The Deep God
“The stones are not the oldest things on this planet.”
Atlantia's faith. The underwater civilization guards a trident said to command the sea and a structure at the bottom of the world its founder sealed and refused to explain.
Atlantia is old beyond surface reckoning, and its faith is older still. The deep god commands the sea through a trident, watches things in the trenches that the word monster undersells, and keeps treaties the surface forgot it ever signed.
Their deepest vault is not their most guarded site. That honor belongs to a structure at the very bottom of the world — older than every nation, older than the stones — that the founder of Atlantia sealed personally. He said only one thing about it, and Atlantia has built policy around the sentence ever since: the stones are not the oldest things on this planet.