The drowning names

The ocean is winning. It always was. Kaelen Thorne was born into a duty he never chose: as Wayfinder of the city-titan Vaerith, he reads the moods of the ancient stone giant carrying his people across a world that's slowly, permanently drowning. As a Name-Warden's son, he guards something even more fragile — the last unclaimed names of the dead, sacred and untouchable, even as the flood swallows the graves that hold them. Isra Vantel doesn't believe in untouchable. She dives into the sinking ruins Kaelen is sworn to protect, harvesting names before the water claims them forever — not for greed, but because she's already watched one home disappear with nothing salvaged at all. To her, the dead don't need protecting. They need saving, before it's too late to matter. When a routine confrontation turns into a shared crisis that threatens to sink Vaerith itself, Kaelen and Isra are forced into an alliance neither of them wants — one that unravels everything they believed about duty, grief, and who really deserves to be remembered. But something darker is moving beneath the surface: a name-broker with plans bigger than either of them can see, and a secret buried in Kaelen's own past that not even the flood managed to fully erase. Some things are worth drowning for. The question is which ones.