#this is another repurposed idea of mine that I've been trying to rework for ages

[crtalley]

'Golden Blood' for the fic title ask ^^

Golden Blood

Naith has done deep-ocean hauls since she was a kid, pulling the remains of ancient sunken cities up from the radioactive depths of Thalassa. She’s no stranger to long periods of silence and darkness, accompanied only by AI and the barest whisper of life in the water around her. It’s lonely, but it’s life.

But then she finds something different on one of her hauls: a pressure-sealed casket holding a mobile cryo-chamber, something that she’s only seen in rusted-out remnants and plasticine replicas. To the right buyer, it’s worth more than the blood-price of her whole town combined. She tests her limited power reserves, carefully extracting it from the debris and pulling it to the surface.

Only then does she realize it’s still occupied. The person inside is as much a pre-disaster artifact as the casket itself; when she brings it to the ruling council, they measure the sleeper’s blood-price in gold, not steel or power. But where the council intends to keep the sleeper as a curiosity on display, Naith thinks they would have so much more to add to the anchored cities and the traveling armadas of Thalassa—

And she’ll risk everything to wake them.

→ new adult / scifi / far-future post-apocalypse / ocean-bound cities / waking the sleeper / stranger in a strange land

send me a title and i’ll tell you what i would write for it //