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Morning Rituals
The golden light of dawn spilled into Kaiya’s bedroom, painting her walls with waves of warmth. She stirred on the soft sheets, reluctant to leave the cocoon of her bed. For a moment, she lay there, listening to the gentle rhythm of waves lapping against the shore. The sounds was soothing and pictures of playing on the beach as a child danced in her head. The music of the ocean a constant reminder that at least some things in the world hadn’t changed. She stretched lazily, her hair spilling across the pillow as her eyes flicked toward the window.
The view was breathtaking: the endless expanse of the ocean glittering under the rising sun. The horizon was sharp and clean, the sky untouched by the dust and haze that had choked the surface world during her childhood. She padding barefoot across the smooth wood floor toward the open balcony facing the sunrise. Crossing her legs in a lotus position she opened her hands, palms up in her lap, and slowed her breaths. It was a meditation stance her mother had taught her long ago: empty hands receive, quiet hands offer. She cleared her mind, letting her thoughts drift by, seeking the stillness in her soul.
After finding her center, Kaiya descended the elevator carved into the cliffside and emerged into her beach cave. Glancing around its dark interior, she recalled her former refuge with reverence: a black mouth in the cliffside where the world ended and something new began. The place where her mother held her like she was still whole and whispered a future into the darkness. Her snug wetsuit felt good on her lean body, scarred from a life shaped by hardship and survival. With joy she dove into the brisk water. It closed around her like memory. Like home. The only constant in her tumultuous life.
After swimming peacefully in the empty sea, she returned to shore, rinsing beneath water tumbling off the cliffs. She donned her work clothes and took the elevator to the underwater tube—a sleek, translucent tunnel that led from the cliffsides homes beneath the waves toward Thalassara, the city her mother had dreamed of and helped built.
As she walked through the underwater tube toward the city, she gazed outward through the curved glass. Sunlight filtered down in golden shafts through eelgrass as it swayed in the current while seaweed farmers thinned and replanted the thick carpet of blades. Others harvested shrimps thriving in the green forest. Beyond her, Thalassara rose on the horizon—an elegant sprawl of floating platforms connected like petals of a living flower to the underwater city below.
Kaiya was born in a bustling coastal city, the daughter of two extraordinary parents. Her father, Mato Stormbearer, was a proud Lakota and a military pilot in the Navy, flying the formidable F-35 Lightning. He taught Kaiya the ways of his ancestors, including the sacred ritual of calling to the four directions to honor the Earth and its gifts. Her mother, Marisol Stormbearer, was a Buddhist and brilliant Filipino marine engineer, whose passion for the ocean was only rivaled by her love for her family. Together, they gave Kaiya a childhood that was cozy and full of wonder. She remembered the sound of her mother’s laughter as they walked along the harbor, her father lifting her high on his shoulders as he whispered the names of the winds and the spirits of the land.
Kaiya was beloved by the people of Thalassara—the living embodiment of their founders’ vision. In charge of Operations, today her mission was simple. Check the systems and ensure the interconnected harmony of their ocean refuge endured another day. Entering the floating city, Kaiya moved through the warren of tunnels and walkways with ease, acknowledging old friends while admiring the bounty of Thalassara’s labs and farms and laughing at the children running through the halls. People her age were rare and it was good to see the city thriving.
The ocean stretched in every direction, alive with movement. Beneath her feet, seaweeds swayed gently, their tendrils capturing sunlight to grow sustenance for the city. Further out, mid-water kelp beds shimmered, dense with life. Offshore sea pens housed sleek schools of fish, darting like liquid silver in their enclosures. She talked with workers in the oyster-mussel pens and seaweed farms, visited the algal labs and bioreactors. And checked the solar desalination array.
People greeted her with warmth, respect, and affection. She was their link to a lost past and their hope for a bright future.
But Kaiya carried ghosts.
Descent into Memory
Climbing the steps to Sagga, the sanctuary she built to honor her parents, her heart fluttered at the sight of its blue dome in the soft morning light. The shrine rose before her like a sacred bloom, the spiritual center of Thalassara — its glass windows curved in a quiet arc, open to the sky, filled with gentle light filtered through rippling water and cloud-shadow. She stepped through its archway in silence. No one followed her. This moment was hers alone. Sagga was her still point — the eye of her emotional storm, the only place where time seems to pause. She stopped there each day not just out of duty, but necessity. For Sagga was her armor. Descending the spiral staircase into the underwater city always stirred something inside her and she needed to see the light before the darkness. A sacred pause before facing the ghosts of her past.
Sagga is where her parents’ spirits converged, shaped by her fusion of their cultural traditions. As a child she found the sweeping visions of her father’s Lakota rituals and her mother’s Buddhist practices powerful and profound. Entering the domed-shaped building she walked to its sacred center, breathed slowly then grounded herself, as her father once showed her, and called to the four directions. East for beginnings, South for growth, West for spirit, North for healing. Her father’s rituals rooted her to the Earth while honoring the interconnectedness of all things. As he once whispered to her beneath the stars: “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ. We are all related.”
As her mother taught her, she stood before Sagga’s Buddha shrine and clasped her hands in the Anjali Mudra pose, acknowledging her parent’s love at her heart’s center. Looking up at the light streaming through the dome, she felt their warmth, their love, their spirit. Her daily ritual was a gesture of faith that there was still light above, still a future, still purpose beyond grief. “I bow to the earth. I listen to the water. But it’s the sky I look to when I need to remember who I am.”
Grounded in purpose and peaceful in thought, she gracefully descended the great spiral staircase that led into the heart of the underwater city of Thalassara. With each step her breath grew shallow for the descent was like falling back through time. Her memories returned, unbidden.
Passing through the housing pods she saw a mother reading a book to her children. The sight lanced through her, memories of her mother reading “Thalassara: The Fabled Underwater City” flooded back. Marisol had written it for Kaiya before the world shattered. And although it was utopian fantasy, it became the eventual blueprint for the city.
Kaiya’s childhood had been brief but golden. Born in a coastal city, she was raised in the embrace of her parents’ warm love. Her father had taught her to face her fears and head into the storms of life, not run away. Her mother taught her to dream beneath the sea, to find stillness amid chaos. Raised in love, her most cherished memories were building sand castles on the beach near their hidden cave. A place Marisol had known from her engineering projects, a safe place where Kaiya fell in love with the gentle rhythms of the sea. As waves swept her creations away, she took delight in rebuilding her little cities, marveling as they were reborn again and again.
But when Kaiya was five, her world began to unravel.
It started subtly—weather patterns grew erratic, with harsher storms and strange seasons. Then the catastrophes came in waves: monstrous wildfires consuming entire regions, catastrophic floods drowning cities, hurricanes and twisters tearing apart communities. The skies were often filled with smoke, and Kaiya remembered how her mother’s voice, once calm, had begun to carry a weight of worry.
As a child, Kaiya didn’t understand the broadcasts that played endlessly in the background of their home. She didn’t understand the arguments her parents whispered late at night, their voices trembling with urgency. All she knew was that their home, once filled with light and laughter, had grown quieter, heavier. And then came the day her father was called to war.
As the seas rose and the skies turned to flame, the last safe places became battlegrounds. Not of soldiers, but of families. Borders dissolved under the weight of humanity in motion — cities overwhelmed, governments collapsed, and walls crumbled beneath barefoot migrations that spanned continents. No map could contain the chaos. No country could hold the tide. And when nations grew desperate, war came. Her father, a Navy pilot, was called away to defend their city. She remembered him kneeling before her, pressing his forehead to hers.
“Remember who you are, Little Sky. The earth remembers. So will you.”
Kaiya didn’t fully understand why he was leaving, only that he was going to protect them. She watched him walk out the door, his eagle feather hanging from his flight suit, and never saw him again.
Weeks passed, and the city’s tension mounted. Food became scarce, water was rationed, and the streets emptied as people barricaded themselves inside their homes. One morning, Kaiya and her mother saw warships on the horizon, the roar of guns followed by explosions in their neighborhood. Her mother’s grip tightened on her hand as the news reported nuclear explosions in the big cities. Marisol’s voice was steady, but her eyes betrayed her fear.
“We need to leave,” she said simply.
Kaiya didn’t question her. She trusted her mother completely.
Marisol led her daughter through the chaos. They fled the city, navigating through back roads and overgrown paths to avoid the panicked masses. Eventually, they reached their hidden cave, shielded by towering cliffs and protected by the sea as battles raged around them.
The cave was damp and dark, but it was shelter. They scavenged what they could and began living off the ocean. Marisol taught Kaiya how to forage for mussels, catch crabs, and identify edible seaweeds. At night, as they huddled together for warmth, her mother began to dream aloud about a vision for Thalassara. To Kaiya, the underwater city was a fairy tale, but to her mother it was a way out of a world gone mad.
“We will build a place,” her mother would say in her soothing voice. “Where there’s no war, no pain. A city powered by the sun, the waves, and the tides. A city that lives in harmony with the ocean, where people are kind and work together. One day, we’ll build it.”
“We can’t live on land anymore, Kaiya,” her mother had whispered, stroking her hair as the sound of distant explosions echoed over the water. “But the sea will take care of us. We will learn to live with it, not against it. Floating schools, underwater farms, a city beneath the waves. Not for war. Not for conquest. For living in harmony with Earth’s bounty.”
Kaiya would listen, her fears melting away as she imagined her mother’s peaceful world. It became her sanctuary, her hope, her life.
Scouring the city for survivors, her mother had gathered engineers, scientists, and builders—the best minds and hands left. And right there in the cave they sketched plans on scraps of salvaged material, mapping the power systems on the walls, and dreaming of a future that seemed impossible.
Yet deep inside, she never stopped wondering what had happened to her father. Had he died in battle, his jet plummeting into the sea? Had he been captured? Or had he somehow survived, lost in the ruins of the world? The questions lingered, unanswered, an ache she carried with her. Her heart seeking his spirit each morning in the golden sun.
By the time Kaiya was ten, the community had grown to a hundred people working on the first floating city with a protective shield against the outside world. But Marisol had paid a heavy price for their survival. Exposure to radiation had weakened her, and without medical facilities, there was nothing anyone could do. She died with Kaiya holding her hand, whispering one last request.
“Remember the stories, Kaiya. Build the world we dreamed of.”
Marisol Stormbearer died before seeing it built. But Thalassara had risen all the same.
Now, years later, Kaiya was entering that dream made real.
Ghosts of the Deep
Moving deeper into the underwater city, she strolled through gardens, past concert halls, and traversed the residential pods. Despite the beauty, her heart grew heavier. She descended further still, down into the underwater kelp farms near the old bay. The sunlight filtered through the ocean, casting the ribbons of blades in a surreal, golden glow as kelp farmers harvested fronds for food and medicines. There, a diver waved to her, beckoning.
Curious, Kaiya donned her water gear and followed. They swam together through the thick forests and emerged into a deep trench near the ruins of the old world. And there it lay. The skeletal wreck of a Navy helicopter, half-buried in sand, its frame twisted by time. The sight stole her breath.
Memories crashed over her: her father flying off in a squadron of jets and helicopters, their silhouettes vanishing into the clouds. Her last sight of him.
Heart pounding, she exited the water and made her way to submersible operations in the deepest levels of the city. She loved gliding through the deep sea but today felt different. Each step mirrored a descent into her darkest memories, into emotional trenches, where grief and memory pressed against her like water at crushing pressure. A relict in the kelp beds had opened a schism in her fragile serenity and rekindled questions about her father’s fate. She’d thought about searching for him but the world outside Thalassara’s protective shield was unknown and dangerous. Few had tried to leave but none that had ever returned.
Standing alone in the submersible bay, her reflection shimmering in the curved glass of the cockpit. Beyond the launch bay, the sea pressed in — dark, immense, unknowable. She touched her forehead to the sub’s hull — like a blessing, or a goodbye. She wasn’t sure which. Maybe it was a prayer to a pilot who never came home. To the man who flew into hell so his daughter could live in peace under the sea. And then — without hesitation — she dropped into the sub, sealed the hatch, and raced off to check the tidal generators and methane farms. But her mind churned in the quiet darkness around her. The silence here was different. Not the silence of peace. The silence of pressure. Of memory folding back into the body like salt into water.
Beyond the boundaries of Thalassara lay the ruins of the city’s old bay, marked by danger signs and guarded by ghost currents. But her father taught her to face the storm, to seek truth despite the pain. And the path to her truth required descent. Exposure. Risk. She’s lived with hope. The maybe. The not knowing. Hope has pain in it — but it also had possibility. To find his remains…to confirm his death…would be a kind of death, too — the death of that last ember of her childhood.
With trembling hands she steered into the ruins. Passing through a narrow canyon the vessel descended into the depths, its lights piercing the blue-black void. As she piloted it across the seafloor, the remnants of the old world loomed out of the darkness like ghosts from her past.
As she moved through the underwater graveyard, she passed the remnants of human life: rusted cars, shattered electronics, a field of garbage slowly dissolving into the sea. Toxic barrels lay scattered like forgotten bones. Her lights caught on a whale skeleton, the ribs arching upward, curving like the decaying hull of an ancient ship. It lay there like a fallen god. A monument not just to death, but to endurance — the long, slow forgetting of something too great to save. Kaiya slowed, her breath catching in her throat. She thought of the whales her father had shown her, their songs echoing across the water. Bright, clear and full of joy. The silence of the abyss pressed down on her.
“And now they’re gone, like so many precious things,” she whispered to herself, her voice trembling in the quiet of the sub.
Further along, she passed a destroyed fishing boat. Memories surfaced—a vessel aflame, people screaming, the ocean slick with fire. Then a field of recreational vehicles, their hulks encrusted with coral and marine growth. After that a commercial plane wreck, half-buried in silt. The scars of war were everywhere, even here, in the abyss. Each scene a stab through her heart, upwelling memories of long buried traumas. Deeper still, a field of rusting tanks sprawled across the sand. She remembered children fleeing her neighborhood, tanks grinding the street behind them.
Finally, she reached a graveyard of warships.
Battleships lay in twisted silence, their guns corroded, their hulls split open. And it was here, amid these apparitions from the past, that Kaiya’s mind unraveled.
She regressed, became five again, watching the news broadcasts of her city on fire, the invasion rolling up the beaches and flooding city streets. People running from fires and guns and bombs. It wasn’t just her city but across the planet, the war spreading like rot. The unimaginable sights of earth’s destruction and the suffering of so many people left deep emotional scars in her young heart. The safety and trust she knew with her family became lost in a storm of fear, helplessness and sorrow.
But as bad as it was, she didn’t really understand what was happening. She didn’t understand war. Not then. Not really. But she knew when her parents stopped smiling. Knew when the lights went out more than they stayed on. Knew when her father’s hugs lasted too long. And she knew what fear smelled like. Not hers — theirs.
And when they watched the news together it felt like a movie that might change endings if they stared hard enough.
But it didn’t.
Images flashed through her head— not clean memories — but flashes burned in like heat scars. People running. People on fire. Planes falling like wounded birds into the sea. Whole cities swallowed in fire and smoke and bombs. Kids with blood on their faces, screaming for mothers who weren’t coming. She remembers being very still. Being very small. Trying not to exist. Because back then, she learned the earth could break. People could break. Mothers could die. Fathers could leave and never come back. And a little girl who once built castles in the sand could sit in the dark and watch the world burn — and not make a sound.
But after years on Thalassara her rituals and prayers had given her enough inner peace to endure the pain, to survive, to keep the old traumas buried where they belonged. And leaving the field of battleships she took deep breaths at the painful memories, relieved she’d been able to keep the nightmares at bay, glad that she had a peaceful world to return to.
And then she saw it.
A shattered airplane, a downed fighter jet, its tail broken and its cockpit shattered, its fuselage torn open like a wound. Slowing she searched the wreckage, her heart racing in her chest. Then a jolt of pain as she saw her father’s name on the side, one she’d seen many times on the air field. “No!” she screamed, “it can’t be.” A surreal frozen stillness surrounded her. Not from disbelief but in the quiet wordless ache of the truth finally settling in. She remembered their last meeting, watching him kneel in front of her.
“Remember who you are, Little Sky. The earth remembers. So will you.”
And now all that remained of him was… this.
Staring at the wreckage the floodgates opened and her darkest memories flooded back. She was a child again — helpless and cracked wide open. She saw her mother pulling her from their home seconds before it exploded in flame, fleeing through the burning city to the beach, to their hidden cave, seeking refuge beneath stone and salt and shadow. Hoping the world would stop killing itself. That the madness would end.
“Look at me, Kaiya,” her mother had whispered that night, holding her tight as bombs exploded in the distance and the smell of death hung heavy on the air. “We will build something better. We will build a life the earth can’t destroy. We will build Thalassara.”
In her sub, Kaiya shook with silent sobs, the pressure of memory crushing her.
Return to Sagga
Her heart in her throat she turned and fled, piloting towards Thalassara as fast as the sub would allow. Fleeing to her ocean refuge to quell the tempest inside. Running through tunnels and tubes she fled upward — out of the crushing dark towards the light. Up the spiral staircase — like ascending a sacred path, climbing her mother’s dreams, chasing the warm love she remembered. Each step like climbing a stairway to heaven to be reunited with her mother and father. But her steps weren’t graceful. They felt desperate. Animal. Taking the steps in big jumps, she was crying without dignity.
But upward she went. Towards light. Towards heaven. Towards salvation.
Gasping for breath, she reached Sagga and ran to the center of the temple, trying desperately to make her father’s connection to the Earth, find her mother’s stillness. But she failed and the tears came.
When she finally lifted her gaze to rays of light streaming down through the shrine, seeking the lost love of her mother and father, seeking comfort, all she felt was emptiness and the pain of all that was lost in the world. Her parents, a beautiful planet and all of its creatures, destroyed by things and people she didn’t know, for reasons she couldn’t understand.
Thalassara was all that remained. A fragile utopia in a dead world. A sanctuary floating amidst the ruins of everything lost. The ache of her memories lingered like salt on her skin, raw and unfinished. Yet even in her deep grief, her mother’s voice in the cave returned.
“We will build a place where there’s no war, no pain. A city powered by the sun, the waves, and the tides. A city that lives in harmony with the ocean, where people are kind and work together.”
She could still see her mother in that cave, kneeling beside a crude map scratched onto stone, surrounded by tired but determined faces. Survivors. Dreamers. Builders. Marisol Stormbearer, whispering hope into the ashes of the old world. Thalassara the phoenix of her dreams.
Kaiya breathed in deeply, her hands lifting, palms open, just as her mother had taught her. Her feet planted firmly on the earth, as her father had shown her, she honored the directions, seeking a path to the future. East for beginnings. South for growth. West for spirit. North for healing. And at the center of it all—the people.
Thalassara was never meant to be hers.
It was her parents’ dream made real—a place where no child would have to endure what she had. Where the pain of war would not be forgotten, but transformed into wisdom. A place where the sea was not a place, but a teacher. Where harmony was more than a word—it was a way of life.
She had suffered so others wouldn’t have to. She had endured so they might thrive. Here, beneath the waves, they could live in peace. Together. Bound by the memory of the old world and the vision of a better one. Rooted in the lessons of the earth, and rising with the light of the ocean. They were all connected.
As her father once whispered to her beneath the stars:
“Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ. We are all related.”
And that, Kaiya knew, was why Thalassara must endure.
Guide to Thalassara: The Underwater City
and the Stairway to Heaven:
What is the meaning of the song Stairway to Heaven?
The lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven” are open to many interpretations. I believe the song explores the spiritual journey of a woman who mistakenly believes she can buy her way into salvation. At first, she clings to materialism and self-delusion, but subtle signs from nature — symbolized by a songbird and smoke through the trees — hint that true wisdom and redemption lie elsewhere. As the song progresses, the narrative shifts toward a universal message: a choice between two paths — continuing in self-centered ignorance or seeking enlightenment and harmony through nature, patience, and reason. Ultimately, the “stairway” is not something to be purchased or owned; it is a personal, often difficult transformation that demands humility, reflection, and connection to something greater than oneself.
In the Thalassara film, I use the mysticism of the song to reflect on the journey of a woman living in a futuristic utopian ocean refuge. Everything seems perfect, at first, and she is truly living in heaven and remembers her golden childhood. But deep inside she carries deep trauma from her early life which keeps flashing back, her self delusion being that her utopia comes at a high cost in our modern world. Her paths are either to forget her shadows or face them, which leads to her transformation in the end and the strength of her connection to her parents, to family.
What does Sagga mean?
Sagga was chosen as a spiritual term — inspired by Buddhist references to heavenly realms (“Sagā”) and adapted to feel timeless, universal. In the story, Sagga is the shrine and sanctuary at the heart of Thalassara, honoring the founders — Kaiya’s mother and father — and the philosophical roots of the city. It is a sacred place and a symbol of memory, legacy, and spiritual grounding for Kaiya and her people
What does Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ mean?
Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ is a Lakota phrase meaning “All My Relations” or “We are all related.” It expresses a deep, spiritual understanding that everything — humans, animals, plants, rivers, winds, stars — are interconnected parts of the same sacred web of existence. A gift from Kaiya’s father, Mato Skyhunter, it was part of the Lakota wisdom he taught her as a child, alongside rituals like honoring the Four Directions and is a core philosophy behind Thalassara’s founding vision — living with the ocean, not against it; remembering that humans are not separate from the world, but of it.
Watch the videos:
Trailer (1 min)
Full video (8 min) to Led Zeppelin!
2 responses to “Thalassara: the Underwater City and the Stairway to Heaven”
A work of love. It should be made into a movie
Thanks Mike. Just need a few million 😎