air in the room seemed to congeal at his proclamation.
Common sense dictated that 'war' was a term reserved for human adversaries, but that logic was momentarily suppressed under the weight of the King's authority.
The Great Age of Iberia had been forged upon the waves. A declaration of war against the ocean sounded like peak arrogance, yet to the panicked citizenry, it offered a desperate comfort.
A national broadcast was mandated.
As the sun began to tilt toward the horizon, the sound of radios leaked from every street in Ria Iberia.
Taverns, bakeries, guild halls, and harbor warehouses all tilted their collective ears toward the speakers.
The people clung to the sound.
The voice of Alejandro I boomed across the nation.
He designated the sea as the enemy and declared that Iberia would never surrender to the silence. He consoled the masses, emboldened the military, and invoked the legend of the Invincible Armada.
He spoke of the 'Eyes of Iberia.'
He detailed the vigil of the coastal ramparts, the batteries of cannons, the lanterns of the lighthouses, and the watchmen in their towers.
And he promised: in twelve hours, he would issue the next directive.
The people inhaled that number, finding a moment of reprieve in the timeline. Applause broke out in some quarters; in others, there was only weeping. Some praised the King's courage, while others stared blankly at the ocean through their windows.
The sea was so quiet that the King's voice felt unnaturally loud.
But then, the wind arrived.
The wind usually accompanies the sea, but not this time. This was a wind that arrived later than the tide it preceded.
The harbor flags whipped violently once, and an unidentifiable stench drifted through the streets.
The radios cut out instantly.
The power had not failed, yet the sound simply vanished. People looked at one another, paralyzed.
Someone tried to speak but found they could not. Their tongues felt leaden; their breath hitched in their chests.
And then, the ocean retreated.
Below the docks, the seabed—land that had been submerged for eternity—was suddenly exposed. Wet stones, slippery moss, discarded scrap metal, and grounded skiffs lay bare.
At first, the people took it for a bizarre spectacle. A few scavengers even descended to pick up lost items, kicking at stranded fish with nervous laughter.
Then, a scream pierced the air.
"Get up! Get to high ground! The tide is coming!"
The horizon transformed. The line became a plane. The plane became a wall.
The boundary between sky and sea vanished as the ocean surged upward as if pushing the heavens out of its path.
The word 'wave' was insufficient. It was a monolith. A black precipice. It was the night itself, set in motion.
The 'Eyes of Iberia' attempted to respond.
Sirens tried to wail along the coastline; lanterns were lit, and observation posts attempted to signal. But the signals never reached their destination.
The First Eye collapsed. Stone shattered, iron buckled, and human bodies were hurled into the air before vanishing into the maw. The Second Eye followed. The Third Eye appeared to hold for a fraction of a second before it was snapped in its entirety.
Someone watching thought: 'The nation is closing its eyes.'
Before that thought could finish, the Fourth and Fifth Eyes were extinguished. Only one remained—a lone lantern on a distant, high rampart, flickering until the very end.
The Invincible Armada was already at sea. They believed that being on the water would allow them to withstand it. This belief was Iberia's oldest and most fatal arrogance.
As the black wall approached, the fleet traversed their guns. Commands were shouted. Sails and banners unfurled all at once. For a heartbeat, it appeared as if humanity had formed a line of battle against the ocean.
But formations only matter in war. The sea was not fighting. It was merely exerting its weight.
The first battleship was lifted high, then hammered down. In that ascent, the sailors felt a fleeting hope that they might crest the wave; in the descent, that hope was pulverized. The ship did not merely sink; it was smashed against the sea, its masts splintering like toothpicks, its gun ports torn asunder, its decks folded in on themselves.
The massive keel snapped, and the leviathan of wood and iron was crumpled like flimsy parchment.
The second and third battleships vanished in succession. The pride of Iberia succumbed, one by one, to the raw hegemony of nature.
The city witnessed it all. The black wall grew until it filled the eyes of the people of Ria Iberia.
Some began to run. Others stood frozen—not out of courage, but because their bodies had ceased to function.
The black wall breached the harbor.
The docks vanished first. The people on them were erased. Warehouses were lifted, then shredded. The cobblestones of the streets were uprooted and sent flying through the air.
Windows shattered simultaneously, and the shards were carried not by wind, but by the water. The deluge swept inward and upward at once. Only after watching the first floors of their buildings vanish did people scramble for the second. Only when the second floor disappeared did they climb onto the roofs.
But the moment they reached the rooftops, the buildings were no longer structures—they were driftwood planks in a maelstrom.
The towers of the Royal Palace swayed. The statues in the square toppled. The documents in the Administrative Bureau floated to the surface, their ink bleeding until the parchment became nothing more than meaningless white pulp.
The grand hall where the national convention had been held swelled with the pressure until its pillars snapped, collapsing inward. The voices of those who had debated there would never return.
Royals, nobles, citizens, communists, dockworkers, and police were all submerged in the same tide. Titles and ranks were equalized beneath the water.
The twelve hours promised by Alejandro I did not even last the night.
Less than an hour after the broadcast, Ria Iberia was no longer a city by the sea; it was the floor of the sea itself. A point on the map was erased.
The tsunami was not a single event. The water surged in and out, scouring whatever remained. It dragged wreckage into the depths and hurled it back, grinding the city's skeleton into dust.
In the silence that followed, Iberia was left speechless. Half the coastline had vanished. Fertile fields were poisoned by salt. The soil looked alive, but it crumbled into sterile powder in the hand.
The coast was no longer a habitable frontier. Rumors spread of monsters emerging from the foam. Villages that turned their backs to the sea locked their doors and raised their lanterns higher every night.
The heart of the nation was a void.
Most of the royal family was dead, and the administration to fill the vacuum had been drowned with the capital. With no one to govern, order evaporated. In the absence of order, looting flourished. Looting accelerated famine. And in their hunger, the people looked for a scapegoat.
The name of Breogan was invoked. The Royal Engineers, the Aegirians, the architects of the Golden Age—whispers circulated that they had summoned the disaster or provoked the sea. When silence robs people of their language, what remains is resentment and suspicion.
But defining a villain turned fear into hatred, providing a fleeting sense of clarity. That hatred only dismantled Iberia further.
Refugees wandered the roads. Endless caravans of carts stretched across the horizon. When a child cried, the sound did not last long; they had no strength left to weep.
The masses moved toward where there was no water, but even when they found it, they could not drink. Salinity and filth had spread, and plague followed in their wake.
Yet, amidst the ruin, some places remained standing like miracles.
Under the eaves of the cathedrals, the priests gathered the survivors. They shared water and bread. They washed wounds and recorded the names of the dead. The people knelt—not to a god, perhaps, but to the last remnant of order in their world.
They wanted someone to organize the ruins. They wanted someone to tell them that they were not yet finished.
Relief efforts began to take the shape of governance. The documentation required to streamline aid became the new administration.
In a corner of a ruined marketplace, someone whispered, "Now that the King is gone, who will lead us?"
Another replied, "It must be the Church. Otherwise, we all die."
While those words spread through the air, the sea remained silent. That silence was not one of peace, but the expressionless face of something waiting for what comes next.
Iberia did not yet know what would forge the nation anew. Only one thing was certain: the survivors would soon seek out the sword and the lantern.
********************************
The news that the coastline had vanished arrived first as a rumor. Rumors are prone to exaggeration, so many dismissed the reports half-heartedly.
But after two, then three days, the rumors did not stop; they only became more specific. Details were added: which port was erased, which city's bell tower was submerged, which roads were swallowed by sea-mists and never reopened.
And rumors with details are usually the truth.
Refugees were the first to arrive at the inland stations and markets. They brought no luggage. They brought only soaked clothes, bruised arms, and broken voices.
When they tried to speak, their lips trembled; when they tried to explain, their sentences fractured. Yet someone eventually managed to choke out the words.
"Ria Iberia has been submerged in its entirety!"
When that name was uttered, a profound hush fell over the surroundings. People checked each other's faces for signs of a joke, a provocation, or a drunkard's rambling.
But the eyes of the refugees were not the eyes of the intoxicated. They were the eyes of those who had looked upon the truth.
Within days, it was confirmed. Directives from the central government ceased. Mail stopped arriving. Telegraphs went dark. Public offices either closed or stood open and idle, incapable of processing anything.
The tax collectors did not come. In their place came armed drifters. They did not ask for food; they took it.
It was then that the leaders of the National Confederation of Trade Unions gathered. Their meeting place was an empty school auditorium.
Marcos Ibañez stood at the entrance, checking the faces of every individual who entered. Estella Romero spread out sheets of paper on a desk, scribbling until her pencil was a mere stub. Juan Maria Alonso sat by the door, listening to the outside world with the ears of a man who measured the quantity of bows, the supply of arrows, and the intent of every footfall.
The opening statement was not long.
Marcos spoke: "The King is dead, the coastal cities are finished, and the capital has vanished. All that remains is the people in front of us."
Someone gave a bitter laugh, but the sound died quickly.
Another cadre spoke up. "Then what are we supposed to do? We are the ones who were exiled here. We are the losers whose organizations, titles, and commands were stripped away."
Estella looked up. "That is true. But right now, those things that were taken from us are utterly useless anyway. Titles have been drowned. Orders do not arrive. What is needed instead is food, medicine, and patrols. The time has come to decide who will provide them."
Juan added in a low voice, "If we don't decide now, the bastards with the guns will decide for us."
The auditorium fell silent again. They had already seen it—gangs looting village granaries, men blocking roads to extort tolls, others using refugees as bait to squeeze out supplies.
This state of uncontrollable anarchy did not begin with freedom; it usually began with a bandit crowning himself king.
Marcos held up a piece of paper. It was a list written in pencil. Party organizations in the vicinity. Still-active party cells. Left-wing cooperatives. Union branches. Craftsman guilds that operated on cooperative principles.
He said, "Some things are still alive. The organization is not yet dead; it is merely scattered. We must gather what has been dispersed."
From that moment, the meeting shifted to practicalities.
"We must fight two enemies," Marcos said. "Hunger and fear. Hunger must be barred with bread, and fear must be barred with order."
Juan tapped his fingers on the desk. "Order is fine. But who will give the commands?"
That was the crux of the matter. To end the 'anarchic chaos,' someone had to command. Yet, as they had felt during the National Convention, command from a strong power had been the blade of a purge, and procedures had been the wrapping paper for exile. People with those memories were not likely to accept directives from above so easily.
And so, they decided to change the name.
Marcos proposed: "If we remain as a party organization, we will be hunted as a warlord faction by our opponents until we vanish. What is needed now is not the victory of the party, but survival. Let us call ourselves the Regional Defense Committee. Defense is the mandate; the Committee is the method of control. If a single head leads, everything breaks when that head is severed. Right now, we need many hands."
An objection was raised. "Won't a committee diffuse the responsibility of leadership compared to a single-leader system? Won't decisions be delayed in such a critical situation?"
Juan interjected immediately. "It is fine if decisions are delayed. Our problem so far was that decisions were too fast and too absolute. However, we cannot afford delays in emergencies, so we will establish a structure. We have the precedent of the Soviets. We will serve as committee members, each directing a specific department."
And so, after several more sessions, the Iberian Regional Defense Committee was born. Iberia lay in ruins, but within the cracks of the fallen nation, new hands began to move.