The First Heir Rises
Author's Note:
Welcome, fellow travelers.
This is the beginning of a tale where our heroes are reborn as gods—
A legend. A remembrance.
Lapu-Lapu — the first Guardian.
Darkness.
Cold.
Slow.
And—
Undying.
A slumber older than the tides, deeper than any trench. For ages, he had rested beneath the sea, cloaked in the embrace of salt and silence. The world above had forgotten him. But the sea never did.
And now, the sea stirred.
It began as a murmur—a distant tremor across the seafloor. Whispers rippled through the deep, reaching into his hollow bones, threading through coral-covered ribs and barnacle-laced fingers. The ocean remembered his name.
Lapu-Lapu.
His eyes—long closed, now flickered. No light reached this abyss, yet a glow bloomed beneath his skin, ancient and blue, pulsing with the rhythm of the tide. His chest rose. The first breath was agony.
The second, fire.
He screamed, but no sound came. Only bubbles and silence. The sea did not need his voice—it knew his will.
Above, a storm cracked the heavens.
Waves churned like beasts unchained. Lightning clawed the sky. And from the heart of the ocean, the wave was born—not of wind nor moon, but of memory, of rage, of a promise once made.
He rose.
Not swam, not surfaced—rose, like the sea carried him in its arms. Coral crumbled from his shoulders. Water peeled from his skin like shedding past lives. Each heartbeat was thunder. Each breath, a tide.
His body, forged by battles long forgotten, now surged with something more. Something divine.
He was no longer man.
He was—
The Waveborn.
And the world above? The colonizers, the kings, the gods they worshipped? They would learn.
The First Heir has awakened.