Chapter 3
The scholars were coming.
The finest minds Caelith Mare possessed were already threading through the Bosphorus Passage. Ancients Thalos had summoned the instant he'd realized Kore was pregnant. When he'd seen the color dancing through her biolume, that it wasn't just Nyxarion's mark inside her.
He'd summoned them in secret. To examine Kore, to catalog every last chromatophore. Document her every impossible, illicit breath, and measure the spread of every fin.
Because she didn't merely possess the Queen's Lightning—an Abyssair trait assumed extinct. She also wielded his own Chromatic Camouflage. A trait assumed exclusive to his Asterion bloodline, now in the dainty, mutant hands of a Siren.
A pregnant Siren.
One he'd bred himself, despite the cost.
Thalos rolled, belly-down, and swam a lazy circle through the sunlight. Opalescent scales catching the warmth, he flicked his tail. Eyes scanning the dark below, where his people worked.
Thalassari reef breakers. Toiling to erect an outpost of Caelith Mare in the poisoned tide.
It was an art, building the sweeping, elegant structures. Breaking the coral and coaxing it to grow new structures to suit the exacting demands of Caelith Mare architecture.
One he was utterly unequal to, for the ancestral seat of Thalassari power was luminous.
Open to the tides. And even here, in the anoxic current, the Hollow Court would spawn beauty.
Perfection. For as long as the matter of Kore's child remained unsettled, Thalos would remain.
The Hollow Court would have a seat here, no matter how viciously the Black Sea resisted civilization or elegance.
Rolling again, Thalos basked in the fractured sunlight.
Slipping through the glittering shafts, floating on his back in the warmest layer, he drifted.
Arms folded behind his head. Drawing pendulous sweeps with his tail, aiming to keep himself suspended in the brightest shaft of light.
Glacial-blue eyes slitted against the glare as he basked.
Behind him, the island rose against the surface. Stark. Black rock and barren scrub.
The place where Nyxarion had dragged a human woman onto shore and fucked her full of venom until she grew gills.
Where he'd won the Chain of Breath and let the beguiling little monster seduce him.
He should have killed her.
It would have been easier.
Fingers drifting to his ribs, Thalos smiled where no one could see it. Tracing the scars glittering on his skin.
Wounds Nerissa had closed. Singing her last song for him, she'd pulled him back from the abyss of death's current. Flushed the venom Nyxarion had pumped into him before he'd begun to fester and rot.
But he would keep the scars.
Ridged tissue marring his perfect form, marking the points where Nyxarion's barbed spines had punched through scale and bone. Impaling him, left to bleed before both courts.
But Nerissa's final song hadn't been a gift.
It was an exchange.
Return the Sirens to the sea, Sovereign.
The oath was heavy. A weight sealed in venom, written in blood.
Return the Sirens.
It was insanity.
Kore was an oddity. A curiosity.
But to bring them back was to undo the same laws he'd spent his life upholding. His father had hunted them to extinction before his birth. Written the Accord of Nisyros to subjugate the Abyssari. A law Caelith Mare had been using to prosper for longer than Thalos had been alive.
Thalos' smile grew wide. Toothy.
For with her final breath, Nerissa had ensured the king who had exterminated Sirens, would be succeeded by the one who resurrected them.
Nerissa had known exactly what she was doing, the crafty little minx.
He would have to be exceptional.
Careful.
Every action planned. Each word layered with deliberate intention. Meticulous.
Weaving the art he excelled at—cultivating inevitability.
Because Kore was pregnant.
And he had a claim.
The memory of it, those grey-gold eyes sparkling with violet light, the way she'd arched when he'd buried his knot inside her…
Exhaling through his teeth, a careful hiss of bubbles leaked from his gills.
Arrogance had cost him dearly.
Because then he'd gone and lost the Spiral, failed to take the creature from Nyxarion's monstrous claws.
But she'd been bred by both—seeded and growing ripe, she was marked by the venom of two kings. And Thalos would not leave a child marked by Asterion gifts to rot in the Deep.
Light.
Pulsing and distant, but impossibly bright.
Thalos opened his eyes.
Vorynthar.
The heretical reef had ignited.
Not the dreary muted blue of deep-sea vermin.
No. This was a riot of color—blue and violet and searing gold erupting from the Deep in a column of radiance that lit the black waters with enough force to reach him, even in the shallows. And for a moment, just one breathtaking instant, it outshone even the sun with its brilliance.
Liquid flames.
Painting his opalescent scales in the glow of a flickering sunset.
Beneath him, the Thalassari reef breakers stopped.
Kore.
She was a beacon. Summoning his curiosity with a lure he couldn't possibly resist.
Pressing one hand to the scars lodged beneath his ribs, Thalos looked. Entranced as that molten fire pulsed again.
And again.
Frantic. A desperate, obscene throb that painted a slow, lewd grin across Thalos' lips, for he remembered that particular cadence. The persistent flutter broadcasting Nyxarion's claim across every poisonous fathom of black water.
Watching it pulse in perfect sync with the memory of Kore's tight, deplorable little cunt clenching around his knot, Thalos' lips curled around a grin.
Shameless.
Greedy. His blood running hot with the thirst for… more. Another taste of what the king of the Deep had claimed for himself.
But Pelagorn spawn needed the venom of their sires to develop into healthy babes.
And in her? A Siren marked by two kings before conception had even occurred? Bred and knotted by both? Surely she would need both to ensure her child developed properly.
And who was there to say otherwise?
What was it but a gentle… push to convince them both of the risks? A little cultivated inevitability. After all… her skin was marked with his venom, too. And thus, the babe would need the attention of both potential sires…
Grinning now, Thalos dove.
Sinking into the riptide his reef breakers had braided into the poisoned tide.
It was a controlled descent. A helical current, twisting through the depths.
One that turned crushing pressure differential into manageable stages, sending the surface's warmth and minerals into the deep.
Cycling the sluggish, ancient water in a corridor that would serve both courts.
Grant diplomatic access. Enable trade.
A polite fiction of alliance, while two kings warred over the same womb.
Descending, fins flared to catch the manufactured current, Thalos rode it down and let his scales ripple. The chromatic camouflage took him in a cold sweep of flexing scales blending with the lifeless palate of the Black Sea.
Chromatophores firing along his spine, bleeding pigment of darkness and mirroring it.
Black on black on black.
Opalescent scales shivered and vanished. Dissolving into the current, taking on the tactics of an apex reef predator. Invisible. Patient. A ghost in the tide.
All around him, the pressure built. Manageable. Squeezing his healing wounds where the scars sang in aching protest.
But he sailed through that helical, twisting current. Deeper. Past the threshold where Thalassari physiology began to labor, where his gills worked harder to extract oxygen from water that held almost none. Breathing easy in the riptide suffused with the surface warmth.
Until the spires of the forbidden city materialized below him.
Vorynthar.
No longer the fledgling reef he'd first invaded.
The heretical reef was transformed. Changed. Sprawling across the trench basin in aggressive, Abyssari architecture.
Pulsing with color that shouldn't exist in the Deep.
That unmistakable bioluminescent blue, yes. Expected. Thriving. But the city was alive with streaks of gold and crimson. Violet and silver. Colors Thalos recognized with a visceral jolt.
His colors.
Woven into an Abyssari fortress.
It was… breathtaking.
Drawn deeper, he followed the light. Sailing through the riptide, past the Abyssari sentries nosing through the frigid dark. Their eyes gleaming and inky black. The vacant, ravenous stares of deep water predators scanning for movement.
Thalos slipped through the current without displacing it.
Invisible. Hidden. Free to admire the grotesque formations of Nyxarion's Raskoril where no one might see his wonder.
Inspecting the reef, where the coral had been twisted into eerie shapes that defied nature's order.
Arches and spirals grown to suit Abyssari whims.
He saw everything and nothing.
Fixated to the source of the radiance that had pulled him back into the dark.
And then he saw them.
Sprawled across the trench floor, nine meters of obsidian muscle and plated scale was twisted through the reef. Nyxarion's fins were shredded, his gills clapping and ragged where they bore fresh scars to match Thalos' own.
Still healing from the Crucible.
The beast looked… diminished.
But his arms were full.
Impaled on his knot, wretched, alien legs splayed in a lewd embrace, the Siren was draped across his bulk. A body slumped in a blend of exhausted bliss.
He could see it in her scales.
Etched in her skin.
The sunset burning at the bottom of the sea.
And her belly.
Still small. Hardly enough to fill his palm, but noticeable now. Alive with the shifting color pulsing throughout Vorynthar's cursed corridors and reaching, ravenous spires. Hypnotic waves of color that shifted in a contented rainbow.
Gold. Violet. Indigo. Pearlescent silver.
One massive hand cradled her skull. Nyxarion's claws were buried in the floating silk of honey brown as his chest rumbled with a subsonic hum.
Hanging motionless above them, watching and invisible, Thalos lurked.
Drinking in her scent.
Citrus and ozone, yes, but richer now. Deeper. Layered with something warm and animal that pregnancy had made thick. Real. It curled through the water, threading past his stillness and his silence and his invisible scales to settle on his tongue.
His pupils dilated.
Watching Nyxarion trace the blade of her jaw. Petting her. The tips of wicked claws Thalos had felt tear through his flesh, dragged over her delicate edges, drawing faint, elegant trails of biolume in their wake.
Crooning to her as she dozed impaled on his knot. A tectonic rumble, pitched well below hearing. It was felt. Echoed through the structure of the reef, until Vorynthar hummed in tune with its creator.
It was the sort of gentleness that was obscene to behold from a beast meant to crush bone and rend flesh.
Intimate.
Raw, animal contentment between lovers.
Sedated by the beast, Kore was still. Her chest moving in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Gills fluttering in a soft pattern he didn't quite recognize.
Not at first.
And then understanding bloomed.
She was… asleep.
Dreaming.
Like a human.
Surrounded by predators who never stopped hunting. Never slept, for the ocean did not pause, and neither did its sons and daughters.
Pelagorn merely… dimmed. Maintaining vigilance, a perpetual half-awareness that kept predators alive and prey moving.
It was… outrageous to see her surrender so completely. To close both eyes and relinquish every ounce of perception. Every defensive instinct, entrusted to a predator like Nyxarion?
Incomprehensible.
Neigh-on suicidal.
And…
Beautiful.
Her fingers twitched. A tiny spasm that sent a ripple of color cascading across her forearm.
A shimmer of gold to violet, bleeding through to silver and pearl.
Each hue blending with the next without conscious intention.
Chaotic by nature of whatever pretty pictures were dancing behind her eyelids.
A show of light that existed outside of her control.
Croon deepening, Nyx traced the curve of her spine. Shifting her so he could cup her little belly.
Thalos stopped breathing.
It was scarcely a suggestion of fullness. Merely a swell utterly swallowed by the sheer size of Nyx's palm.
But it was there.
Taut and glowing. Luminous with that impossible, entrancing halo of light peeking out from between the beast's fingers.
And as Thalos watched this stolen moment, he saw something splinter in Nyxarion. Heard it when that droning purr cracked, bleeding into something wounded. Reverent.
Thalos's camouflage slipped.
An accident. Something that pulled at his legendary control and tore it clean in half. Chromatophores firing, opalescent silver bled through the dark in a brilliant, damning cascade he couldn't control and couldn't stop.
A shower of scattered prisms that drew Nyxarion's glare up from the girl trapped on his knot.
Molten silver clashed with glacial blue across the yawning void of dead waters.
The soothing croon perished between flashing teeth.
The Raskoril pulsed blue, a deadly warning in the dark.
And for a moment, the silence that fell over the Black Sea was absolute. Crushing.
And then, "Korrides," Thalos murmured, inclining his head. "Hard at work, as usual."