The white cruise ship settled gently onto a wide shelf of crystalline sand just outside the main palace gates of the Undersea Crystal Capital.
Around the ship’s golden bubble, tens of thousands of merfolk, ancient sea-turtles, and broad-shouldered Shark-Folk guards floated in the water. Their eyes were wide with awe at the ten thousand Armored Sea-Dragons resting neatly in harness formation and the thousand-foot Kraken King standing guard in his bright yellow lifeguard vest.
Yet beneath the citizens’ polite smiles, the sickness of the deep sea was unmistakable.
The water at two thousand fathoms was bitingly cold. Violet threads of miasma drifted up from the jagged black Upper-Realm Plague-Coral choking the city’s outer foundation trenches. Almost every child and elder in the plaza had dark purple veins beneath their gills, and they shivered constantly as they hugged thin kelp blankets around their shoulders.
Mermaid Queen Lan Zhu swam up to the cruise ship’s open air-lock platform on Deck Three, bowing her head in quiet sorrow.
“Forgive the bleakness of our ancestral home, Master Gu,” Queen Lan Zhu whispered, her sapphire trident resting against her arm. “For centuries, this black plague-coral has spread from the eastern fault line, draining the warmth from our bloodlines and rotting our coral gardens. We have traded pearls with surface alchemists for medicinal pills, and we have tried to light alchemical furnaces down here.”
