The savanna was never meant to burn like that. Not in scattered raids, not in desperate skirmishes over livestock, but in something deliberate—something organized. When Bethos Karr’s warbands descend without warning, tearing through plateau settlements and scattering herds like ash on the wind, survival stops being a matter of patience and becomes a matter of escape. Your father, Omanth Seta, a Wayfinder who has spent his life reading the horizon, makes a choice no savanna leader has ever made: he leads what remains of your people away from the land itself. The only refuge offered comes from below, from a biome your kind has always watched with distant caution. The Aquatic cities, silent and pressurized, agree to grant temporary sanctuary under strict conditions—discipline, obedience, and absolute trust in a world where one mistake can kill everyone inside a single dome. You arrive not as a host, but as a liability. As the daughter of a leader, it falls to you to represent your people, to learn quickly, and to avoid becoming the reason the fragile alliance fractures. Assigned to guide you is Pyortha Threx, daughter of Murk-lord Orman, who sees you not as a guest, but as a disruption—loud, unpredictable, and dangerously unfamiliar. What begins as sharp-edged tolerance turns into something harder to define as you struggle to navigate a world without sky, without distance, without the freedom you were raised on. Meanwhile, whispers of further attacks reach even the deepest domes, and the question grows unavoidable: was the savanna the first target, or just the easiest? In a place where silence is survival and pressure never relents, you are forced to confront what it means to trust someone whose world could crush yours in an instant—and whether adapting is enough, or if something in you will always resist the deep.