Chapter 116: Tidecallers
The Pale Coast was the first place in the kingdom where Ryn couldn’t hear forges.
The silence hit him at the provincial border — the place where the Iron Road’s southern branch descended from the highland plateau toward the sea. The air changed: dryer warmth replaced by salt moisture. The soil changed: iron-rich brown replaced by sandy grey. The vegetation changed: alpine scrub replaced by coastal grasses that bent under ocean wind like congregations at prayer.
And the sound. No hammering. No smelting. No industrial percussion. The Pale Coast’s soundtrack was water — waves, rain, the drip and rush of the tidal system that defined every aspect of life in Seylith’s domain.
Tidewatch was the provincial capital — a city of sixty thousand built along a natural harbor, its architecture climbing the hillside in terraces of white stone and blue tile that caught the coastal light and threw it back at the sky. If Ashenveil was iron and amber, Tidewatch was salt and pearl. The buildings were smaller, curved rather than angular, designed to deflect wind rather than contain heat. The streets were narrow and steep, paved with crushed seashell rather than cobblestone, producing a soft crunch underfoot that made the entire city sound like it was whispering.
Bloomist temples dominated the skyline. Not one or two — dozens. Tidewatch had more temples per capita than any city in the kingdom, and the temples were Bloomist rather than Ordinist. The distinction was visible: where Ordinist temples featured the Cog-and-Flame and sharp geometric lines, Bloomist temples featured the Three-Petaled Flower in curving, organic shapes — arched doorways that looked like opening buds, domed roofs that resembled seed pods, walls covered in living vine that the growth domain kept eternally green.
"Welcome to the anomaly," Lysa said.
She was here — she’d joined the expedition separately, because her family had connections in Tidewatch. Her mother had been born on the coast. Her analytical distance softened slightly here, replaced by something that wasn’t quite nostalgia but wasn’t quite not.
"Anomaly?"
"Every other province in the kingdom worships the Sovereign primarily and its local god secondarily. Ordinism first, regional religion second. The Pale Coast is the reverse — Bloomism first, Ordinism second. Seylith’s believers worship Seylith. They acknowledge the Sovereign as the head of the Anvil, but their faith, their daily prayers, their temple attendance — it’s Bloomist."
"Is that allowed?"
"It’s not disallowed. The Covenant permits individual gods to maintain their own religions. The expectation is that the local religion and Ordinism coexist, with Ordinism as the senior faith. On the Pale Coast, coexistence has drifted into Bloomist dominance." She paused. "The Crucible doesn’t like it. The Crown tolerates it because the Pale Coast pays its taxes and provides naval support. The Sovereign—"
She stopped. Reconsidered.
"—the Sovereign permits it. Which tells you something about how the Sovereign weighs religious homogeneity against functional governance."
***
The Bloomist High Temple sat at Tidewatch’s summit — the highest point in the city, where the wind carried salt spray even in calm weather and the view encompassed the entire harbor, the coastal settlements stretching north and south, and the ocean beyond.
The temple was beautiful. Ryn had seen the Grand Cathedral — had felt its engineered awe, its mathematical precision, the way Ordinist architecture was designed to make you feel the Sovereign’s power. The Bloomist High Temple was designed to make you feel something else entirely.
Peace.
The interior was a garden. Not a decorative garden — a living ecosystem. Trees grew through the temple floor, their canopy forming the ceiling. Flowering vines covered the walls, producing blossoms in colors that shifted with the season — currently late Sunsteel, so the dominant color was deep blue, like seeing the ocean from the inside. Water ran through channels in the floor — fresh water, flowing from a spring beneath the temple, circulating through the root systems, emerging in small pools where mosses grew and tiny fish darted.
The air smelled like growing things. Wet earth. Pollen. The particular green scent of photosynthesis happening in real time.
The High Priestess of Bloomism — First Tide Nerissa — received them in the temple garden. She was Human, which surprised Ryn — he’d expected the coastal faith’s highest authority to be a Fisher, one of the amphibious humanoids that constituted the Pale Coast’s indigenous population. But Bloomism, like all religions in the kingdom, was open to all races, and Nerissa had risen through twenty years of genuine devotion to Seylith’s teachings.
"You’re from the Academy," Nerissa said. She wore the Bloomist vestments — sea-green robes with the Three-Petaled Flower in silver at the collar. Her hands were soil-stained. She had been gardening when they arrived and saw no reason to pretend she hadn’t been. "Come to study the anomaly."
"That’s Lysa’s word, not mine."
"It’s the Crucible’s word. Ashenveil considers us anomalous because we prioritize our goddess over the Sovereign." Nerissa’s voice was the voice of the temple itself — calm, unhurried, flowing. "We consider Ashenveil anomalous because it prioritizes a system over a relationship."
She gestured at the garden-temple.
"This is what Seylith provides. Growth. Healing. The connection between living things and the living earth. Our believers don’t come to the temple for doctrine. They come because when they’re here, surrounded by growing things, they feel well. The prayers work. The blessings work. The healing works — Bloomist healing, life domain channeled through growth, is the most effective healing tradition in the kingdom. Our priests heal more efficiently than Ordinist priests because Seylith’s domain is specialized. She does one thing and does it completely."
"The Sovereign has the Life domain too," Ryn said.
"The Sovereign commands many powers — fire, knowledge, storm, life, and more. Life is just one among them. Seylith has fewer, and Growth is her heart. When you spread a god’s attention across everything, each part receives less focus. When you concentrate on one, that one becomes absolute." She paused. "The Pale Coast’s infant mortality rate is the lowest in the kingdom. Our crop yields are the highest. Our life expectancy is the longest. These are not opinions. These are census data."
She led them deeper into the temple-garden, past a pool where water flowed from the spring in slow spirals.
"And we have the Tidemother."
"The what?" Ryn asked.
"Seylith’s divine creature. The Sovereign has his Hydra and his Gryphons. Seylith has the Tidemother — a sea serpent, perhaps ninety meters from head to tail, dwelling in the deep water off the southern coast. She’s been there since Seylith joined the Anvil. The creature tends the coastal ecosystem — regulates fish populations, purifies water toxins, maintains the kelp forests that anchor the seabed. Our fishing industry exists because the Tidemother keeps the ocean alive."
"I didn’t know vassal gods had creatures."
"Every god with a Beast domain connection can produce creatures, proportional to their power. Seylith’s beast domain is borrowed — channeled through the Sovereign’s Anvil structure — but it’s enough for one creature. The Tidemother has tended these waters for over two centuries." Nerissa smiled — the expression of someone for whom a divine sea serpent was not mythology but morning scenery. "The Fishers don’t use Wardens. They don’t use bonds. Their relationship with the Tidemother predates the institutional framework. The creature simply is, and the Fishers simply know her, and nothing in the Warden Academy’s curriculum can explain how that works because it isn’t a system. It’s a relationship."
Ryn glanced at Lysa. Lysa’s expression confirmed: the numbers were real.
"The Crucible," Nerissa continued, "sends inspectors annually to ensure our temples display the proper Ordinist iconography. We comply. The Burning Hammer flies above the Three-Petaled Flower, as required. But the people who walk through these doors come for Seylith. And they come because Seylith’s priesthood heals them, which is more persuasive than any flag."
***
The harbor was Tidewatch’s other face — the practical counterpart to the temple’s spiritual serenity.
Fishing boats filled the water — hundreds of them, ranging from two-person dinghies to sixty-foot trawlers, all built from the ironwood-and-pine construction that the coastal shipyards specialized in. The morning catch was coming in as Ryn walked the docks — crates of silver fish, baskets of crustaceans, nets of kelp that the alchemists in the Scholar’s Ward paid premium prices for.
The Fishers worked the boats. They were the Pale Coast’s indigenous species — humanoids with scaled skin in tones of blue-grey, webbed hands and feet, gill slits along the neck that allowed underwater breathing for up to four hours. They’d been Seylith’s first believers — her original population, predating the kingdom, predating the Anvil, predating everything except the goddess herself and the tidal pools where she’d first manifested.
They spoke Common — the kingdom’s administrative language — but among themselves, they used the old tongue. Tidespeak, a language of clicks, hums, and harmonic overtones that carried through water better than air and that sounded, to non-Fisher ears, like someone singing inside a seashell.
"The Fishers don’t vote," Lysa said, walking the docks beside him. "They don’t attend court. They don’t sit on provincial councils. They fish, they pray, they raise their children, and they die in the sea because Fishers don’t bury their dead — they return them to the water."
"Are they dissatisfied?"
"With what? The kingdom provides infrastructure. The Crucible provides blessing services. The naval garrison protects the coast. The trade routes bring iron tools and stonesteel equipment that they couldn’t produce themselves." She stopped at the end of the dock. The ocean stretched before them — grey-blue, endless, the horizon line where Seylith’s domain met the unclaimed water and the world became, briefly, ungoverned. "The Fishers aren’t dissatisfied. They’re *indifferent.* The kingdom is a thing that exists on land. They live in the water. The intersection is narrow."
"And Seylith?"
"Seylith is their goddess. Was their goddess before the Anvil. Will be their goddess regardless of what the Anvil does. Their faith isn’t institutional — it isn’t mediated through temples and priests and hierarchies. It’s direct. They pray to the tide. The tide answers. The relationship predates the system and exists outside it."
Ryn watched a Fisher bring in her catch — a woman, blue-skinned, strong-armed, pulling a net of fish from the water with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this every morning for her entire life. She didn’t look like someone who lived in a kingdom. She looked like someone who lived in the sea and happened to sell her fish to people who lived on land.
The kingdom’s edges. The places where the system’s reach thinned and the people underneath it had their own relationship with divinity — older, simpler, unmediated by institutions or hierarchies or flags.
The Burning Hammer flew above the Bloomist High Temple. The Three-Petaled Flower flew below it. Order maintained. Hierarchy observed. But in the harbor, where the Fishers worked, no flags flew at all. Just nets and water and the particular faith of people who had never needed a system to find their god.
And in the deep water beyond the harbor — far out, where the color of the sea changed from grey to dark blue — something moved. A ripple. A wake without a vessel. A shadow beneath the surface that was too large to be a fish and too slow to be a wave.
The Tidemother. Tending the deep water. Doing what she had always done, in the way she had always done it, indifferent to flags and kingdoms and the elaborate architecture that mortals built around the simple fact that gods existed and sometimes made creatures that cared more about fish populations than politics.