Voice in the Sea — Sunlight Gardens return
Home is Being Together
After the whale attack, the Hero helps Aria and Yulgar slip up to the Sunlight Zone for a break. Tara is keeping Caesar occupied, giving the Hero a reprieve from his unsettling interest and the dreams that have made sleep difficult. The Hero apologizes for needing Aria’s help against the whale and recalls the worry when she passed out. Aria refuses the apology: she would have resented anyone who tried to stop her from helping.
Aria has heard something of the Hero and Tara’s difficulties. Tara thanked her during a night of board games with Fa and described the people restricting them as know-it-all jerks. The conversation gives Yulgar an opening to explain his own anger. Cosmic duties remain hard for him to understand: he was an innkeeper, Aria ran a pet shop, and neither asked to be drawn into a struggle over the world’s survival.
Yulgar and Aria have talked through what happened. He recognizes that his anger came from how little he could do for his daughter. Unable to help her save the world, and struggling to help her heal, he blamed the Hero for taking her to the Firmament. When he could not tear down the Hero directly, he blamed Artix for apparently escaping unharmed while Aria suffered. The doctors have since revealed how severe Artix’s injuries were, possibly permanently so.
The Hero understands why Yulgar might lash out, but Yulgar insists that his respect never disappeared. Every departure from the inn carried the fear that the Hero would not return. Aria’s duties as Champion of Nature now summon the same fear of permanent separation, and the helplessness he felt when her mother died. Lark had been frail throughout her life and died when Aria was learning to walk. Yulgar remembers her last words about the happiness their family gave her, and wants to carry that care forward.
Recognizing that fear lets Yulgar choose something he can do. His daughter is a Hero, and he can support her rather than turn his helplessness against others. Noelle has lent Aria her old wheelchair, but Yulgar wants to build one fitted personally to her while she rehabilitates. He asks for help, and the Hero readily agrees.
Mi has set aside part of the garden for them and arranged for a Medical Division cleric to visit with advice. Aria wants a proper chance to catch up, and the Hero finds that speaking openly has helped enough to consider encouraging the others to do the same. Yulgar catches the Hero’s overly gory phrase about spilling their guts and turns it into a joke about a heart-to-heart. The break gives them room to speak as friends and family amid the larger crisis.
A Tool for Freedom
Yulgar’s gratitude for Undine comes from a difficult history. After the Mana Crisis, Galanoth and Artix escorted the family back to the inn. A messenger soon brought Victoria’s invitation: the seabase had resources that might restore Aria’s health. Yulgar knew almost nothing about it, but they needed help.
Their first home below the sea was a soggy cave, with Twilight as the highest floor, repeated intrusions and little improvement in Aria’s condition. Yulgar dates the change to Rivale’s arrival with her family. She explained the Astravian technology that would be used and performed an operation lasting almost twenty hours. Aria also credits Rivale with planning rehabilitation alongside Indradeep.
Father and daughter see the wheelchair differently. Yulgar’s first reaction to seeing Aria seated in it was distress over how badly she had been hurt. Aria sees a tool that lets her move and gives her freedom. She still has angry or unhappy days, but being heard by the people around her makes those days easier. Her recovery has room for frustration as well as gratitude.
Aria praises Rivale’s care, although the doctor withdraws when she tries to chat. Mi and Fa spend their breaks with her. Noelle’s kindness does not earn the same affection: Aria dislikes her encouragement of twelve-hour workdays, even under the banner of the greater good. The patient can value the medicine while questioning the demands placed on the people providing it.
Aria also wants a fuller understanding of her role as Champion. Terrane urges her not to overexert herself, but Aria wants to learn Nature’s darker aspects along with its gentler ones. She thinks the Avatars’ distance from mortal affairs has left them out of touch, while Terrane wants to learn more about Lore herself. For now, Aria can help nurture gardens that remind her of Battleon’s forests, even without their animals, and offer the researchers and their families a sense of home.
A Tree and Clean Water
Aria wants the wheelchair made from a tree she grows with her Nature abilities. Octotree begins with Yulgar’s concern that the work might strain her injuries, followed by his decision to trust her knowledge of her own powers. She wants to grow the tree rather than summon it fully formed. The artificial gardens cannot sustain another tree without better soil and water, so the Hero is asked to gather eight Chewy Tentacles from Twilight’s Lampreys for fertilizer.
Dawn sorts the collected Lampreys for contamination from what they have eaten. The Sisterhood is making progress toward purifying living creatures, but has not fully solved that problem. Yulgar prepares to grind the Lampreys into food for the tree, warning anyone who would rather look away. Growing the chair requires practical labor and a reliable environment alongside Aria’s magic.
Thirsty Roots turns to the seabase’s dependence on fresh water shipped from Ashray. Rivale gives drinking water priority, and Yulgar recalls supplies that were sometimes disturbingly green. Dawn’s Sisterhood has improved its ability to purify seawater and remove salt. The Hero brings four samples of Blighted Water so the supply can be replenished and the process explained.
Yulgar jokes about settling in for the eight to ten hours purification can take. Clean batches were prepared in advance; the work has not become instantaneous. Dawn and Rivale combine spells with special filters to remove salt and strange organic material. The result is possible and improving, but still costs strenuous time and effort.
Quiet Visitors
While Yulgar works on the chair, Aria becomes restless enough to want another visit from Tara, Mi and Fa. Travel between floors is still suspended, so Yulgar hopes that visiting one at a time will attract less attention. Dollar Store Mogloween Costume asks the Hero to disperse four Astravian and four Infernal Illusions to make their visits more comfortable.
Yulgar describes the intruders as Water Elementals in cruel disguises. They are rarer in Sunlight, but come knocking at Twilight’s windows, and Dawn has made no progress purifying them. One tried to persuade him to break a window by imitating Lark. He recognized that it behaved unlike his wife and refused. He keeps the incident from Aria to spare her worry; the disguise did not succeed.
Sea Snow Angels asks for another threat to be dealt with quietly: two Marine Waste from Marine Snow. Yulgar stresses that he is not criticizing the staff’s efforts to make them comfortable. He and Aria have had more than enough fish, salt and alarming sea life. Yulgar describes Marine Snow and seafoam as frothed seawater saturated with dead fish, and remembers Aria playing in the foam on old beach holidays. Sparagmos again fails to sound an alarm. He hopes the intrusion will not force them back to Twilight before their break is over.
In Ten Klicks, Yulgar worries about clicking and whistling heard below. The family will eventually have to return to Twilight while floor travel remains restricted, and he asks the Hero to keep the Leviathan from coming back, collecting three of its Tendrils. Researchers confined to Sunlight also hear the clicks. Yulgar accepts that the Hero thinks it is the Titan of Water and puts his confidence in the Hero, Tara and Rivale’s efforts to defend the base. His trust offers reassurance without establishing that the danger is gone.
After Ten Klicks, Aria praises a new chair that is easier to maneuver and makes her feel closer to Nature. She jokes about racing the children and invites the Hero back whenever the deeper work allows a break. She intends to make the gardens better in the meantime. Yulgar, too, has shifted his measure of home: returning to the inn or restoring their old life matters less than remaining together.
The Work of Purification
Dawn greets the Hero as a member of the Sisterhood of Dishpan Hands invited by Victoria to Undine’s Medical Division. She wants to help the injured Champions and restore some of Aria’s energy and happiness. Her sense of duty also carries guilt: she and her sisters regard the turmoil around Alteon’s fall to Chaos and Brittany’s death as failures they could not prevent, and hope their service to Victoria can make amends.
The clerics have had to learn unfamiliar technology and find their way around the base. Dawn admits to fumbling with keyboards and getting lost. Rivale has been a kind teacher; she initially hid her horns because she thought them frightening, until the sisters encouraged her to show them. Dawn hopes that welcome will help the doctor grow closer to them.
Water and cures are only part of the Sisterhood’s remit. Dawn says selected members were consulted about making necromancy obsolete by preventing souls from being raised as Undead. This is the purpose of the consultation she reports, rather than proof that Undine has already found a way to achieve it. It widens the stakes of the medical work beyond recovering patients.
Ariel introduces herself as Dawn’s student and Aria’s nurse. The Mana Crisis drew her and many other sisters to Undine, hoping that shared suffering could lead to a better future. She says Greenguard’s physical and mental scars persist even where wounds have healed, and the Sisterhood has spread itself thin trying to help. She came despite the danger to learn and contribute to medicine.
While Dawn specializes in Purification, Ariel works on practical healing. She praises regrowing limbs and reconstructing nerves to improve magical affinity. She also describes purifying patients of fears, inhibitions and nightmares as progress in healing the mind. Her account presents those treatments as accomplishments; it does not answer the questions about choice and control raised elsewhere in Undine.
Ariel’s work also reflects the political changes after the Alliance’s dissolution. She is relieved that some friends have recognized a chance at redemption, but also says she has lost companions to the Empress’s Shadowscythe. The Sisterhood now works with Swordhaven’s mages to cleanse people who leave the Empire of darkness and identify spies. The garden’s shelter and the patients’ care exist inside that wider system of trust, suspicion and purification.