The tides call out from a world not of our own...

Beneath the veiled cerulean clouds of Valeris, a world where the oceans drown the mountains and light dies long before the seafloor, the Tideborn—known in the ancient tongue as the Tidrakin—glide through forests of glass coral and living currents that hum like song. Their bodies shimmer with hues borrowed from the deep: pale opal skin threaded with veins of indigo light, eyes vast and luminescent, made for darkness. They are not creatures of conquest, but of communion, born with gills that breathe both air and water, minds tuned to the tides and the slow pulse of the planet beneath. For them, home is not a fixed place, but a rhythm—a continent of liquid memory where cities drift like bioluminescent lanterns across the abyss. They build not from stone, but from coral grown with touch, and their songs shape the flow of the currents as surely as gravity shapes the stars. Yet even here, in the cradle of the world’s oldest sea, there are shadows. Beyond the coral spires of Ael’Thura, the great capital reef where Leto was born, the water grows colder, heavier—alive with ancient things that dream in silence. The Tideborn call it the Deep Below, a place older than memory, where light itself fears to swim. And though Leto is of the sea, fearless and curious, even she knows to whisper the old prayer when the currents fall still: “The sea remembers, and so must we.”