Chapter 6
Tail flicking in lazy, effortless spirals, Thalos rode the current's edge. Eager for the coming fight. The delicious flavor of the battle he was quickly becoming addicted to. At his hip, a pouch. One filled with the gift he'd gathered with his own hands.
A prize for the Siren who shone with the hint of not one lineage… but two.
It was a test.
A trap.
He smiled.
Dragging warmth from above into the depths, the riptide pulled him down. Through the thermocline. Into the anoxic dark, flanked by three hunched figures whose ancient fins strained against the pull.
The scholars.
Pelagius was the first to voice his displeasure. Gills gaping wide and labored around every straining breath, his filaments had thinned to pale threads.
"The oxygen thins." Pelagius' voice was a brittle shard of ice. Cutting and sharp. "Another hundred meters and my gills will be thick with trench muck."
The eldest of the three—old enough to remember the wars, to have listened when the Accord of Nisyros was drafted—his scales had long since faded from their Thalassari brilliance.
Now a dull, flaking pewter. A lattice of calcified growths crusted his jaw and temple, the slow mineralization that claimed all Pelagorn who outlived their era.
Elongated body coiled against the riptide's drag, Syrathis fought to maintain a shred of dignity in a current that outmatched his aged body.
Whittled away by centuries spent lounging in shallow, temperate waters, Syrathis was slender to Pelagius' girth.
Stretched long, ribs pressing against translucent skin.
But his eyes.
They'd grown milky. The fogged amber of a creature whose sight had turned in, blinded by the eons. His great age was plainly visible in the thin barbles dangling from his lower jaw, in the growths that trembled with every tiny shift in the current.
"A poison," Syrathis agreed, his tone reedy and precise. "This sea is stratified. Below two hundred meters, the black waters are intolerable. We are swimming into a dead zone."
"Lovely." This from Vorthane, the youngest of the three—though young meant little to Pelagorn who measured their lives in centuries.
Vorthane's build retained the power of his youth.
His tail was thick, though scarred, but his dorsal fin had been clipped.
A punishment for some ancient transgression that lent him a lopsided, listing gait as he swam.
Deep grooves bracketed his mouth. His scales held their color better than the others.
A frigid, polar blue, but the pattern had grown irregular, patches of bare skin showing where they'd shed and never regrown.
"The cold alone will kill us before the gas does," Vorthane added.
Thalos' lips twitched.
Three of the Hollow Court's most venerated minds, reduced to grumbling elders sulking in the dark because they couldn't command a current.
Because their sovereign had ordered them to dive, when all they wanted was to bask in the shallows.
Slowing, despite the dark amusement coiled tight in his chest, Thalos' fins flared. Letting the riptide bring the scholars to him. Level. Stifling the urge to cloak himself with his camouflage, Thalos flexed his scales. Bringing them up.
Flashing silver.
A beacon that demanded their attention.
"You will survive the descent," Thalos said, voice a low rasp of absolute authority. "Vorynthar produces its own oxygen."
Pelagius's calcified jaw ground audibly. "The heretical reef. Not recognized by Caelith Mare. It is an affront to your power, Sovereign."
"Heretical indeed," Thalos returned without heat, faintly amused by the wheedling.
“It should be razed,” Vorthane said, always the first to leap to bloodshed. “Exterminated in the name of the Accord. To uphold your authority.”
Thalos raised one brow. Eyes slitted as he hooked the ancient with a slitted glare. Ending the discussion of war before it had begun. And then, in a tone that held no mirth, "If Nyxarion permits you to examine the Siren, you will observe. Measure. Inspect her and the spawn for flaws or risks.”
He paused.
A weighted silence lingered beneath the riptide’s howl.
And then, "You will not explain your findings to the creature or Nyxarion Korrides.
You will not translate your observations into language he might use.
Every conclusion, every implication of what you discover in that creature's womb—it comes to me first."
Syrathis's milky eyes narrowed, sightless and shrewd. "And if Korrides demands answers?"
Shrugging, Thalos' gaze drifted… down. Helplessly drawn back into the Deep.
Scanning the endless black, where Vorynthar belched oxygen into a poisoned tide and something from ancient myth was breeding in the gloom.
"Give him nothing he might weaponize. Speak in complications.
Dress her in terrifying unknowns. But do not hand him certainty. "
It wasn't long before the dark grew weak.
Before the glow of Nyxarion's heretical kingdom pulsed beneath them, and Vorynthar's outermost wall rose from the seabed in defiance of every natural law the Black Sea enforced.
Raskoril tendrils swayed in the sleepy, ancient current of the deepest dark.
Pulsing with an explosion of color, the fledgling reef thrived in the abyss. Arched gateways knit with the end of the riptide, ushering them through the threshold of Vorynthar's limit. Where oxygen hung heavy in the water, rich in minerals that had no business existing below two hundred meters.
The scholars felt it too.
Pelagius' laboring gills flared wide around a shocked breath.
Filaments that had grown thin and pale bloomed, flushing with color as he tasted the labor of Nyxarion's toil.
A sound escaped him—involuntary, almost reverent—before he clamped his jaw shut with a click Thalos could feel in the jelly behind his eyes.
Vorthane said nothing, but his listing gait evened out. Finding balance in the gentle current, and for the first time since they'd penetrated the thermocline, his strokes came easy. True.
"Describe it," Syrathis said, tilting his head, the barbels along his jaw extended fully, trembling, trying to read the water.
Drifting forward, his calcified jaw working as his eyes swept the interior, Pelagius slipped through the first arch.
The gateway opened into a broad corridor of living architecture—walls that breathed, floors that rippled with slow peristaltic motion, every surface encrusted with coral formations that threw light in spectrums Thalos recognized, but had never expected to see in the Deep.
"Raskoril," Pelagius said, voice a quiet hiss. "Everywhere. Growing in structures never documented. No carved stone. No shaped bone."
"And the color?" Syrathis pressed, as if he'd already been considering a hypothesis.
Hesitating, Pelagius' faded pewter scales caught the ambient glow, and for a moment the elder looked almost young again, bathed in light that shouldn't exist.
And then, "It glows with the hues of a coastal sunset," he murmured. Voice rough and low, as if it cost him to admit it. "Gold and violet laced with crimson. Colors that belong to shallow reefs, to warm water and sunlit places a thousand meters above us."
Thalos watched the scholars' faces—the grudging awe they couldn't quite suppress, the professional hunger warring with racial horror.
That the Abyssari reef breakers had built this kingdom? It was an affront to the scholars' ancient, Thalassari hearts.
Every arch and glowing, ravenous tendril pumping clean water into the dead zone was the work of trench-born hands.
Nyxarion's work.
"What Korrides has accomplished in this trench is impressive," Thalos allowed, and the admission cost him very little given the resplendent wonder sprawled all around them. "But it is nothing compared to the Siren."
Silence.
Left long enough to grow heavy with all that went unspoken.
"The Siren is an abomination," Pelagius droned at length, twisting, his voice injected with a hiss of venom. "The Accord exists precisely to prevent—"
"A violation of every principle the Hollow Court has upheld for three generations," Syrathis finished, his blind eyes burning with the wrath of frigid certainty.
Vorthane's scarred tail lashed once against the seabed. "We forged the Accord in blood. Every Siren line was extinguished before your birth. For a reason. If Korrides has bred one back into existence, the sentence is death—for the creature and its maker."
Their outrage poisoned the waters of the riptide, the scent sharp and acrid, spreading until the Raskoril polyps recoiled.
Rippling in a silent rebuke.
For a moment, Thalos let it build. Allowing the ancients to vent their fury in this empty corridor where it couldn't reach the wrong ears.
"Enough.”
“My lord,” Syrathis wheedled, barbles turning toward his king. “You must see reason—”
"Unless you’re particularly eager to join Nerissa and die in this trench,” Thalos hissed, scales catching the light, “you will keep your opinions between your teeth.”
And then, twisting to show those who could see, Thalos displayed the vicious scars where Nyx's spines had impaled him during the Crucible of Bone.
“Nyxarion Korrides is nine meters of territorial rage coiled around every inch of that girl,” Thalos drawled, tracing his scars with the tip of his claws.
“He will not stop to distinguish between scholarly objection and existential threat.
You will observe," he said again, and left no room for discussion.
"And you will save your moral outrage for the journey home. "
It was then, as the attitude of the ancients grew hesitant and frosty, Thalos felt it. A shift. The taste of something electric and bright in the current.
Perfuming dark waters.
Slick.
Kore.
The corridor pulsed gold around them.
A summons. One he felt in his gills.