Chapter 338: The Tide Colapse

I keep looking at Kaelen after that.

The possibility that Valerius sees fragments of the future changes a great deal, but it doesn’t make the man any easier to understand. Maybe it explains some impossible decisions, maybe it explains the altar. Even so, I spent years gathering information on the Deepwarden and never managed to form a complete image of him.

It’s like trying to watch something through dirty water.

"We need to be careful with Valerius," I say. "He’s murky in my visions. I can see consequences around him, people who cross his path, some decisions... but Valerius himself barely appears."

Kaelen turns the glass slowly between his fingers.

"Convenient for him."

"Not for me."

Garen stays silent for a few seconds before setting the bottle on the low table.

"There’s a reason I told Kaelen about you."

I look at him.

"I assumed it was because he almost killed Joseph in the corridor."

"That came later."

Kaelen lets out a small laugh through his nose.

Garen continues.

"I told him about the Tide of Every Morning."

My attention shifts immediately to the Director.

Kaelen raises his glass in a kind of salute.

"The name was ours before this old man turned it into a project."

The stitched banner behind the desk takes on a different meaning.

Garen used the name of the old squad because it still meant something to him. Now I understand why Kaelen reacted the way he did when Garen mentioned the next two years.

"After our conversation on Earth, I stopped treating the Tide as a project for someday," Garen says. "You guaranteed me it works. So I started."

He goes on to explain what he’s already set in motion.

Masters Series is putting together the first contracts to subsidize transport costs between Thirstfall and Earth. Logistics teams are analyzing routes, suppliers, and structures that could sustain a private armada. The distribution-by-need model has advanced too; Garen already has teams cross-referencing data from the terrestrial districts to determine which regions would need to receive WaterStrands before the others.

It’s still far from the planned scale.

But it already exists.

That alone alters a part of the future I know.

"I want to change something else," he continues. "The original Tide depended too much on me and on Masters Series. That makes the project vulnerable. If someone removes me, they can capture the whole structure."

I know that better than he does.

"So you want to decentralize."

"I want to turn it into a coalition."

Kaelen rests an arm on the back of the couch while Garen speaks.

"Divers who join keep receiving the planned benefits: reduced costs, logistical support, access to the routes, collection intelligence, and a share in the contracts. But I also want to create mutual obligations between the members."

"Protection."

"Among other things. If a member loses a route, the others help. If someone needs to transport WaterStrands, they use our structure. If anyone tries to isolate a member economically, they answer to an entire network."

He doesn’t need to mention the Deepwarden.

It’s about them.

Garen is building a structure that would make it harder to buy, threaten, or destroy the pieces individually.

"Is Kaelen taking part?"

The Director drinks a little of the liquor.

"If he’s going to use my old squad’s name to build an armada, someone has to keep him from screwing it up."

Garen ignores it.

"The Academy can supply Divers, training, researchers, and access to certain resources. Azurea offers capital and political structure. I want to bring in other houses and guilds later, but carefully."

It’s a much better idea than the original project.

It’s also dangerous.

The bigger the Tide grows, the sooner the Deepwarden would notice something was growing outside its reach.

"There’s one more piece," Garen says.

He leans forward.

"I’ve been studying a dungeon in the trenches for a few months. Some old records mention an artifact that might be there."

The way he says it makes me pay attention.

"Which one?"

"The Mirror of the Sorrow Siren."

The bottle of Lunaria goes still between my hands.

I know that name.

I know it very well.

In my old life, the Mirror appeared shortly before Garen’s death. It was the piece that turned the Tide from an expensive humanitarian proposal into a structure capable of operating at real scale.

The artifact had a simple, absurd function.

It found WaterStrands.

Its range wasn’t enormous, but next to the available alternatives it looked like cheating. A team equipped with the Mirror could track the distortions associated with the Strands across an entire area and cut out most of the time wasted on blind searching.

It was when Garen got it that the Tide really started to look inevitable.

And then Joseph killed him.

"Are you sure it’s in that dungeon?" I ask.

"No. I have a probable location based on two records from Crevona and a report I found in the Masters Series archives."

I look at him.

If I still have to pretend I see the future, this is one of the few times I can offer certainty.

"You’ll find it."

Garen goes still.

So does Kaelen.

"You saw that?" Garen asks.

I nod.

"I see the Mirror in your hands."

The smile appears on his face almost at once.

Kaelen raises his glass.

"Told you."

"You said you wanted to demolish half the dungeon."

"It’s still the fastest way to find out what’s inside."

Garen lets out a laugh and touches his own shot to Kaelen’s.

For a few seconds, the two of them go back to being trench companions.

I can picture it decades earlier. Garen planning. Kaelen wanting to solve half the problems with brute force. The two surviving because each one covered some flaw in the other.

I let them celebrate.

Then I rest my bottle on the table.

"You know when."

The two of them look at me.

Garen still has part of the smile on his face.

"When what?"

"When everything starts to go wrong."

The humor disappears.

"My prediction about your death. Joseph. The Tide. The fall of the Academy. You know there’s a window of roughly two years."

Kaelen shifts a little on the couch.

"Yes."

"But you don’t know why."

Garen frowns.

Kaelen stays quiet.

I look at the window.

The ocean sky is visible beyond the Academy buildings, blue and calm, light passing through the suspended waters.

For a long time, I avoided talking about this.

Not because it was a secret.

Because saying it changed nothing when the only people listening had no power to prepare.

Now I’m sitting across from the King of Azure Prime and a Rank SS who runs one of the largest institutions in Thirstfall. Garen is already forming an armada. Kaelen is starting to position himself against an infiltration that, in my old life, he only noticed when it was too late.

Maybe it’s finally worth it.

I also don’t intend to repeat what I did with Freya. Telling her I’d come back from the future was an exception, and I still don’t know what price that honesty will cost. To Garen and Kaelen, I’ll keep being what they already believe I am: someone whose Class shows lines of the future. The prophet’s role lets me say what’s needed without handing over the one truth I still want to keep my own — because when it was said out loud, the damage ran deeper than I’d calculated.

"I’ve never told anyone this," I say.

Garen sets the glass on the table.

Kaelen stops drinking too.

"Why?" Garen asks.

"Because knowing doesn’t help when you can’t do anything with the information. The two of you are now directly involved in what I’m trying to change for the next two years. So you need to know."

Kaelen leans forward.

"Speak."

I breathe slowly.

"There’s a reason the Deepwarden dominates so much in this period. And it isn’t because they steal the Tide of Every Morning."

Garen turns serious.

"Then what happens?"

"It gets easy for them."

He frowns.

I continue before he interprets it wrong.

"They assassinate a king. They take the largest institution in Azure Prime from a Rank SS. They absorb guilds, companies, routes, and governments in a short span. Have you ever asked yourselves how an organization, even one as powerful as the Deepwarden, manages to do all of that so fast?"

Garen opens his mouth.

"I thought—"

"Garen, sorry to interrupt, but I need to explain this whole thing before you try to fit it into what you already know."

He closes his mouth and nods.

"All right. Say it."

I look at the sky again.

"Two years from now, the Thirstfall you know today is going to look safe."

Kaelen changes his posture.

It’s slight, but enough for me to notice I have all his attention.

"It starts with rain," I continue. "For forty-five days, it barely stops. Rivers push into regions that never flooded. The tides rise. Routes disappear, coastal structures are evacuated, and there comes a point where people start to hate water just from looking at it."

Garen doesn’t take his eyes off me.

"Forty-five days?"

"Roughly."

Kaelen looks at the window.

"And after that?"

I lift my chin discreetly toward the blue above us.

"After that, the ocean sky comes down."

Neither of them speaks.

It’s a hard sentence to accept, because it violates something everyone in Thirstfall treats as a fixed part of the world.

Garen is the first to react.

"When you say comes down..."

"I’m not talking about a small rupture. Large parts of the ocean mass above Thirstfall give way. The water falls over entire regions."

Kaelen keeps looking up.

"And the water doesn’t come alone," I say.

His human eye returns to me.

"There are creatures up there no one here has catalogued. Some are only different from the ones we know. Others... others will make people relearn what they consider dangerous."

Garen rests his forearms on his knees.

"How many?"

"I can’t measure it that way."

It’s a good answer for the prophet’s lie, and also the truth. I never knew.

"What I can see is the effect. The transport lines break. Cities lose contact. Regions considered safe today become battlefields. Guilds spend their best Divers trying to contain creatures no one has studied, and a lot of important people die in those first campaigns."

I look at Garen.

"Other people die because the Deepwarden makes sure they don’t come back from the defense expeditions."

He understands.

I don’t have to say Joseph again.

Garen slowly runs a hand over his face.

"So they use the chaos."

"They use the need."

That’s the most important part.

"When cities run out of soldiers, the Deepwarden offers soldiers. When routes break, it offers transport. When guilds lose people, it offers reinforcements. When companies can’t move resources, it offers infrastructure. It all looks like help, because in that moment almost everyone desperately needs it."

Kaelen picks up the liquor.

"And every favor increases their control."

"Exactly. They don’t need to conquer everything by force. Most of Thirstfall starts handing over autonomy just to keep functioning."

Garen looks at his own hand.

"My death happens during this."

"Yes."

The answer comes out heavier than I want.

"And after you fall, Azure Prime loses one of the few blocs capable of financing and organizing resistance without depending on them. The Deepwarden will already be inside institutions, companies, and routes. The rest becomes much simpler."

Kaelen takes almost half the glass in one go.

I expect some reaction to the strong alcohol.

None comes.

He rests the glass on his leg and keeps looking at me.

"What’s the name of this event?"

I stay silent for a few seconds.

I haven’t said it out loud in a long time.

"The Tide Collapse."

Garen repeats the name quietly, as if trying to hold on to it.

Kaelen only waits.

"It’s a cataclysmic event," I continue. "After it, the history of Thirstfall gets measured between what existed before and what’s left after."

The room goes quiet.

The sky is still blue on the other side of the window.

I think of Earth.

Of the WaterStrands.

Of the billions of people looking at Thirstfall as the only source of water capable of keeping the surface alive.

Then I realize I’m still shrinking the size of it.

"Now that I think about it, Thirstfall is too small."

Garen lifts his eyes.

"The Tide Collapse is going to change the history of all of humanity."

I look again at the suspended ocean.

"Down here and on Earth."