CHAPTER 170: THE TIDE THAT REMEMBERED

The city had drowned.

Yet Poseidon still stood upon its broken shoreline, his bare feet sinking into the silt where temples had once towered. Lanterns floated past him like forgotten stars, their light dimming as the sea claimed them. The air reeked of salt and smoke, the silence broken only by the moans of wood cracking under pressure and the whispers of waves tugging at the rubble.

But in the silence, he heard more than ruin.

The sea spoke.

Every ripple carried voices — prayers, curses, screams swallowed by water. Mortal lives, extinguished in his tide, did not vanish. They returned to him, their last breath dissolving into the ocean’s eternal memory.

Poseidon closed his eyes. For a moment, the god he had been — the boy, the vessel, the shell mortals once called Dominic — shuddered inside him. Faces flickered in his mind. Mothers clutching children. Sailors gasping in shock. A priest on his knees, naming him aloud.

Was this guilt? Or was it recognition?

He could no longer tell.

A sound interrupted his meditation — a thrum beneath his skin. Not the hum of waves this time, but the sting of distant thunder. It came not from the sea but from above, sharp and electric. Olympus was stirring.

The decree had been passed. The gods had branded him enemy.

And still, Poseidon smiled.

"They think to cage the tide again," he murmured, his voice rolling with the cadence of surf on stone. "But they forget—the sea remembers."

---

The Survivors

Down the broken streets, survivors had begun to gather. Some clung to debris, eyes hollow. Others staggered, coughing brine, searching desperately for kin who would never answer.

One boy, no older than ten, crawled across a roof beam half-submerged in the rising tide. He slipped, flailed — and the sea caught him. Not with hunger, but with care. The water curved upward, lifting him back to safety, setting him gently upon a broken wall.

The boy blinked, stunned. Then his lips moved soundlessly.

"Poseidon..."

Others saw. Some wept in awe, some screamed in fear. But all whispered his name. Not the boy he once was. Not the cursed vessel the gods despised. Poseidon. The drowned god reborn.

Every prayer reached him. Every curse too. The ocean inside him swelled, thick with mortal voices. Their fear was salt. Their reverence was current.

And Poseidon drank it in.

---

The Whisper in the Deep

From the trench beneath the world, another voice stirred.

You see it now, don’t you?

It was not mortal. Not divine. It was older, darker — the abyss itself given tongue.

They will curse you, worship you, fear you. But all the same... they will feed you. You are not Dominic, nor merely Poseidon. You are tide unending. You are Thalorin’s heir.

Poseidon’s hand clenched at his side. He felt the trench breathing with him, like lungs deeper than the planet itself. For every drowned soul, the abyss gave him strength. For every collapsed city, his claim grew wider.

Yet there was a fracture inside him still. A faint echo of Dominic — the boy who had laughed, who had longed, who had once prayed to gods that now hunted him. That echo recoiled, whispering: This is too much. This is slaughter.

But the tide drowned that voice.

The sea does not apologize. It takes, and in taking, it renews.

---

Olympus Moves

Far above, the council of Olympus had not been still.

Thunder split the heavens as Zeus himself rose from the Sky Throne, eyes flashing gold. The drowned bell’s toll had reached his ears, and with it, the memory of an old war he had hoped forgotten.

"A tide once bound rises again," Zeus declared, his voice shaking constellations. "This cannot be ignored."

Around him, gods argued. Hera whispered of restraint. Ares demanded immediate war. Athena urged strategy, warning that Poseidon was no longer merely himself. He carried something deeper — a memory of the abyss.

But in the end, the decree was sharpened.

Poseidon would be hunted. Not with words. With war.

And Olympus stirred its armies.

---

The Mortal Alliance

Back in the mortal realm, Veyrus, the chancellor who had survived the flood by sheer luck and desperation, stood on a water-logged tower, coughing blood from his lungs. His city was gone, but he still lived — and where there was survival, there was ambition.

He saw Poseidon standing serene upon the drowned streets, mortals kneeling or screaming around him, and he understood.

This was no mere storm. This was ascension.

If Olympus wished to slay him, mortals might yet find a way to survive — or even thrive — by bending knee first.

Veyrus fell to his knees in the saltwater, his voice hoarse but loud.

"Hear me, Lord of Tides! If the gods would cast you as enemy, then let mortals be your army. Take us, drown us, remake us—but let us live beneath your rule, not their chains!"

His words spread like fire through the broken crowd. Some spat at him. Some wept. Some whispered in desperate agreement.

And Poseidon heard them all.

The sea within him rumbled. Mortals offering fealty, not to Olympus, but to him. Was this how gods had once been born? Not in heavens, but in the prayers of those who drowned and lived to tell of it?

He lifted his hand. The tide surged, not to crush, but to raise. Survivors found themselves lifted upon pillars of water, set upon fragments of stone where they would not sink.

He said no word. But they understood. He had spared them.

And in their silence, worship bloomed.

---

The Omen

Night fell again, and with it came the omen.

The sea did not calm. It glowed. Phosphorescent light rippled through the black waves, tracing a spiral sigil vast enough to be seen from the heavens. From its heart, whales breached unnaturally, their eyes glowing with the same abyssal light. Schools of fish gathered in shapes that mirrored constellations.

The ocean itself had become his herald.

Poseidon gazed upon the sigil, and the abyss inside him whispered:

The war has begun.

---

Closing Scene

High upon Olympus, Zeus raised his lightning once more, but for the first time in centuries, there was hesitation in his hand. He remembered the last time the sea had risen against the sky. It had nearly unmade the world.

And now, below, mortals prayed not to him — but to Poseidon.

The tide had remembered.

And it was still rising.