#emerald seas

[terrafey]

Emerald Seas by @cryptotheism! Read the story in its entirety here, or start from the beginning with Amber Skies.

Click for higher resolution! Like my art? Leave me a tip!

[cryptotheism]

The city was drowned slow, its ankles tied to the moon as the tide rose to meet it.

Blind and reaching, its tongue cracked and split with thirst, its thousand iron throats burning with salt and pollution, desperate to drink, the head of Teleth Avaris sank deeper beneath the waves. A hundred more hydroelectric dynamos. A thousand. Ten thousand. Breathe in, let the sea flood your lungs. Let it pressed its weight upon the sternum of Teleth Avaris, and beat upon it with a tidal rhythm to spur its thousand hearts. Breathe out, feel the salt burn as it escapes your lungs. The sea staunches the atomic piles, distilling itself on the city's fever heat.

There was an impulse to abandon the low places, to cast the unwanted and unworthy into the dark, to climb higher, to build on their corpses. But not here. The pumps refused to die. As the great sprawl of Teleth Avaris was cast to the sea, the pumps continued. Time would march on. The low places were scoured of their materials, their technology, their working masses. Yet the pumps continued. The city built higher, piling itself above the waves, sealing its orphaned thralls in its cast-off shells. Yet the pumps continued. For all the filth the high places cast into the dark, the pumps continued.

The gates were sealed, the old blocks quarantined. Networks of communication died. Diagnostic panels went dark. The nature and structure of the deep was lost to history. Yet the pumps continued.

Time passed. Records were lost. Official inquiries into city infrastructure returned only ancient blueprints and useless maps. Inquiries became expeditions, surveyor teams sent deep to explore the abandoned cargo shafts. The roots of Teleth Avaris became unmapped places. Theories turned to stories. They said the old machines are still running, whole automated armies of maintenance drones. They say legions of lobotomite husks keep the water-wheels turning. Stories turned to legends. They say the deep is a lost nation, a rouge state that lives of the trash from the city above. They say it is a bunker, a guarded enclave where the old lords are cloistered in paranoia. Legends to myth. They say the deeps are a holy kingdom, a paradise where life is long and beautiful and the old world never died. They say it is a city of ghosts, a hell where sinners turn the dynamos for all eternity. Expeditions became pilgrimages. Yet the pumps continued. There was something in the deep.

Slaves combed through the runoff. Prisoners and lobotomites on stilted prosthetics picked life debts in the processing basins, minds mirrored along cybernetic proxies under careful watch. They worked without rest, their hands whittled into probes for testing the value of bodies and machines. Rigged overseers in military armor scanned for mechanical faults and disobedience as field techs kept watch over minds and circuitry.

Time passed. Peasants worked the processing fields. Children born with tall shins and smooth dense flesh sang as they trawled the processing basins. Plumber-knights patrolled the far marches. They returned with songs of strange beasts and great hunts. Irriation-sages tended to the forest reefs where the bodies necrosed to crops. The abandoned processing basins bloomed with lilies in the summer, roots tangled with old bones and neurocircuitry. The king was dead.

Lay-clerics divined wisdom from the bodies in the water. Salt-spoiled bones and corroded motherboards became syllables of the divine hymn. Discarded knuckles were whittled to dice for children's games. Bloated stomachs were dried and tanned for ballgames. It was winter in the deep and the water was cleaner, cooler from snow-melt on high. The Holy and Sacred Order of Water Treatment wore cloaks woven from synthetic furs and reclaimed silver wire. They did not need to, but it helped fight the chill. The druids built shrines of pseudo-driftwood and terracorals about the diagnostic stations. They would sit in silent meditation beneath the wireless towers, relay-staves thrust into the wires in communion with the diagnostic spirits. It would be a good harvest this year. Long live the queen.

At the root of the pumps were the mourning stacks. Where bodies and machines were piled for processing. Work lines became necropoli, morgues for holy burial. Here augments were cut from flesh, metal sorted by its alloy, organs preserved and reclaimed. At the north lay the tomb of the old king, his body embalmed in resin lest he rise again one day.

Above bloomed the sanctum. In a time now lost to history, it was little more than offices and residences. Old-world bioconcrete melded with terrestrial coral, cut and shaped by secret geometries into a cathedral of municipal irrigation. Verandas of sea-green fan corals, colonnades of deep blue staghorn, great arches of maroon finger coral, all carved over centuries into a living basilica of the pumps. Within, beside an empty throne, sat the queen.

(more)

[stabbydragon]

Me: aww man ive lost all hope :( I sure hope the giant cursed octopus that eats people whove lost all hope doesn't show up :(

Giant cursed octopus that eats people who've lost all hope: 🐙

[deeper-ever-deeper]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapter 57 is up

[normal-horoscopes]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

First chapter of Amber Skies sequel is here

[elvenpathazalea]

Not gonna lie, I think the story of Emerald Seas would make a good dark ride, I can imagine it being similar to Valhalla at Blackpool Pleasure Beach or Pirates of The Caribbean at the various Disney parks, with a drop into the mouth of The Drowner of Worlds as the main splash effect.

I might have to build this in Planet Coaster some day

[malkah-of-kharbranth]

Hm.

Why is it that I can read ~90 chapters worth of a fic almost end-to-end on AO3 and not read that much per session spent with a physical book?

[wormrat]

truly wish there was an amber skies/emerald seas subreddit or smth I need to talk about them with people!!!!