Tideborne Throne
He thought the worst thing that could happen was being questioned across the street from a police station.
Then the street turned inside out.
Every night, the city recedes like a tide, peeling away asphalt and daylight to reveal a drowned underworld—reefed highways, trench-like subways, and courthouse stairs leading nowhere. In the Low Tide, names are not labels.
Names are coordinates.
The world’s consciousness is dying. An Outer God is siphoning its Origin dry—levying a tax on reality itself to stay anchored. With nothing left to fight back, the world summons an outsider: a man from Earth with a hollowed core, hard to locate and harder to claim.
He survives his first Low Tide by learning the only law that matters:
Never speak a full name in the dark.
But survival isn’t victory. To drive an Outer God away, you don’t kill it. You don’t seal it.
You outlaw it.
The dying world grants him authority in fragments—each one a borrowed right, each one bound to a Liability Clause the world enforces without mercy. His first clause is simple and brutal:
Duty of Record.
If he grasps a truth, he must file it—fix it into a case, a rule, a binding line of evidence—before the tide returns. Fail, and the penalty escalates: pressure behind the eyes, language turning to salt, sleep collapsing into nightmares that don’t end.
With a small crew of broken survivors at his side, he descends into the drowned city to recover Exhibits—relics of forgotten trials, sealed verdicts, and drowned precedents that can be cited like weapons. Each Exhibit grants power: a ward, a writ, a temporary injunction against the impossible.
Each citation demands payment.
As the Outer God rewrites the rules to keep its claim, the outsider begins writing back—turning horror into clauses, clauses into commandments, commandments into sovereignty. To win, he must do the unthinkable:
Claim the Tideborne Throne.
And when the final door opens, he will draw on the cosmic tide of the universe that birthed Earth itself—and issue a verdict strong enough to exile an Outer God beyond its own name.
The door will close.
But something, somewhere, will finally learn the word:
Earth.
