She spotted a flicker of bioluminescence near the Sunken Bell Tower—a place where the old coral bells still chimed when the underwater currents were right. Without thinking, she folded her wings, tucked her three eyes forward, and dropped.
The sphere’s crystal sensors were overwhelmed. It had asked for memories. It received an avalanche. Three thousand years of Topeagler history poured into the machine: the hatching of a thousand chicks, the migration of glow-eels like rivers of stars, the first human boats, the first spear, the first fire, the first extinction. And underneath it all, the constant, humming sorrow of a creature that remembered every face it had ever loved and every face that had ever wished it dead.
For a moment, there was peace.
She swam back to the surface. The white machine still hovered above her spire. But without its sphere, it was blind. After a few minutes, it turned and hummed away, retreating toward Port Glimmer.
Below her, the Sink had changed. Where once there had been clear channels and beds of luminous moss, now there were oil slicks and floating islands of plastic waste. The ruins of the old Velorian cities—those strange, cyclopean structures made of compressed coral—had begun to collapse. Their glow-eels had migrated deeper, into the Abyssal Trenches, where the pressure would crush a Topeagler’s skull like an eggshell.
It meant: I was here.
