Record 2

Across the eastern valley federation, the true cost of the newly minted military alliance began to take a heavy toll on the civilian populace. With iron reserves heavily diverted to feed the demands of the Obsidian Pact, local smithies found their forges falling silent or redirected entirely toward the production of spearheads and blades. Agricultural tool production ground to a complete halt, leaving plows unrepaired and harvesting sickles unfinished just as the autumn frost settled over the fields. The common folk whispered anxiously in the marketplaces, watching their livelihoods traded away for distant ambitions of continental conquest.

Further toward the sea, a different kind of crisis gripped the foaming shores of the Atani Coast. Coastal fishing fleets returned day after day with empty nets, their crews pale and shaken by what they had witnessed in the deep waters. Blind, predatory leviathans—monstrous shapes of ancient scale and sinew—had surged upward from the dark ocean trenches into the shallow straits. Terrified mariners abandoned their traditional deep-water grounds, refusing to cast their lines where the water churned with unnatural warmth and sickly green bioluminescent pulses. The ocean itself seemed to turn its back on the island dwellers, cutting off their vital sustenance as the world above tore itself apart.

Meanwhile, the pressures of the mainland war and the terrifying omens from the deep fractured the elder councils of the western island clans beyond repair. Traditionalist leaders stood fiercely opposed to the younger war chiefs, flatly refusing to send auxiliary warriors across the sea to the central mainland. They argued that throwing lives into the continental meat grinder was sheer madness when the ancient horrors of the deep were already beginning to awaken and circle the islands.

Heated debates inside the basalt council halls dissolved into shouting matches, tearing families and centuries-old alliances apart overnight. As the western archipelago stood internally divided and paralyzed by fear, the drums of war continued to beat louder on the mainland. No one knew whether the tribes would tear each other to pieces first, or if the rising tide from the abyss would swallow them all whole.