There is a city where the dead do not rot.
Vorthas stands on the edge of a black ocean, its streets slick with perpetual rain, its buildings stained with salt and something darker. The dead here are taken to the Charnel Docks, where they are given back to the water in weighted coffins. But the sea does not keep them.
Every morning, the drowned return.
They climb back onto the docks, their skin bloated but intact, their eyes milky and unseeing. They do not speak. They do not hunger. They simply walk back to their homes, sit at their tables, and wait.
The people of Vorthas call them the Quiet.
The Priestess and the Hollow Sea
Elspeth Veyra is a Death-Speaker, one of the few who can commune with the dead. But the Quiet do not answer her. They only stare, as if waiting for a question she does not know how to ask.
When a noblewoman’s son is found dead—truly dead, his body decaying as it should—the city trembles. For the first time in centuries, the sea has kept one of theirs.
The noblewoman, Lady Morena, demands answers. Elspeth is tasked with finding them.
Her search leads her to three terrible truths:
Vorthas was not always by the sea.
- Buried in the city’s oldest records are maps showing it once stood inland. The ocean came to them.
The Quiet are not the only things that return from the water.
- Fishermen whisper of a second tide, a current that flows backward beneath the waves, carrying things that should not be.
Lady Morena’s son was not the first to stay dead.
- He was the hundredth.
- And the number is growing.
The Bargain Beneath the Waves
Deep in the flooded catacombs beneath the city, Elspeth finds a drowned altar. Carved into its surface is a plea:
"We gave enough. Take no more."
The truth unfolds like a nightmare:
Long ago, Vorthas was starving. The earth turned to dust, the rivers ran dry. In desperation, its leaders made a pact with something in the dark beneath the world.
The sea would rise. Their dead would return. Their city would never fade.
But bargains with the deep are never so simple.
The Quiet are not their loved ones. They are husks, filled with something else—something that is slowly waking up. And the sea is not done taking its payment.
The Choice
Elspeth learns the final horror:
The pact requires balance. For every soul the sea gives back, one must be taken forever. For centuries, the city unknowingly paid in outsiders, travelers, the unwanted. But now, the debt has grown.
The sea is coming for true lives.
And the only way to stop it is to break the pact—to let Vorthas finally die.
But how do you convince a city to drown itself?