Five thousand years ago, the god of death fell into the Candlelight Sea.
The islands were littered with his bones and the waters became a haunted wasteland - the final resting place of a swarm of hungry ghosts. Those few who survived the cataclysm now cower behind the glow of sacred lighthouses, fearing the deadly oceans beyond.
When the spirit of an ill-fated princess arrives on the other side of the horizon line, she risks her soul for a chance to live again. Her opponent: the vile remains of the fallen death god himself — a formless, parasitic, devilish blight known as the Red Tide King.
Read it here.
General Tropes:
- Accidental Misnaming: Pavel encounters an unusually friendly plesiosaur seaghost, mishears the name it provides in God's Tongue, and calls it Jeff. It's actually an avatar of Cheth, who finds it Actually Pretty Funny.Pavel: [head in hands] I. Called. Him. Jeff.
- Armor-Piercing Response: After her daughter's funeral, Daphne is asked whether there's a prayer she'd like her to say. Unbeknownst to Daphne, her answer saves her life — the one who asked was too stunned and touched to push her down the stairs.Daphne: I pray that you wake up from your own bad dream. And that when it's over, you're far happier than I am.
- Big Bad: Zigzagged with Cheth and Halea who is actually Cheline possessing Halea's corpse.
- Cheth is the Satanic Archetype of the setting: children are told that, should they misbehave, he'll come to steal their souls and wear them as clothing. He's a Jerkass God to Phaedra, and he is also blamed for the existence of the Fata Morgana, a dangerous army of assassins.
- Halea is sinister from her first appearance, quickly becoming a threat to Pavel and his mother when she learns that he has survived his seabite longer than normally possible. She is also behind Phaedra's assassination, as well as her father's, and has led a millennia-long campaign of misinformation and suppression via her church.
- Big Good: Zigzagged with Cheth, Shoshana and Cheline.
- Cheline is revered as the Mother Goddess of Life, whose daughter Shoshana saved the world from the evil god Cheth. She is the mainstream deity of the Candlelight Sea and Shoshana is a Messianic Archetype, the Prophetess who is predicted to one day come back to fix the sea.
- While Cheth is the creepy God of the Dead, in truth he used to be the psychopomp of souls towards reincarnation. He is the main benefactor of the protagonist and his main goal is to restore the natural order and finally let the countless billions of souls stuck in the sea move on. He also used to be worshiped by his own church, just like Cheline.
- Blessing: An Immortal with the Gods' Tongue can bless food to allow ghosts to eat it and ease their Horror Hunger. Phaedra's team receive a huge stash of blessed food from Cheth, rousing their suspicions at his generosity.
- Calming Tea:
- Cal welcomes Pavel to the Mantaluna with multiple cups of chai and some tactful off-screen exposition to help make sense of the horror show he's been dropped into.
- Phaedra's first taste of food after months as a ravenous seaghost is honey lemon tea with a Blessing to make it tangible to her. Given the circumstances, she promptly bursts into tears.
- Candlelit Ritual: Funerals are consecrated to Cheline, goddess of fire and life, so attendees carry candles and the body itself is cremated. The flames all change color to Cheline's signature electric blue when the rite begins.
- Cataclysm Backstory: The ocean was cursed — and many islands were flooded and destroyed — in an event called the Fracture, in which Cheth's body was cast down and broken apart.
- Celestial Deadline: Cheth tells Phaedra that she needs to find the artifact that can return her crew to life before the year's end or their souls are forfeit. Later on, he raises the stakes, warning her that it's also their only chance to heal the Candlelight Sea and free its ghosts.
- Chess with Death: Lampshaded. Cheth offers a chess game as a potential challenge. Phaedra turns it down, commenting "You must've played millions of chess games," and defeats him in a contest of knowledge instead.
- Color-Coded Elements: Inverted. Cheth, god of water, has a red motif (hence his nickname as the Red Tide King). His sister Cheline, goddess of fire, has a blue motif (hence the blue fire in her temples).
- Crapsack World: Most of humanity is dispersed on a hellish water world. While life on the islands is generally okay, the entire ocean is plagued by ghosts who will attempt to devour any living creature they come across. Anyone injured by these ghosts becomes incurably cursed and is shunned by society, and will inevitably die and be consumed by the curse, becoming undead thralls. The only reason the sea can be navigated at all is because of a line of Lighthouses that emit a magical light that repels the ghosts, but the undead thralls are resistant to it and can even disable it during attacks. As if that wasn't bad enough, all of those miserable ghosts? That's the fate of everyone. There is no other afterlife or reincarnation system; once you die you're stuck forever in the sea as a decaying monster who serves as a toy for the God of the Dead.
- Culture Chop Suey: Elements of many different real-world cultures appear to be mixed. Pavel wears a festival costume based on Cham Dance masks and Pacific Northwest button cloaks. He and his mother eat ramen. Cheline's shrine looks Egyptian or Babylonian. Phaedra's father dresses like an 18th-century British admiral.
- Cypher Language: The symbols for the God's Tongue are a phonetic substitution cipher.
- Deal with the Devil: Multiple.
- If Phaedra can ask a question Cheth can't answer and if he asks a question she knows the answer to, then she and her crew get their lives back. What Cheth didn't tell her was that she only saved her own life, and so her life force was divided between herself and her crew. One fifth of a soul isn't enough to live off of, condemning them to live as conscious seaghosts instead.
- Amos is obeying Cheline on the belief that she will bestow her gift upon mankind, despite her orders resulting in the death of his son and the protest that she could have at least given him a funeral... she shoots him down, claiming that feeding the seagulls was honor enough.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best:
- Phaedra clearly misses her father, who she deeply admired, but only calls her living mother "panicky".
- Subverted with Vanna, who fits this trope but is not actually killed. She is shown as a kind maternal figure and even in deep pain she makes sure that her son has a store of medicine and a way to find help, and Pavel misses her a lot.
- Lani speaks fondly of her mother but doesn't know that she's already dead.
- Desecrating the Dead: Both Cheth and Cheline do this in different ways. He wears their souls to mess with their loved ones, while she puppeteers and operates on the corpses left behind.
- Disease Bleach: Anyone who is seabitten slowly turns white, and eventually turns into the Fata Morgana. Pavel and Eddy are two examples, while Vanna is an example of someone who has completely turned.
- Eyes Are Mental: Cheth can appear as any of the souls he's collected over the millennia, or thousands of them at once, spreading his distinctive red eyes to his current vessels. "Red tiders" are recognized as an unusual variety of seaghost but very few know their true significance. Similarly, Cheline needs to replace her host bodies' eyes with glass to hide her own glowing blue eyes, which manifest when she removes the fake orbs.
- False Flag Operation: Chapter 6 reveals that the Fata Morgana, Cheth's undead assassins, are actually puppets of his sister Cheline — the beloved patron goddess of the world's main religion. Being bitten by seaghosts turns someone entirely white, but they vanish and appear in Cheline's clutches. They remain themselves, and alive, unless she kills them to make puppets out of their corpses. Cheth's markings are a Marked Change on his real agents. Cheline paints them on the Fata Morgana.
- Fantastic Slurs: Seabite victims are called Crossers, referring to their eventual fate of 'crossing the Horizon Line' and becoming Fata Morgana.
- Fate Worse than Death: Anyone who is bitten by a seaghost turns white, either slowly as the mark spreads or very fast if they're bitten all over, until they lose their humanity and become Cheth's Fata Morgana. Or rather, until they vanish and Cheline makes them Fata Morgana. Without her interference, they retain all their faculties. That being said, true death is not much better due to the fact that souls are forever stuck in the sea in an unending restless state as they suffer and fall apart. This is not natural, and Cheth's defeat 5000 years ago caused this. He is supposed to be their psychopomp, but due to his injured status he is unable to continue his work, something that torments him.
- Faux Affably Evil: Cheth initially acts the part of an Affably Evil god, but he's fairly quick to anger and Kick the Dog. That said, the "evil" part becomes less and less certain as the comic goes on, to the point where he just seems to love drama, to not take slights or insults well, and to dislike Phaedra rather than acting like that to everyone. The really Faux Affably Evil character is his sister Cheline, who is slower to lose her temper but it flares for far less understandable reasons and she doesn't have Cheth's liking for humanity.
- Food as Bribe: After the trauma of being dead, the Mantaluna Crew conspire to get Phaedra back in sorts by cooking up a feast.
- Funny Background Event: The notes for a comic in which Phaedra gravely tells Pavel about what she'd been doing when she was killed, while in the background Cheth covertly steals a scone, reads "Foreground Characters: heartfelt discussion. Background Characters: random stupidity. This is how you make a Phantomarine page."
- Glass Eye: Lady Halea has two; the pupils/irises are fashioned after peacock feathers. All the Fata Morgana have these as well. Cheline can reanimate peoples' bodies but the illusion of life collapses if they retain their flesh eyes.
- God and Satan Are Both Jerks: Cheline and Cheth are respectively their setting's God and Satanic Archetype. Both have been shown to taunt people with their dead family members. However, with Cheth that seems to have been a Jerkass to One moment. Q and A comics and supplementary information on the artist's blog have Cheth come off as fairly sympathetic, often annoying to deal with and overreacting to slights but basically good, while Cheline is... worse.Euphemia: I'll see you burn yet.
Cheline: Your granddaughter burns first ♥ - Hazardous Water: The people are cautioned not to go into the sea for the fear of getting bitten by seaghosts.
- Healing Potion: Although it can't heal him, Vanna's mysterious medicine has succeeded in halting Pavel's seabite from spreading. He's five years past his life expectancy as a seabite victim.
- Healing Spring: Bathing in the sacred waters of an Aquifer is believed to slow the spread of seabite.
- Light Is Good: The lighthouses keep the seaghosts at bay and away from the living.
- Locked into Strangeness:
- Victims of the seabite have the color bleached out of them at the site of the bite, and the bite is said to "spread" the longer a victim remains untreated. Pavel's head and neck, including his hair, have been bleached. Some of the other children at the Salabay Aquifer also have bleached streaks in their hair as a result of their seabites. When Pavel's mother is seabitten, she loses all the color in her skin, eyes, and hair before fading away.
- The Fata Morgana, the ultimate fate of the seabitten, all have white hair.
- Mysterious Disembodied Voice: In Chapter 5, the many-bodied god Cheth speaks despondently about his faint hope for an end to his imprisonment, addressing an unknown "You", when one of his bodies unexpectedly answers with differently colored Speech Bubbles to reassure him. The official transcript labels the interjection as "???" and "Cheth(?)".
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: The Red Tide King and the Fata Morgana.
- Ocean Punk: The Candlelight Sea relies on ships, both sailboats and motorboats, for travel between its many islands.
- Our Gods Are Different: Gods are spirits and forces of nature, largely disembodied and functionally immortal — killing them is extremely difficult, even for other other gods. They do not have set physical forms but can manifest by possessing vessels, such as the souls or bodies of the dead, and can do so in multiple locations while doing different tasks without visible loss of concentration or attention. Eight existed once, in addition to a "Mother" that created them, and they were made in pairs — six died in unstated circumstances but apparently by human hand; Cheth, the god of the soul, endures as a shattered husk smeared across the sea, while his sister Cheline is the only fully "alive" god left.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The seaghosts drain life away from living organisms, bleaching them. They are also kept away by the light of lighthouses, despite being unaffected by sunlight.
- Plot-Triggering Death: The assassination of Phaedra and her companions triggers the events that lead to the main plot.
- Power Crystal: Phantomarine is a glowing mineral used in the beacons of the Lighthouse Road - its perpetual light creates a barrier that repels seaghosts. It has a related substance called Revenite that provides similar protection, but requires an electrical current to glow. Pavel was given a lantern with a piece inside, which should be impossible because all of the Phantomarine in the world was supposed to have been used to make the Road.
- Powers That Be:
- Subverted. The Red Tide King is invisible to the average living person, but it's absolutely possible to be Pals with Jesus if you're seabitten or dead.
- Cheline also subverts this, as she deliberately invokes this trope to obfuscate her very real and physical actions.
- Rotating Protagonist: The prologue and chapter one are about Phaedra and Cheth, chapter two and three are majorly about Pavel and his mother, completely leaving out the previous cast until four and five regroup them, and then six is almost entirely focusing on Halea and a whole new set of characters again.
- Say It with Hearts: Both Cheth and Cheline are prone to this, mostly as a taunt.
- Supernatural Language: The Gods' Tongue is a language that can only be spoken by immortals, though the spirits of the dead can understand but not speak it. It's also used to Bless food so that it can nourish ghosts.
- Title Drop: "Phantomarine" is the name of the local Power Crystal, which generates light to repel seaghosts, not needing an electrical current like the related Revenite. Interestingly, Pavel is given a lantern with Phantomarine in it when all of the substance in the known world should be in the Lighthouse Road.
- The Undead: Seaghosts are the specters of all dead animals and humans, drawn to and trapped in the seas. If they manage to bite a human and consume parts of their soul, these become "seabitten", marked with a white patch that grows until their soul is entirely consumed and they become Fata Morgana, soulless, bleached-white beings who walk upon the sea and wage war against the living. At least, so it is believed — the Fata Morgana are actually husks puppeted around by a god.
- Undeathly Pallor:
- Human seaghosts' skin tones range from bone white to different shades of purple or blue, depending on their skin tone in life.
- The seabitten are left with patches of white skin, regardless of their original skintone, wherever ghosts bit them. The white gradually spreads across their whole bodies until they become the voiceless, unblinking Fata Morgana. In fact while the seabitten do turn entirely white, they remain alive. The Fata Morgana are their corpses, puppeteered by Cheline to do her bidding.
- Unobtanium: All the known Phantomarine in the world was supposed to be used to make the Lighthouse Road, so Pavel's mother is baffled by how some was made into a lantern and given to him.
- Written by the Winners: As time goes on, it's made clear that the conflict between Cheth and Cheline is not nearly as black and white as most people believe it is, and it seems that Shoshana was far from the Messianic Archetype the church claims her to be.
