The Forgotten Tide: Rebirth Before the Pirate Era

The scholar's ink ran red.

Not from pigment, but from the blood dripping down her wrist as she carved the final glyph into the obsidian slab. The chamber trembled, dust sifting from cracks in the ceiling like hourglass sand. Somewhere above, the screams of Alabastra—the kingdom that dared to defy gods—were being silenced.

"Hurry," croaked the old scribe beside her, his fingers crumbling to ash as he touched the stone. A curse, or a cost? "The World Nobles will burn everything… but this… this they cannot destroy."

The slab pulsed faintly, its surface swallowing the blood-inscribed words: "The Void Century was no accident. It was a murder."

But as the scholar stepped back, her triumph curdled to dread. The glyphs began to shift. Lines rearranged, symbols melting into new warnings, as if the stone itself were rewriting history.

"What have we done?" she whispered.

"We woke it," the scribe rasped, his voice dissolving with his body. "The Tide… it's not just a record. It's alive—"

The chamber exploded.

Far below, in a vault drowned by the rising sea, a glass womb shattered.

The thing inside uncoiled—a skeletal child with eyes like cracked storm clouds. It gasped, not air, but saltwater, its veins glowing blue as bioluminescent algae. A failed experiment. A successful abomination.

"No… no, NO!" The scientist who created it staggered back, his reflection warping in the child's irises. "You were supposed to die! The energy—it's too chaotic! You'll unmake everything!"

The child tilted its head. When it spoke, its voice was the roar of a distant tsunami.

"Where… is my grave?"

The scientist lunged with a dagger, but his blade passed through the child's chest like mist. The last thing he saw was his own face in those eerie eyes—aging rapidly, rotting, until even his bones turned to silt.

The child walked into the flooding corridor, seawater parting around its ankles. Behind it, the vault collapsed, burying Alabastra's sins. Ahead, the ocean stretched endlessly, whispering promises it had no intention of keeping.

Centuries later, on a beach where time bled thin, waves spat out a boy.

He coughed, alive but not right, his gray eyes flickering with the same blue fire that once devoured kingdoms. The sea had finally brought its pawn to shore.

And somewhere in the depths, the Poneglyphs shivered.

Epigraph (scrawled on a waterlogged scroll, found in the ruins of Alabastra):

"Beware the child born of drowned ink.

He walks where kings drowned, breathes what empires drank.

The Tide returns.

Pray it does not notice you."