The Wasting Tide

Black veins crawl beneath a fisher-boy's skin, the first sign of a wasting sickness that spreads along the coast like roots seeking water through parched earth. Healer Lysenne Marrowen watches helplessly as the fever claims villager after villager, its dark tide unmoved by poultice or prayer. When her mentor Healer Tamsin fails to halt the contagion, Lysenne discovers the plague is no natural disease but a summoning, a ritual tide orchestrated by Drowned Cultists to raise their long-dead sovereign, the Drowned King, from his oceanic tomb. High Tidemaster Coren Vyre senses the encroaching doom and dispatches an envoy retinue, led by Captain Rurik, to the rival Vorrath Lords, begging an alliance to face a threat that transcends politics. But Lords Darian and Vael Vorrath carry secrets of their own, and the fever soldiers Lysenne cannot save become weapons in a war between the living and the drowned. As the black-veined rise and the shoreline recedes, Lysenne and Mira Ashfen must choose: hunt the source of the contagion into forbidden waters, or abandon the coast to save what remains of the realm. With the Drowned King's tide swelling with every death, every choice carves the future of a kingdom teetering between salvation and submersion.