The Cartographer's Tide

For twelve years, cartographer Cael Dunmore has walked the same stretch of tidal flat at dawn, his boots heavy with salt, charting the harbor he knows better than his own pulse. He has memorized every rusted bollard, every shifting channel, every drowned finger of shoreline, but the sea has forgotten its oldest instruction. The tide has stopped following the moon. Copper dawns now reveal new sandbars and sunken roads no map has ever recorded, and the harbor townsfolk whisper that something is being uncovered that should have stayed buried. When young surveyor Sola Brine arrives to assist the aging cartographer, she brings fresh eyes and a stubborn refusal to redraw maps she knows are wrong. Together, Cael and Sola trace the retreating water line and find their work crossing paths with Dara Kell, a secretive keeper of the old coastal ways, and Alderman Voss, a politician eager to claim the exposed seabed for industry and profit. As the surveys grow stranger, currents running backward, depth soundings returning impossible figures, Cael's daughter Tamsin vanishes into the dry seabed, leaving only her boots behind. Now Cael must choose: chart the truth of a tide that has broken free of the moon, or surrender the map to those who would bury the revelation and rebuild on land that has already begun to remember what it once was.