The Drowned

Prologue

The Kingdom of Thalassar has fallen silent, and in that silence, something ancient stirs. Three weeks past, the royal fleet sailed into a midnight fog and never returned. Now the coastal villages empty in terror as their own people walk into the black waters, drawn by songs that no human throat should be capable of singing. The mermaids of the Abyssal Trench have awakened from centuries of slumber, and they have declared war. Their queen, Thessara the Siren, claims the surface world poisoned the deep with corrupted magic—a slow death seeping through the trenches. Whether her accusations hold truth or madness, the result is the same: the pact that bound human and mer-kind to coexistence for three hundred years has shattered like glass. The Crown is fractured. War councils demand military response; merchant lords whisper of appeasement through sacrifice; scattered survivors of the Covenant Keepers—the mages sworn to maintain the ancient pact—speak of recovery and renegotiation. But there are other voices in the darkness. Dissidents among the mermaids themselves, hunted by Thessara's enforcers, reach out through intermediaries with impossible offers: peace is still possible, they claim, if the Covenant Stone can be found and brought to the Sunken Temple of Tethys during the next lunar emergence. Yet even this fragile hope masks a deeper terror. Ancient things, older than mermaid and human both, are beginning to surface in the chaos. The barrier that held them contained for millennia grows thin. The kingdom stands at a precipice, and the only path forward leads down into the black waters where truth, betrayal, and something far older than revenge await in the crushing dark.