Voyage Through the Sea of Hearts: To the Embers of the Past

Celestine was originally just a kingdom’s princess, sent by her father to the border to while away her days.

The title of administrative advisor sounded impressive, but the actual work amounted to stamping papers, drinking tea, and occasionally picking out typos in the administrators’ reports. Boring, but safe.

That was until she found a metal necklace in a mine, one that did not belong to this era.

The corpse that crawled out of the rock strata pressed the necklace into her hand and rasped through its charred throat:

“Don’t dig… Don’t become like us.”

Only then did Celestine learn that the continent beneath her feet had already been destroyed twice.

The first time, the gods burned themselves away. The second, civilization was consumed by fire.

Now she had unearthed the beginning of the third destruction.

And a witch told her, “The sea of heart within you was sealed by someone.”

“Want to know who sealed it?” The witch tapped her pipe. “Go search the ruins of the old era for answers.”

So while other princesses competed to outshine one another in the ballroom, Celestine began buying off merchant guilds, refitting sail-less ships, recruiting alchemists, and researching artillery calibers. When pirates ambushed her halfway along the route, she calmly calculated the trajectory of her cannonballs.

The nobles said she was crazy.

Her father sighed and asked if she could stop making trouble.

Celestine answered earnestly, “I’ll try to make less.”

Then she continued sailing toward even more dangerous places.

Because she had taken apart the warnings passed to her by the dead, one by one, and uncovered the real problem behind them: the third destruction of this world would be even more unreasonable than the first two.

She had to get ahead of it.