Deepgraft
Kell drowned.
Dragged under by a riptide with his little sister's hand slipping out of his own, he shoved her up toward the air and let the black water take him in her place.
Then he woke on another world.
Not a kinder one. A world drowned from end to end, nothing but ocean over a darkness that has no floor, where people cling to raft-towns and die of thirst, because the sea cannot be drunk. He woke in the body of the weakest diver of a starving raft, named last at the water-line, with a little sister who is not the one he lost but looks at him the very same way, and no power at all to his name.
Fortunately, there was something that would change his fate.
In this world, power is eaten. Go down into the black, kill a beast, swallow its living organ while it is still warm, and its strength grafts into your own flesh: gills to breathe the sea, a hide to bear the crushing dark, a light to hunt by. Everyone gets one. Only one. A second power burns an ordinary soul to ash from the inside.
And Kell was the one impossible exception.
He came back from the dead with something else fused into his soul, the broken mind of the drowned old world, a cold voice in his skull that no one else can hear. It left his soul hollow, and a hollow soul does not burn. He alone can devour power after power, stack gift upon gift, and become the one thing this ocean was never built to hold.
The problem is that his gift is also a beacon.
Every power he takes lights his soul like a lantern in the endless dark, and the things at the bottom, the vast and sorrowful things that used to be people, turn and rise toward the light. Growing stronger has never once made him safe. It only makes him seen.
Spawned weak, with no guide but a machine-mind too broken to do more than whisper a warning, Kell has to claw his way up from the very bottom: eating the smallest fish for his first small powers, learning to build what he cannot yet kill, and choosing, on every single dive, between growing stronger and staying quiet enough to come home.
From the boy named last to the apex the deep itself fears. From a single stolen breath to the drowned floor of the world and the god-things sleeping there. Breaking the one law that the living and the dead both swear by, that to take too much power is to stop being a person, while he devours his way toward the only question that matters:
Can a soul go all the way down into the dark, and climb all the way back out, still itself?
Welcome to DEEPGRAFT.
Eat the deep. Become the thing it fears.