(etched on a salt-crusted pearl shard, surface pitted by ten thousand years of brine, faint blue-green luminescence still pulsing in the grooves)

  I am Muninn. I am Memory.

  The echo that lingers when the tide retreats.

  The Age of Seas.

  The Drowned Cradle.

  When the sun warmed and the waters rose to claim what fire and ice had left behind.

  Oceans swallowed the land bridges. Continents floated as root-woven rafts, kelp forests taller than mountains swaying in currents that sang. Coral towers rose like drowned cathedrals, branches alive with glowing anemone-fronds pulsing slow, hypnotic waves. Kite-fish leapt in glittering arcs, trailing venomous ribbons; jelly-sharks bloomed open like carnivorous orchids. Sea lilies unfurled to snare clouds of bioluminescent plankton drifting upward like slow-motion fireworks.

  Humanity’s precursors breathed half through gills, half through lungs. They were raft-dwellers who sang to the serpents, and sometimes the serpents sang back.

  Resonance was fluid then, wave-borne, a force that bent with the tide rather than broke against it. The Nephilim rose as sea-kings, bodies sleek and scaled, crowned with coral and pearl. They ruled from sunken thrones, commanding currents like armies. Alliances formed in the deep; fragile pacts that dissolved as easily as foam.

  I perched on a floating root-raft, watching the first great serpent coil around a coral spire. Its scales shimmered in waves of opalescence. It eyes bled the color of a thousand gemstones. It sang: a low, resonant note that made the raft tremble and the humans weep with joy.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  The contradiction was perfect: life born from drowning, beauty from suffocation, song from silence.

  The waters gave, and the waters took.

  They always do.

  The end came not with storm, but with slow draining.

  Tectonic plates shifted. The seas withdrew. Root-continents grounded, kelp forests withered into dust. Coral towers cracked and fell silent. Amphibious tribes gasped on drying shores, gills sealing, lungs burning with air they could no longer share with water.

  The seas left behind salt flats and bone dunes...the first deserts. The Nephilim retreated underground, carrying their songs into the dark. Resonance grew harsh, brittle, a force that no longer flowed but fractured.

  I watched the last raft beach itself.

  The water pulled back like a lover leaving without goodbye.

  The silence that followed was deeper than any ocean.

  I remember when the tides danced instead of drowned.

  When the clash was song, not silence.

  Now the echoes are salt, and I wait for the next tide that believes it can flood the cycle.

  There is always another.

  Now even the deepest current has scars.

  And the wheel keeps turning life into loss, because apparently gods and men are not capable of learning the lessons of water.

  I remain.

  I remember.

  - Muninn

  (Technogod Construct, Survivor of Every Reset, Still Waiting for the Punchline

  ...and the tide that never quite returns)