Tides of Silence

The sea was calm that morning, but the calm felt deceptive — like a beast drawing breath before the storm.

Admiral Edmund Holt stood alone on the weathered promenade of Isla Neritha, one of Abyssara’s northernmost bastions — a speck of volcanic rock and coral in the great blue expanse between Java and Timor. Around him, the morning air shimmered with humidity, the scent of salt and machine-oil mingling in the wind as distant turbines hummed from the subterranean docks below. The horizon glowed with a molten light where the sun began its climb, painting the waves in red and gold.

He had stood upon this same precipice many times before, but never had the ocean seemed so... haunted.

The Pacific — once the lifeblood of Abyssara’s dream — had become the world’s new graveyard. From Manila to Rabaul, smoke and flame now marked where empires clashed. Where once Japanese fishing junks plied their trade, now Imperial convoys cut through the waves under the banner of the Rising Sun. The Americans answered in kind with steel leviathans of their own, aircraft carriers like floating fortresses.

It was a war of giants — and all the while, beneath it, the followers of Captain Nemo known as the Nemoans watched in silence.

Holt’s eyes followed the shifting horizon as though expecting to see something — a sign, perhaps, or a silhouette breaking through the haze. The Tridentis should have returned by now. His son, Captain Adrian Holt, had taken her north into the chaos of the Philippines to rescue a group of civilian refugees — victims of the iron maw of an increasingly hungry Japanese Empire. The mission had been dangerous from the outset. To cross the contested waters was to risk confrontation not only with the Japanese Navy, but with the chance discovery of Abyssara itself.

He drew a slow breath, tasting the salt air. For a moment, he simply listened to the sea — the rhythmic hiss of surf against black rock, the deep exhalation of the world’s oldest creature.

How beautiful it still was. How deceptive, too.

The Admiral’s gloved hands rested on the cold railing as the wind tugged at his long, dark overcoat trimmed with the deep blue sigil of the Nemoan Admiralty — three interlocking spirals representing the triad of Depth, Silence, and Freedom. His uniform was immaculate, but his face carried the lines of someone who had lived several lives in one.

He had once been a boy, barefoot and starving in the alleys of London’s East End — a nobody who stole bread and salted pork to keep his sister alive. The law hadn’t cared about reasons. They had branded him a thief, a conspirator, a “public danger.” He remembered the iron chains, the stink of the prison transport bound for Botany Bay, the lashings when he protested the cruelty of the guards.

When the typhoon came, he had thought it divine punishment — that the sea itself would be his gallows.

He remembered the screams of men, the thunder, the black waves swallowing the ship whole. The world had gone silent but for the roar of the storm. And then — that sound. A mechanical groan rising from the depths, like a god stirring in its sleep. A colossal shape breaching the ocean’s fury: a steel whale, its body patterned like the scales of a large reptile, its eyes glowing a spectral blue through the rain.

He remembered the divers — faceless behind glass helms — pulling him from the water. He remembered their calm voices, their precision, their utter defiance of the chaos raging around them.

That night, British convict Holt died, and the Nemoan Holt was born.

Now, decades later, he stood as Admiral of the Abyssaran Fleet, one of the three who ruled the unseen empire of the deep — the inheritors of Captain Nemo’s dream.

A dream that felt increasingly fragile.

The British Empire that once convicted men like him was no longer the monster Nemo had fought. It was now dying, exhausted by war. The French, too, were broken, their colonies trembling under new flags. Even the Americans — once a confusing dichotomy of freedom and conquest — now bled across the Pacific in the name of liberty from extinction.

The world had changed. And perhaps, Holt thought bitterly, Abyssara had not.

They still hid beneath the ice, beneath the waves, guarding their technologies and ideals while the world above tore itself apart. Nemo had sought freedom from the tyranny of nations — yet now, in their silence, were they not complicit in humanity’s suffering?

A gull cried overhead, snapping him from his thoughts. He turned slightly as the rhythmic pulse of turbines reached his ears — the deep hum of a submersible ascending through the harbor’s shaft.

His heart tightened.

From the ocean below, a column of white mist erupted as the NSS Tridentis broke the surface. The sleek black vessel shimmered under the rising sun, its curved hull glistening like wet obsidian, emblazoned with the trident insignia of the Nemoan Fleet. Its airlocks hissed and opened, sending out clouds of vapor as smaller service craft began to swarm around her.

The Admiral’s voice caught in his throat. Relief, pride, and dread intermingled in the same breath.

“Adrian…” he murmured.

The elevator platform began to rise from the dock below, carrying a handful of figures up toward the terrace where he stood. The central figure was tall and broad-shouldered, his uniform stained with seawater and oil. His eyes — gray as tempered steel — were unmistakably his mother’s.

Captain Adrian Holt, commander of the Tridentis, saluted sharply as the platform came to rest.

“Mission complete, Admiral,” he said, his voice carrying the disciplined composure of a career officer, though the exhaustion beneath it was plain. “We recovered eighty-seven survivors from Mindoro. Several wounded, but all alive.”

Edmund allowed a rare smile. “You’ve done well, Captain.”

Adrian hesitated. “There is more.”

The Admiral’s brow furrowed.

Adrian stepped forward, lowering his voice. “We were pursued. Japanese destroyers — one of them, Kagerō-class, forced us to dive deep under the Sulu Sea. They have sonar technology now — primitive, but improving. They nearly detected us.”

Edmund turned his gaze back to the sea, the joy of reunion already fading.

So it was true. The world above was catching up.

“Did they see you?”

“No,” Adrian replied. “But it was close enough that I doubt we can assume our anonymity much longer. Father… they are building machines — underwater mines, sonar, submersibles of their own. They’re learning what we’ve kept hidden for nearly a century.”

The Admiral said nothing for a long while. Only the sound of the waves filled the silence between them.

When he finally spoke, it was quietly — almost to himself.

“Captain Nemo once said, ‘The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is the vast desert where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.’”

But even as he spoke those words, Edmund Holt could feel the weight of darker tidings pressing at the edges of his mind. Only a week before, Abyssara’s intelligence branch had confirmed the impossible. Reports from covert observers on the surface told of German scientists under Hitler’s Reich, Soviet physicists in the Urals, and American engineers in the deserts of New Mexico—all racing toward the same revelation: the splitting of the atom. A power that Abyssara had mastered quietly for nearly eighty years, used only to sustain their fleets and deep cities while lighting the eternal darkness beneath the sea, was now on the brink of becoming the world’s most terrible weapon. The thought turned his stomach. What Nemo had envisioned as humankind’s emancipation from want and dependence, the surface nations would soon twist into a means of annihilation.

He looked to his son, his eyes cold but not unkind.

“I fear, Adrian, that the nations have finally reached that desert.”

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The journey from Naval Base Nemo — a secretive underwater base southeast of Australia — to Nautilia took less than five hours aboard the Abyssal Rail, a magnetohydrodynamic transport tube that cut through the dark beneath the southern seas. Admiral Edmund Holt had made the voyage countless times, yet each descent into the Antarctic depths still stirred something between awe and reverence within him. The temperature dropped, pressure climbed, and the light faded until only the bioluminescent glow of the tunnel’s lining marked the way.

When the capsule emerged into Nautilia’s docking chamber, the vista before him was breathtaking even to an old man of the depths.

Nautilia — the beating heart of Abyssara — sprawled across the seabed like a constellation of light beneath the black ice. Its domes gleamed in sapphire and emerald hues, tethered by colossal pylons sunk into the ocean floor. Luminescent algae flowed through conduits, illuminating thoroughfares where sleek submersibles glided past towers of coral-reinforced steel. High above, the Antarctic ice shelf formed a pale, ghostly ceiling — an eternal sky of frozen silence.

From the central dome rose the Hall of the Admiralty, its façade adorned with columns of abyssal quartz and black manganese that shimmered faintly with captured light. At its heart stood a statue of Captain Nemo — stern and commanding, cast in deep-sea alloy, one hand on his sword, the other outstretched toward the unseen world above. His eyes, twin sapphires, seemed to gaze into eternity.

Holt entered the great chamber, his footsteps echoing along the polished obsidian floor. The Admiralty Board sat in a triangular formation — a symbol of unity, mirroring the tri-spiral sigil of Abyssara. Each vertex was occupied by one of the three Admirals. To Holt’s right sat Admiral Rajendra Das, descendant of a sailor who had served aboard the Nautilus, his eyes deliberate and weighty with history. To his left sat Admiral Te Ariki Mahina, youngest of the three — a proud heir of Polynesian navigators who had guided Nemo’s expeditions. His bronze skin bore faint ancestral markings, his gaze steady as the sea itself. Behind each Admiral sat their Captain’s Board — semicircles of officers and strategists, silent but watchful.

When Holt took his place at the northern vertex, the chamber dimmed. A low hum signaled the activation of the Privacy Field, sealing the council in soundless isolation.

Admiral Das spoke first. “You summoned this council under urgency, Admiral Holt. I trust your journey north yielded more than news of your son’s success.”

“It did,” Holt said gravely. “The Tridentis returned safely with survivors from Mindoro. But the mission revealed something far greater — and far darker.”

He rose, addressing them beneath Nemo’s statue. “The surface nations have entered a new age. The Japanese Empire devours the Pacific, leaving atrocities that defy every principle Nemo built our nation upon. Cities burned, peoples enslaved in conquest’s name.”

A murmur passed through the Captain’s Boards. Holt’s tone hardened. “And now, intelligence confirms that the surface powers seek dominion over the atom. What we use for light, they would forge into fire. Germany, America, Russia — all race toward destruction.”

Admiral Mahina frowned. “You speak of nuclear power openly, Admiral. Surely the surface peoples are decades—”

“They are within years,” Holt interrupted. “Perhaps less. And when they succeed, the skies themselves will burn.”

Silence fell. Das folded his hands. “You fear they will destroy themselves.”

“I fear,” Holt said, “they will destroy us — or what we stand for. The surface already reaches into the depths with sonar and pressure hulls. If Japan discovers even a fragment of our existence, they will weaponize it.”

Mahina’s tone was cautious. “You speak as though we should intervene. That would end a century of secrecy.”

“Survival means nothing if it costs our humanity,” Holt said. “Nemo fought empires for enslaving and murdering in the name of progress. Are we any different now, watching as others commit worse horrors?”

He turned toward Nemo’s likeness. “Would he have stayed silent?”

Das answered, measured and calm. “You speak with conviction, Edmund. But Abyssara’s population is three million. Our fleets are few. To intervene is to invite destruction.”

“Perhaps,” Holt said quietly, “but to do nothing invites another kind of death — one of conscience.”

Mahina’s voice softened. “Nemo built Abyssara as sanctuary, not crusade.”

“Sanctuary becomes prison if its gates never open,” Holt replied.

For a long moment, only the ocean’s distant hum filled the silence. Then Das spoke, voice low and final. “Until this board reaches consensus, Abyssara shall remain as it always has — silent and unseen.”

Holt’s jaw tightened. “And when the madness reaches our door?”

“Then,” Das said, “we pray the sea still protects her children.”

As the privacy field faded, Holt looked once more at Nemo’s statue — the founder’s outstretched hand catching the dim blue light, as if reaching for a world forever beyond their grasp.

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The year was 1944. Two years had passed since that storm of conviction within the Admiralty Hall beneath the Antarctic ice. Three years since Admiral Edmund Holt’s impassioned plea — and the reluctant, fateful decision that followed. Now the war that once raged above had spilled across every current and tide, leaving even the hidden dominions of Abyssara touched by its ruin.

Many of their islands — once sanctuaries for science, art, and the preservation of knowledge — lay in ashes. Some were bombed to rubble by Japanese patrols who mistook their disguised outposts for Allied stations; others were consumed by the Allies themselves, who sought to root out phantom enemies in the Pacific. The dream of isolation was gone, shattered beneath the weight of global madness.

The NSS Nautilion drifted upon the ravaged waters of the Leyte Gulf, where the greatest battle the Pacific had ever known had only recently ended. The sea was a graveyard of giants — shattered carriers listing in the swells, their decks aflame; broken cruisers and destroyers scattered like the bones of great whales. Columns of smoke spiraled into the gray sky, mingling with the smell of oil and charred metal. The once-blue expanse was now black and red, the surface glistening with fuel slicks that caught the fading light like molten glass. Waves rolled gently over the dead — sailors from every flag — their lifeless forms carried by the same waters that had borne them into war. The air hung heavy with silence, broken only by the distant groan of sinking steel and the hiss of fire dying upon the sea.

Admiral Holt sat on the deck, the salt wind stinging his weathered face. His once-proud uniform was torn, his brass insignia dulled by smoke. Cradled in his lap lay Captain Adrian Holt, his only son, his once-fiery eyes dimmed with pain. A deep wound bled through the fabric of his naval coat, its dark stain spreading like the slow ebb of life itself. The Admiral’s hands trembled, not from fear, but from helplessness.

Adrian’s gaze wandered to the horizon, where the sun — a muted ember through the smoke — cast fractured light upon the churning sea. His voice was faint, brittle as glass.

“Father… what do you think would have happened differently… if we decided not to get involved? Or possibly more involved?”

For a moment, there was only the crackling of flames, the groan of a distant sinking ship, and the rhythmic lapping of waves against the hull. Holt drew in a slow breath, the weight of decades filling his chest before escaping as a long, weary sigh.

“There was no avoiding it, my son,” he said quietly. “Whether we stood in silence or took up arms, the storm would have found us all the same. Abyssara would have been devoured in the shadows, or burned in the light.”

He looked out across the burning waters, his eyes reflecting the fire like twin embers in a fading hearth. “Humanity… is a restless tide. It builds, it conquers, it destroys, only to rebuild again. Empires rise like waves — proud, immense, and fleeting. They crash upon the shores of their own ambition… and vanish.”

He rested a hand on Adrian’s shoulder, his voice softening, almost poetic — as though speaking to the sea itself.

“But the sea endures. Always. It remembers all, forgets nothing. It carries life in its depths and death in its silence. It was here before us… and it will remain long after we are gone. The surface burns and crumbles, but the deep… the deep endures.”