Chapter 13
Something ancient ignited behind her ribs.
Thrashing against that cage of bone.
A thing she was rapidly coming to recognize as hers.
Not the fear of the unknown, that nebulous dread that had haunted her throughout her transformation, when Nyxarion could not speak to her. When he couldn't explain. Neither was it the horror of drowning, the revulsion of enslavement.
Not war, or injury, or death.
This was fury.
Female wrath.
White-hot.
Ancient.
Rising inside her, fed by the fumes of generational suffering that crossed species boundaries and knew nothing of petty political posturing.
And when her lips parted, it was Nerissa's voice that escaped her throat. "Enough."
Threnakar's king jerked. Shocked. As if appalled that she would dare open her lips and speak to him, for when he turned ancient, molten eyes upon her, it was laced with an incredulous glare. His gaze swept over her, twisted with open disgust.
But Kore was far from done.
She stepped clear of Nyxarion's grip.
Setting her feet to the coral floor of the throne room, she took a deliberate step toward Nyxarion's father. Webbed toes spreading against the hard coral that defined Vorynthar's seat of power. Standing where no other could ever stand, for Pelagorn couldn't.
Letting him look.
See all that she was, even as her hands settled over the gentle swell of her belly. Protective. Cradling the modest bulge where his grandchild grew.
There was a moment, as his gaze traced her limbs with a curl in his lip. An instant of stillness.
Profound quiet.
Before a tempest lit the Deep.
Vorynthar touched her skin, and the heretical reef ignited.
Strobing with a blinding display of color, the Raskoril blazed with her fire. Vorynthar's divine flame.
Beneath his enormous, serpentine body, the throne itself pulsed beneath the Abyssari king. Around him. The pedestal that had once been her cage now smoldered with the memory of her. Turning Abyssari blue into something radiant.
Breathtaking.
An answer to her spirit.
And Kore stood fast in the center. Incandescent. Resplendent, both hands secured around a belly growing ripe with the future. One she hadn't wanted, but craved with all her might.
"How dare you," she whispered in that strange, dual-tone of hers. "You speak to him this way? Here? In his city. In our throne room?"
The old king went very still before he laughed. It was a brittle thing. Barbed, but not quite sharp enough to cut. Gills flaring, his filaments pulsing crimson, he leaned forward, watching her with something akin to contempt.
And then, "Your throne room?" he asked, tilting his head to peer down at her.
"A human broodmare presumes ownership of Abyssari territory?
Presumes to command me?" Tail flexing, the massive coils scraped against the seabed.
"You are a vessel, girl. A womb with legs.
The only value you possess grows inside you.
It will be harvested before you might infect it further.
" He leaned closer still. "Claimed in the name of Threnakar. "
It was the wrong thing to say.
Entirely.
Utterly.
Hands balling into fists, Kore's knuckles went white before they crackled with violet light.
She took a step.
Another.
Walking on the bottom of the Black Sea, Kore moved toward the ancient male. Her every line etched with the kind of deliberate, predatory grace that belonged to the Deep—fins along her forearms flaring wide, chromatophores rippled across her scales in violent flashes of violet energy.
Her grey-gold eyes were fixed.
To him.
Only him.
A king whose name she did not know and did not care to learn.
He was just another male threatening to take her baby.
That was all she needed.
Behind her, Nyxarion made no move to stop her. No protective coil. No warning rumble or dangerous thrum.
But she could feel his grin. That potent, savage delight where it spattered against her back. Guarding her and edging her on, all at once. Prickling her skin and scales with a feral intensity that drove her forward. Something voltaic and bright.
The reef felt it first.
Polyps retracting, pulling rubbery fingers back inside calcified tubes with a series of soft, wet pops that plinked against her eardrums.
"I have come," the old king continued, oblivious to the danger, "to execute you, girl. As is my duty. As the Accord demands. To maintain the ocean's balance and put an end to this farce."
Misreading Nyxarion’s retreat for submission, the ancient king flicked his claws toward the Threnakar scholars flanking him.
They oozed from the shadows as if sharing a single mind. Snaking through the throne room toward her.
"After I have harvested what belongs to Threnakar,” he said, droning on in the dreary tone of one accustomed to being obeyed, “your remains will not be wasted.” Fingers fluttering, eying her belly, he said, “It will be preserved. Studied and dissected. Some of your internal structures, I’m told, may be rather… novel.”
The word dripped with revulsion.
Gills flaring wide, filaments trembling as she dragged breath after breath through oxygen-rich water, Kore stood tall. Pulse roaring behind her eyes. A ribbon of violet light shot through her veins, firing in an erratic burst.
They hadn't come to offer counsel. Didn’t arrive to examine her pregnancy or to help her baby.
They had come for a specimen.
Something to dissect. Study.
Meant to carve her baby from her womb and toy with her corpse.
Something vicious splintered and broke. A crack in that spot that had been hollow but was now overflowing. Rage and terror and something far, far older blended into a wave of voltage arcing beneath her skin.
Tilting his massive head toward the two scholars, the ancient king offered a single, bored nod.
They moved to take her.
But Nyxarion made no move to protect her—he retreated to a safe distance.
And that should have been a warning ringing loud enough to clear the trench.
Both massive Abyssari scholars descended from the dais with purposeful strokes. Snaking through the water toward her.
Kore didn't retreat.
Her webbed feet stayed planted on Vorynthar's basin while the reef hummed beneath her soles, matching her pulse. Gold-violet chromatophores pulsed across her hips, belly, ribs—colors no Pelagorn had ever worn flashing warnings creatures of the Deep should have recognized as deadly.
Should have heeded.
The first scholar reached for her shoulder.
His heavy palm settled against her skin…
… and the Black Sea boiled.
Violet light tore through the water around her. A detonation of everything she'd repressed. The discharge rippled out, flooding the antechamber between heartbeats.
The hand on her shoulder went rigid, fingers curled and locked in place.
Incandescent lightning surged through brine and bone.
Frozen. His fingers seized as the power raced through him. Violet light glowing vivid and bright beneath his scales.
The shape of him, the true shape of him, burned brighter than anything else.
Bones.
His skeleton.
The stark, alien difference between all of them. An absence of legs, where his spine was long and serpentine.
It was all there, seared into the dark between blinks.
Jaws frozen open in a soundless scream, elegant spine locked in a garish bow, for a long, horrific moment, they were frozen in tableau.
He, the pillar of grim suffering.
She, the chalice of wrath spilling over.
Before he was nothing—and she was everything. Radiant. Ripe and growing heavy with life.
The silence washed in and swept away everything else.
All except the violet afterimage burned into their eyes.
And for several long moments, there was nothing at all. No movement. No sound.
Just a room at the bottom of the Black Sea, filled with leviathans of the Deep and a woman who shouldn't be.
It was a breathless vacuum.
A declaration.
It was her coronation.
And then… Nyxarion.
Uncoiling from where he'd been pressed back in the shadows, he approached from behind. Hands greedy when they covered hers, cradling their child where it was nestled inside her. Safe from corruption.
His touch was worship.
Heavy.
But his grin was all fangs and feral, greedy pride as he touched the female who'd just slaughtered a trench-forged Abyssari male without lifting a finger. "You sweet, precious girl," he murmured against her gills. Checking on her. The babe.
Tending to her in the aftermath.
Kore's eyes had not left the usurper draped around Vorynthar's throne. Not once. Fixed to that ancient king.
Nyxarion's father was still. Gleaming silver flooded with shock. And then, "Queen's Lightning," he whispered, watching not to the dead scholar floating before her, not to the other, who'd been thrown back, and retreated to the shadow of his king.
But to her face.
Kore tilted her head, holding that ancient gaze without bothering to flinch.
Letting him look.
Not at the girl who'd served a voiceless god.
Not a slave.
Or a victim swallowed by the sea.
A queen.
"You came to uphold the Accord," she said, her voice humming with that strange dual-tone that made Vorynthar bloom in a shower of life and color. "Came to execute me. Carve my baby from my body in the name of duty."
Silt stirred around her ankles when she took a step toward the dais, and Nyxarion's fingers trailed down her nape when she stood tall before his father.
"You came in ignorance with cowardice in your veins," she said, planting her feet.
"To uphold a treaty that protects nothing.
Preserves nothing. Your own people face extinction," she murmured, repeating what Nyxarion had told her.
Not knowing if it was true, but saying it anyway.
"Abyssari bloodlines wither," she hissed, fins fanning out.
"You dare—"
"I do," she said, simply. Pressing both palms flat against her belly, where gold and violet light spiraled beneath her scales. "You fear what grows inside me because it shall not answer to the Deep, nor submit to the Shallows."
Spreading her hands, Kore's chin tilted back, eyes gleaming with contempt, while the corpse of her victim drifted back toward his master.
A gift to the King of Threnakar.
"I am the stormborn flame, anchored in the poisoned tide. The promise meant to reshape black waters. The chalice filled with twin venoms. I command the tsunami that moves my wrath beyond the trench."
Ancient eyes went wide as Nyxarion's father twisted around his stolen seat. "You… you vile thing—"
Kore's knuckles whitened. "Twice, I have tasted death," she said, silencing him.
Letting her voice fill with her wrath. "Spilled blood in empty sacrifice.
I know the taste of extinction and the answer to it.
" Framing the swell of her belly in protective hands, she bared her teeth.
"My legacy will move between, for the sea will know her song. And rise."
Spines clicking, the old king shifted. Fluke moving water aside as he brushed the corpse of his scholar back. Disregarding the husk as he scowled at the divine flame burning at the bottom of the sea. "This is… preposterous—"
Lifting one, elegant hand, Kore declared, "The Accord of Nisyros is hereby null."
The vow fell into waters already charged with ozone and fury, and she felt Nyxarion's grin sharpen behind her. Tasted it in the current. Felt his glee, and knew it to be a buttress against her spine, keeping her standing straight when she might've buckled.
And then, "We will draft a new covenant between the Deep and the Shallows,” she said, refusing to let the ancient king and his remaining sycophant see how she weakened.
“One that will spawn a new age and forget the tomb you built around your own extinction.
" Scales blazing in sunset hues, Kore shrugged. "The Covenant of Twin Venoms."
It was a moment of silence where something profound was left to echo. Settling into the bedrock, where it could be still. Take root.
A moment that tasted… right.
Like prophecy.
Pressing a grin to her throat, his chin settling on her shoulder, Nyxarion spoke.
"May I introduce my precious, divine flame," he crooned, molten silver eyes lifting as he addressed his father.
"Vorynthar's beating heart, my sweet Siren Queen.
" Shifting one hand to her shoulder, he nudged her chin up with the tip of one claw.
Positioning her toward something regal. "Her name is Kore," he said, and his spines spread in a deadly fan behind them. "And you are in her seat."