📍 Location: Tide woven Pavilion – Submerged Menagerie, Lower Reaches
The Submerged Menagerie lies coiled like a living labyrinth beneath the Pavilion — a coral sanctuary where rare aquatic spirit beasts are raised, healed, or hibernated. Only a handful are bonded to Pavilion disciples; most are too ancient, too wild.
🐚 The Disturbance
While sweeping fine grain into a tide-pan for the reeflings, Lan'Fei pauses.
The water in her trough is still. Too still.
Then, without warning, half the Menagerie's inner sanctum ripples with a cold, dreamlike pulse — like a distant heartbeat.
She whispers, wide-eyed:
"Something's calling them…"
🐾 The Forgotten Cage
At the deepest end of the wardens' walk lies a chamber sealed for over a century — marked only by faded glyphs and warnings of "severed bond, unnamed rage."
Lan'Fei, guided by instinct and fear, follows the beasts' resonance until she reaches the door.
It's… open.
Inside waits a withered beast, curled in a spiraled nest of silver bone and tide-lichen.
🐉 Introducing: Whisper fang
A Deep Dream Tide Serpent, thought to be extinct.
Feeds not on flesh, but emotion — drawn to the memories of dying sea warriors.
Its body is transparent and coiled like a ribbon of ink in water, with antler-like fins and eye-slits that drift between closed and open dream states.
When Lan'Fei steps closer, it doesn't strike. Instead, it whispers — directly into her mind.
"You are not the chosen tide."
"But you heard it too, didn't you?"
"The Crown… it stirs the Drowned Bell."
Lan'Fei, trembling but resolute, does not run.
She kneels.
🧬 A Sudden Bond
The moment her hand brushes the surface of the Whisper fang's tide pool, ink floods the room — not real ink, but a vision of the Crown's fracture, the great storm unborn, and the Salt-Touched Fangs closing in.
She sees Feng Xian — though she does not know his name.
She sees the Pavilion in flame — a possible future.
The Whisper fang coils around her arm.
Not as a shackle… but as a pact.
"If they forget the old pacts… we shall remind them."
🕯️ Aftermath
Lan'Fei awakens outside the sealed chamber, gasping — the Whisper fang hidden beneath her robes, now bound to her qi.
Above, footsteps echo.
The Pavilion search group is assembling.
And deep within her, she feels an urge not her own:
Protect the Inheritor. Guard the Vault. Silence the Fang