The ocean that surrounds Cordragia has always been more than water. It breathes in tides. It dreams in currents. It remembers in salt. Before the mountains rose and the forests grew, before the first fire was kindled or the first kingdom founded, the sea was already ancient. It watched the land emerge from its depths with something between curiosity and contempt—these dry places where water could not reach, these barren stretches where its children could not swim.
For eons, the ocean observed the land-dwellers with patient disdain. They built their cities along its shores, harvesting its fish, sailing their pathetic vessels across its surface. They never asked permission. They never offered thanks. They took what they wanted and cursed the waves when storms swallowed their ships.
The sea remembered every insult. Every drop of blood spilled in its waters. Every prayer ignored. Every sailor who drowned calling for salvation that never came.
Sugartha was born where a river meets the sea, in that liminal space between fresh and salt water where the boundaries blur and strange things grow. Her mother was a woman from a fishing village. Her father, the village whispered, was the sea itself—a wave that had taken human form for one night before returning to the depths.
The child was marked from birth. Gills behind her ears, pale and pink and barely visible. Webbed fingers that she learned to hide with gloves. Eyes the color of storm clouds, shot through with lightning. She could hold her breath for hours. She could feel the tides in her blood.
The fisherfolk who found her tried to drown her as a demon. They rowed out beyond the breakers and threw her into the water with stones tied to her ankles. She should have sunk. She should have died.
The sea itself rose up to claim her.
Waves taller than ships crashed over the boats, swallowing her would-be killers. The ocean cradled Sugartha in its currents, carrying her down to depths where no light penetrated, where the pressure would crush a normal being into paste. There, in the darkness, the sea spoke to her.
It showed her its memories. The world before land. The first creatures that crawled onto the shore, abandoning their mother. The slow betrayal as the land-dwellers multiplied and forgot their origins. It showed her what they had taken: the gold beneath the ocean floor, stolen by volcanic action, hoarded by dragons who had no right to it.
It named her its voice.
Sugartha was raised by tides, taught by whales whose songs contained the history of the deep. She learned to speak with hurricanes, to negotiate with monsoons, to command the rivers that the land-dwellers thought they had tamed. She swam with creatures that had never seen light—blind things with too many teeth, ancient behemoths that made dragons look like lizards.
By the time she returned to the surface world, she was no longer fully human. Her skin had taken on an iridescent sheen, like the inside of an oyster shell. Her hair moved constantly, as though underwater even in air. Her voice carried the echo of depths, resonant and cold.
She speaks for all water in Cordragia. The rain that farmers pray for—it answers to her. The rivers that power mills and irrigate fields—they flow at her sufferance. The waves that have sunk a thousand ships—they rise and fall at her command.
The Crimson Chest's gold, she has learned through the sea's long memory, was once part of the ocean floor. It crystallized in thermal vents, shaped by pressures that the surface world cannot comprehend. Dragons stole it. Humans refined it. Now it sits beneath a mountain, guarded by a creature of fire, as far from the sea as anything in Cordragia can be.
Sugartha intends to return it to the depths where it belongs. Not because she wants the gold—the sea has no use for treasure. Because it is stolen property. Because the land-dwellers have built their entire war around something that was never theirs.
If claiming it requires flooding every city that the land-dwellers have built, she considers that merely restoring natural balance. They have dammed her rivers. They have poisoned her waters with their waste. They have slaughtered her children for food and sport.
The sea, after all, was here first. The sea will be here last.
And when the final flood comes—when the waves rise higher than mountains and the cities sink beneath the currents—Sugartha will be there to welcome the survivors to her mother's embrace.
Those who can learn to breathe water will live.
The rest will finally understand what it means to drown.