Chapter 186: Tidewatch Burns
[Campaign Day 3–4]
Tidewatch had been built for beauty, not war.
Seylith’s capital was a harbor city — a crescent of pale stone rising from the shoreline in terraces that followed the natural contours of the coast, its architecture reflecting the Bloomist aesthetic of water, light, and the organic curves that Tide domain artisans preferred over the straight lines and angular geometry of Ordinist construction. The buildings were faced with coral-stone — a material quarried from the coastal reefs and sun-bleached to the luminous white that gave the Pale Coast its name. The harbor itself was the city’s heart: a natural deepwater bay enclosed by two breakwaters that extended from the crescent’s tips, creating a sheltered anchorage that could accommodate three hundred fishing vessels and the twenty merchantmen that typically shared the harbor on any given trade day.
On the war’s fourth morning, the harbor accommodated something different: Serath’s remaining six warships, arrayed in a defensive line across the inner harbor, their crossbow batteries and fire-pot catapults trained seaward, their crews standing to action stations at the positions they had occupied for nineteen hours.
Beyond the breakwaters, the Accord’s fleet had arrived.
Thirty-seven vessels. The fleet had bypassed the outer approach — the twelve-nautical-mile zone where Serath’s First Squadron had engaged them — and anchored in a crescent formation that mirrored the city’s own curved coastline. The formation was not random. It was a bombardment arc — a configuration that positioned the warships so that their offensive systems could deliver coordinated fire across the harbor entrance and the waterfront buildings.
The bombardment began at sunrise.
The Accord’s offensive weapon for the naval bombardment was not catapult or ballista. It was Demeterra’s Growth domain, applied through ship-mounted projection systems that the kingdom’s naval intelligence had not previously encountered.
The weapons were called Verdant Cannons — organic tubes, approximately three meters long, grown directly from the warships’ living hulls. Each tube was a biological mechanism: a closed chamber at one end, filled with compressed sap under pressure generated by the Growth domain’s accelerated fermentation process, and a constricted aperture at the other end that directed the release. The projectile was a seed-mass — a compressed sphere of Growth-enhanced organic matter, approximately twenty centimeters in diameter, dense enough to serve as a kinetic projectile and biologically active enough to produce secondary effects on impact.
The first salvo struck Tidewatch’s waterfront district at approximately 350 meters per second. Twelve seed-masses, launched from twelve warships in coordinated fire.
The kinetic effect was comparable to conventional siege ammunition — a twenty-centimeter sphere of compressed organic matter at 350 meters per second delivered approximately 15,000 joules of impact energy, sufficient to penetrate one meter of coral-stone wall construction. The six seed-masses that struck buildings punched through walls and roofs with the indiscriminate efficiency of any kinetic projectile.
The secondary effect was worse. On impact, the compressed organic matter decompressed — the Growth domain’s biological imperative activating upon contact with stable material. The seed-mass exploded into accelerated vegetation: roots, vines, shoots that grew at visible rates, expanding from the impact point at approximately one meter per second in all directions. The vegetation was structurally aggressive — the roots penetrated load-bearing walls, the vines wrapped structural columns, and the growth’s expansion generated forces that exceeded the building’s design tolerances. Buildings didn’t collapse from the impact. Buildings were pulled apart from the inside by the explosion of organic growth that the impact planted in their structure.
***
The bombardment’s first hour destroyed fourteen waterfront buildings and killed approximately 200 civilians.
Tidewatch’s civilian population was 80,000 — the Pale Coast’s largest concentration. A partial evacuation had thinned the numbers in the days before the naval contact: approximately 45,000 people — women, children, elderly, anyone deemed non-essential — moved inland to refugee camps that the provincial governor established in the agricultural districts behind the coast. The remaining 35,000 were either essential workers (fishermen, dock workers, supply handlers), defensive militia, or people who had refused to leave.
The 200 dead were from the last category — people who had remained in their waterfront homes because they believed the navy would protect the harbor, or because they had nowhere else to go, or because the particular stubbornness that characterized generation-deep coastal residents prevented them from abandoning homes that their families had occupied for decades.
Seylith — the Pale Bloom, the Tide and Growth goddess who governed the Pale Coast as a vassal of the Eternal Anvil — felt each death. The divine awareness that connected a god to their believers registered each cessation as a quantifiable loss: not just life, but faith points, belief strength, the particular energy that gods drew from living mortal devotion. Two hundred deaths was approximately 200 believers lost — a number that was strategically insignificant for a goddess with 80,000 believers but psychologically devastating for a goddess who had joined the Anvil specifically to protect her people from exactly this kind of destruction.
She acted.
Seylith’s Tide domain appeared in the harbor as a defensive response that the Accord’s bombardment fleet had failed to anticipate. The harbor’s water — approximately eight meters deep in the anchorage zone — rose. It rose as a *wall* — a vertical barrier of seawater across the harbor entrance, approximately four meters tall and twenty meters thick, sustained by Seylith’s continuous divine investment.
The seed-mass projectiles that struck the water wall lost approximately seventy percent of their kinetic energy before transit. The biological payload — the Growth domain enhancement — was neutralized by salt water exposure; the Growth domain’s biological mechanisms required air contact to activate, and sustained water immersion deactivated the seed-mass’s organic components before they could decompress.
The water wall was not impenetrable. It was a filter — reducing the bombardment’s effectiveness from devastating to merely damaging, converting each salvo from structural destruction to surface-level impacts that produced bruises in the cityscape rather than collapses.
***
The naval bombardment’s attenuation by the water wall forced the Accord to shift tactics.
The fourteen troop transports — carrying 6,000 Rootist marines — began deploying landing craft. The amphibious assault aimed at the beaches north and south of the harbor, beyond the breakwaters and outside Seylith’s water wall’s coverage area.
The beaches were defended.
Seylith’s militia — 8,000 Bloomist defenders, trained in coastal defense, equipped with the particular weapons that coastal warfare required — occupied prepared positions along the beach approaches. The positions were not walls or trenches. They were *tidal pools* — natural depressions in the coastal rock, enhanced by Tide domain modification, that filled and emptied with the surf’s rhythm. Between waves, the pools exposed the defenders’ firing positions. During waves, the pools filled and concealed the positions beneath water that the Bloomist militia’s Tide blessing allowed them to breathe.
The first Rootist landing wave — approximately 300 marines in twelve landing craft — hit the northern beach at mid-morning.
The landing was contested from the water line. Bloomist defenders emerged from tidal pools as the surf retreated, delivered crossbow volleys at ranges of thirty to fifty meters, and submerged again as the next wave arrived. The Rootist marines, advancing through ankle-deep surf that slowed their movement, were caught in a cycle of intermittent fire that killed fourteen in the first minute.
The marines pressed forward. Their Growth-blessed equipment — the vine-armor, the wood-reinforced shields, the weapons whose handles were living wood that regenerated grip surfaces — gave them physical advantages that compensated partially for the tactical disadvantage. The marines reached the beach line and began to advance inland — at which point the tidal pool positions became flanking threats rather than frontal obstacles, and the combat shifted from range engagement to close-quarters fighting on wet rock.
The beach fighting was visceral. Bloomist militia — fishermen and dock workers in peacetime, their combat training a fraction of the professional army’s standard — fought with the desperate energy of people defending their homes against invaders who were visibly destroying their city behind them. The fighting qualities that emerged were not doctrinal. They were emotional — the rage and fear of civilians who had become soldiers not by choice but by necessity.
The northern beach held. Barely. The 300-man landing wave was repulsed after two hours of fighting, at a cost of 89 Bloomist militia dead and approximately 120 Rootist marines killed. Among the dead: Fisherman Callek Tidewarden — a name that was also a title, passed from father to son in the harbor families who had tended the breakwater lights for three generations — who had charged a Rootist officer with a gutting knife after his crossbow jammed, killed the officer, and died under the blades of the two marines flanking him. His body washed out with the tide and was recovered the following morning by his fourteen-year-old daughter. The exchange ratio was unfavorable — the kingdom lost more defenders than it killed attackers — but the beach was held, and the landing force was pushed back to its transports.
The southern beach was less successful. A second landing wave — 500 marines, better supported by sustained bombardment from the Accord’s warships — established a beachhead at the harbor’s south approach. The Bloomist defenders withdrew to the secondary inland positions, conceding the beach but maintaining a defensive line that prevented the marines from advancing into the city proper.
Tidewatch was besieged — besieged, but still standing. The water wall held against bombardment. The northern beach held against landing. The southern beachhead was contained. But the siege consumed Seylith’s divine energy at rates that sustainable defense could not maintain indefinitely, and the Accord’s fleet had the patience and the sustainability to wait.