OCHREMONT: The Nine-Hour Tide

The story

On a bleached limestone coast, the sea withdraws two kilometres and exposes OCHREMONT — a sunken merchant city whose bronze vault-towers have been underwater for a century. Salvage-surveyor MIRETH TAAL, exiled after her father died charting the last tide, walks the drained seabed with a stolen brass tide-clock and a crew: a silent burn-scarred safecracker, a young kite-flying scout, and a Warden defector in stripped armor. They cross kilometres of stranded kelp, beached shipwrecks and gasping fish under a copper sky, entering the city through a whale-boned canal mouth. Inside, the streets are chest-deep in receding water; coral has fused doors shut and the vault sits at the bottom of a cathedral-sized bronze drum sealed by a mechanism that only unlocks under falling pressure. Halfway through the heist, the crew discovers the Wardens never left: they live in air-bells inside the drowned towers, and they flood districts deliberately to drown intruders. A betrayal splits the crew — the defector opens a sluice to buy his own passage — and the young scout is swept into a lower gallery. Mireth abandons the gold to go after her, cracking the vault only because its floor is the fastest route down. They surface with a single crate of tide-charts and one gold ingot as the ocean returns in a grey wall across the flats. The safecracker holds a gate against the flood so the others reach the cliff stair. In the final images Mireth stands on the cliff at dusk watching Ochremont vanish beneath the water again, the recovered charts open in her hands — proof the next tide comes in nine years, not ninety.

Cast

• Mireth Taal to prove her father's tide charts were right, and to get her crew out alive
• Vask to open the one lock that beat him a century ago
• Pell to be counted as crew, not cargo
• Corvan Rhee to buy his way back into the Wardens at any price
• The Tidewarden to keep Ochremont drowned and its vault sealed