Three months is a long thing when the sea has plans.

Thalassaria walked the rim of her observatory, a ring of black shell and glass sunk below the churn of the tide.

She counted the days as one counts heartbeats.

The ruins left behind by the Eidolons, that slumbered beneath the sea were mapped in her mind like constellations.

For 10,000 years she had failed to breach a single entrance, but she knew all their locations.

Caedrion had bought his freedom for six months, under the promise of preparing. For her, for them, for their crowning moment.

When they finally explored the depths and discovered the ancient secrets long forgotten by mortal races.

It was the waiting that tasted worst.

Not the patient, imperial waiting of a queen arranging treaties, but the eager, childish waiting of someone staking everything on the click of a single hour.

She lifted her hand and imagined Caedrion stepping from the marble doors, a promise in his hands.

She pictured the way he had looked at her the last time, not frightened, which she had expected, but wary, curious, the old human energy softening into something like hunger.

Her smile was savage and wide. The world had been dull for ten thousand years; she had waited until a man made it worth breaking silence for.

"Three months and six days," she murmured, a private litany.

Around her, the palace breathed.

Lamps guttered with oil the color of old blood.

Servitors moved like schools of blind fish, efficient and silent.

War-kelp banners hung in long folds, each stitched rune a promise of depth and weight.

The captains of her fleet came and went, their boots whispering on the stone.

They brought reports of timber gathered, of engines tuned for pressure, of the new shells forged to bear the Architect's light.

Each report was a small drumbeat toward the hour she had chosen.

And then the voice came, not from the chamber but from under the chamber, from the bedrock of the world.

It did not arrive as speech so much as memory shifted into sound, dry, patient, and as contemptuous as old salt.

"You never were subtle, little tide-licked one."

Thalassaria paused. The laugh that followed was not hers. It was older and harder, like surf grinding bone.

"I never thought I'd see the day my daughter would fall head over heels for one of those hairless chimps..."

She knew the cadence without being shown: the mocking tilt of vowels; the scent of brine in the consonants.

Her mother. Imprisoned, bound in some black lock far below the fathoms.

The thought of her mother brought a contraction in Thalassaria's chest, not fear, only disdain.

"You remember, don't you?" the voice pressed on. "It was their kind that drove your people to the sea...that compelled you to swear yourselves to the abyssal in perpetuity. That changed you into what you are now. Or were you simply too young to remember it all?"

Thalassaria rolled her shoulders back, as if posture could ward off an accusation.

She let the curl of her mouth become a blade.

"Do not pretend you are free to speak," she said aloud.

Her voice filled the observatory and rolled outward through channels carved in living shell.

"You are bound beneath my command. You may have once ruled these waves long ago, but now I am their Queen!"

The mother's laugh came like a storm. "You are no Queen, you are merely a steward of the waves. But I... I am the sea."

A cold amusement sparked under Thalassaria's skin.

She snapped her fingers once, a small, elegant gesture. However, in the back of her mind, the howl of agony resounded.

A slight smile curved upon Thalassaria's face as she enjoyed the torment she inflicted upon her ancient mother.

"You are loud for one who sits in a cage," Thalassaria said. Her tone was even.

She leaned forward on the parapet and watched the sea's white teeth. "You are awfully nosy lately, have my recent actions truly stirred your notice to such extent? Is it because I used that silly old artifact you left behind?"

Her mother's voice thinned; where there had been waves before, now there was only the rasp of shell-cracked bone. "

The voice came as a curse, hurled like a stone. "You are nothing more than a little girl who holds my throne while I sleep. You may sit in a chair and smile for worshipers. You may bend the tide and call it yours. But you are not the sea. You merely have its diluted blood flowing through your veins."

The words struck like cold iron. Thalassaria's hands clenched until the knuckles whiteened.

Pride flared, hot and sharp; for a beat she imagined storm and ruin and a thousand drowned cities as her answer.

And then the laughter returned, not the thunderous roar of a free sea but a thin, small sound like a voice playing with a bone.

"You think him a crown? A consort? A tool! He will teach you wonder, perhaps. He will make you forget the ache for a while. Even if the blood of the Architects still runs through his human veins, it is not enough to compel me into submission. Remember that little girl… Because one day soon I will be free. And I will not forgive my mistreatment at your hands."

After that there was a silence that felt like the bottom of a grave.

Thalassaria stood very still, listening to the slow sleep of the machinery, to men pacing the lower decks, to the distant, soft clack of divers' fins preparing in the staging pools.

Her heart did not race. It tempered.

Freedom.

The word hovered like sea-glass in her mind, not a threat but a promise.

Her mother had been boasting of her escape, her freedom, her vengeance for 10,000 years now. It was nothing to Thalassaria, but a toothless threat, from a pitiful creature beneath her control.

Rather, the ruin-opening was all she could think of at this moment. As unlocking the

Secrets the Eidolons had left behind was all that mattered now.

Still, if her mother had found some form of escape over the last 10,000 years of plotting she would be a fool to not act now.

Thalassaria smiled then, and it was not the gentle smile for suitors. It was the smile of a predator sharpening its teeth.

"Prepare the vanguard," she ordered, voice like a shell's final whisper. "Seal the lower sluices. Increase the wards on the holding stones. If the old queen finds the seam in her prison, we will not meet her with politeness."

A captain snapped to attention. "And Caedrion, my queen?"

Thalassaria's eyes found the small carved figure of the artifact she had given him, the leash she had offered and the promise he had accepted. '

She felt something that was almost tenderness, then folded it away beneath her ambition.

"He returns on my day," she said. "And when he steps into the ruins, we will show the old gods a new face."

She turned back to the window and let the sea roar itself out in the darkness.

Her mother's whisper had rattled the edges of her certainty, but it had not broken them.

If anything, the voice had given her an extra edge to sharpen against the coming breach.

Beneath all the plans, beneath the drilled men and the calibrated sigils, something older woke, not only hunger, but strategy.

And should her mother be unbound, she would find, waiting in the watery courts, a daughter who had learned how to take a leash and make it a crown.

Outside, the sea sighed into itself and then settled, as tides do when they are poised to change.

Inside, Thalassaria folder her arms and began to count again.

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