PART III
A Lore Primer for Dockside Memory-Keepers & Tavern Bards
The Exocoetidae did not “arrive” at Julius Applebottom’s old home so much as slip through it: a pressure curtain hanging in the rock like a sheet of liquid glass. One moment the hull listened to the Abyssal Cradle’s roar; the next, silence—humid, pearl-lit, and almost gentle. Kaelen Vance called it deep-lab technology or ancient magic and could not decide which insulted physics more.
Inside waited the Blue Glow Cavern: smooth stone, a low subterranean lake, and clusters of pearls embedded in the ceiling pulsing azure like a slow heartbeat. Hala saw beauty first—then loneliness. Lance saw “solid ground” and nearly wept. Kaelen saw a choke-point and approved the defenses.
Julius showed them the camp: crates, hammock, workbench—evidence of an eight-year life lived like a held breath. The only “luxury” was food: dried Meito Glowshark hung in strips, still faintly luminous, which Lance immediately tried to turn into something edible and holy.
And because the Love Pirates are not allowed to be normal for more than ten minutes, Julius demanded a celebration: milk for himself, rum for the others. Lance spiced the milk with cinnamon and nutmeg, and for the first time in a long time, Julius looked like a boy instead of a weapon wearing a grin.
That night—between stew, laughter, and Kaelen quietly “checking perimeter” for the fifth time—Julius finally said the part most stories skip: he found this cavern with nothing but smoke, stubbornness, and an apple core he rationed for a month. He named himself for that apple, because down here, names are survival tools.
Before “dawn” (if dawn can exist under miles of water), Julius rolled out the chart and pointed to the Abyssal Bloom. The plan was simple enough to sound like madness: Lance’s sedative paste (“The Long Night”) delivered into a Great Pearl Jellyfish’s mouth, then harvest—sensory node and the parts Dr. Mako would pay for. Kaelen called it “dentistry with a death wish.” Julius called it Tuesday.
They left the Blue Glow Cavern with a shanty on their lips and fear given honest work. Harpoon guns were primed—not to kill, but to punch the seabed and throw up a silt-blind. Julius insisted on swimming the final stretch himself: the only way to make sure the beast swallowed, not nibbled.
The Bloom was a living weather system: millions of small jellies pulsing violet, turning the water into a humming, strobing blizzard. Then the “cathedral shadow” arrived—a Great Pearl Jellyfish, lightning rolling inside its bell, tentacles trailing like a curtain made from murder. The Exocoetidae fired.
THOOM. The seabed erupted. Silt climbed like smoke, and the world went blind.
Julius went out into it anyway.
Every port that tells this tale argues on one detail:
Was it one leviathan Julius fought… or three?
The Abyss answered: three.
A triad of Aetherium Leviathans rose from the trench walls, converging on the Exocoetidae from different angles, their blue electricity threading through the silt like searching hands. What should have been a hunt became an ambush designed by something that understood ships.
Julius did not retreat. He became the thing the sea once tried to make him—a resonance cascade, violent and precise. One bell imploded, one detonated, and the third was erased. The ship survived.
Julius did not. Not cleanly.
They found him miles out, suit shredded, alarms screaming, body burning—still smiling, because that is how he refuses death.
He woke in the med-bay wrapped in dampening gauze to Hala’s shaking fury, Lance’s frantic tending, and Kaelen’s silent, paid-for respect. It was there—over bread and apple juice—that Kaelen Vance stopped being cargo and became crew. Hala named him what he already was: the Anchor.
And then Julius, at one hit point and with a grin that should have been illegal, went back out to carve the monsters for Mako’s list—because Love Pirates don’t just survive the dark; they come home carrying proof. In the fused wreckage of the three, they pulled a Giant Yoto Pearl—pink, pulsing, and wrong in a way that whispered devotion like a knife.
The return voyage blurred into repairs, fever, and the sound of Lance and Kaelen arguing over hull plates like two men building a coffin they plan to outlive. Six days later the pressure eased. The black thinned. The Exocoetidae rose.
Crownhold Sink appeared as a colossal vertical fortress-city carved into a sinkhole, lights flickering from carved windows, traffic flowing through water like streets. The Exocoetidae slid into its berth, clamps biting, chains humming, and at last the ship stopped moving.
“Docking clamps engaged,” Kaelen announced over the intercom, voice all business so nobody had to admit they were relieved. “Berth 44-B. The Rusty Gullet. Welcome to Crownhold.”