Chapter 21
Bleaching.
Death’s pallor.
It was what happened to coral when it died. To stunned fish when they were struck with a killing blow.
“Kore,” he said, barking it. Too loud. A thread of something desperate blooming behind his ribs. “Kore. Look at me. Here.”
Cupping her jaw, Nyxarion’s fingers trembled as he searched her face.
Tilting her chin back, seeking any tiny wisp of hope that might argue what his eyes were telling him.
Anything at all to contradict the horrible spread spilling down from pale cheeks, bleeding through her scales as her skin blanched white, draining of the storm of color that had been singing through her scales only moments before.
The milk didn't matter.
Breeding her in an endless battle against Thalos’ influence, forgotten.
“Kore,” he said again, louder. Stopping just short of shaking her.
She didn’t react beyond a weak flutter of her gills.
Action scarcely strong enough to move the current through her filaments.
And as he watched, the gossamer veins of bioluminescent tracing elegant, Abyssari patterns beneath her skin, grew dim.
Flickering. Threatening to go dark right before his eyes.
“She needs a physic,” Thalos said, looking to the riptide. His eyes rimmed in white, voice tight with the same strain Nyxarion could feel thrumming bright and wild in his own chest. "We have to take her up. To the shallows. Syrathis left—"
"No.” It was a single syllable. A stiff denial of Thalassari interference.
“She stays in the Deep.” Pulling her close, inhaling the scent of her through his gills, Nyxarion lay one massive palm against her belly.
Touching that vibrant pulse. “Did you not see it? Abyssari milk, Thalos. She’s mine. Still of the Deep.”
Thalos made a sound, circling too close.
Too bold in his panic. “And she expresses Thalassar cravings, Nyx. We are both in her veins. Both of us marked that child in a way no one ever has, and her body is—” A muscle bunched at the corner of Thalos’ jaw.
Fins fanning in sharp, jagged ripples. “Look at her, Korrides. Look."
Nyxarion did.
That horrible grey had reached her collarbones.
Left her skin and scales waxy. Translucent.
It was spreading, staining scales that should have blazed with a brilliant sunset.
The indigo of his lineage, the molten gold of her transformation, the violet and silver of Asterion's stain—all of it washed away.
Her eyes were open.
Grey-gold irises swallowed by blown, glassy pupils. Fixed on some middle distance that existed beyond the abyss, she was adrift. Looking where neither king might follow.
And her skin.
It was… cold against his. Wrong.
"Kore," he whispered, bumping his forehead to hers. Trying to force her eyes to focus on his own, he filled her vision. "Stay with me. Stay right here. With me."
Her lips parted, but nothing moved through her lips. No Siren song.
There was only a thin, reedy exhale that disturbed the faint cloud of blue milk still swirling around them. Perfuming the current with the flavor of something sweet, but already fading.
Both kings went still.
The argument died between them. Territorial posturing, venom claims, paternity—all of it rendered meaningless by the waxy, unnatural spread draining her of all life.
Reaching out, Thalos' fingers claimed Kore's wrist. And, frowning, the Shallow King measured her pulse. “Thready,” he said, scales flashing before his jaw flexed and he fought it back. “It’s too fast. I have physics at the surface, Nyx. Healers who can—”
Her head rolled. Breaking from Nyxarion’s gaze, her eyes shifted.
Seeing neither of them, not the surface above or the cloud of blue milk, Kore looked… down.
Toward the black-throated abyss, where she’d been born in dark waters. Fed her first sip of breath from the poisoned tide.
They watched, silent, when her fins tucked tight to her body.
It was a tiny thing.
Instinct.
Something that told her to look into the dark and choose the Deep.
That was all Nyx needed.
Sweeping one arm beneath her knees, he looped the other around her shoulders and crushed her to his chest. Ignoring the garish way her neck rolled, the chill of waxy skin, he simply tucked her face into the hollow beneath his chin and dove into the riptide.
Descending in that gentle embrace, his eyes shifted to her face. Her gills.
They were scarcely fluttering.
The bleaching had touched her gills. Left the filaments pale and thin, as if they’d forgotten their purpose.
Adjusting his grip, heart thundering behind his eyes, Nyx did as he had done when he'd first drowned her.
He sealed his lips across that pretty mouth and breathed for her.
Careful exhales.
Filtering the toxins in the anoxic tide, he flooded her lungs with life.
Without a word of argument, Thalos followed. A pale, silent shadow, matching his pace.
And when Vorynthar materialized from the dark, neither slowed. They sailed past the sweeping architecture, snaked past sentries who went rigid at the sight of the Siren hanging limp in their king’s arms, and ignored the reef breakers tending the Raskoril looming in the dark.
Each and every Pelagorn who witnessed that grim procession froze at the sight.
Horror rippled through the heretical reef as they passed. Fins pressed flat, jaws clenched.
One sentry made a sound Nyxarion had never heard from an Abyssari throat. A keen. High and thin and wounded as he saw the color of Vorynthar’s divine flame.
But no one spoke.
No one dared.
Nyx dove into the corridors that would take him to the throne room, seeking shelter. A fortress he might defend against attack. And the instant the antechamber opened around them, he spun, turning on Thalos, with a clipped, "Get out."
Going still, the Shallow King stopped. Fins flared to catch himself in the current. Palms flashing a pale surrender. A bid for peace. Reason. And then, carefully, he said, “What if she's dying?"
"She is not—"
"What if she needs what only I can give her?" Thalos said, interrupting in a tone utterly devoid of threat. It was beseeching. Infuriatingly reasonable. "She needed my venom to stabilize the child. What if I can offer something you cannot? This is the reason we’re negotiating the Covenant. I’m the Anchor.”
Bristling, spines lifting in a deadly fan, Nyx’s lips wrinkled around a snarl.
But Thalos was right.
Damn the slippery, silver-tongued prick to die beached on land, baked in the heat of the sun.
A growl built in his chest, but he made no move to open Thalos’ throat and feed his corpse to the Raskoril.
Because the Siren in his arms was grey.
"Shut your mouth." It was a plea, a desperate flailing attempt at control. One he couldn’t be bothered to mask. Not now. "Just… shut up,” he hissed, and turned to the throne.
The bowl of her seat, the cage where he’d remade her, the bones of the first fool who’d threatened her. Every iteration of that cursed structure had served his precious Siren bride. Cradled her, supported the precious thing he’d fought an ocean of predators to claim.
Careful, watching her every fluttering breath, he laid her into the bowl.
It happened in an instant.
From one blink to the next.
Bleaching.
A colorless tide that raced through the Raskoril's veins. Bleeding the reef of every drop of color. Blue faded to grey before it washed away to nothing.
The throne drained first, then the floor, then the walls—death’s pallor spread through Vorynthar's bones in waves.
The entire reef was bleaching.
"No." It was a whisper. Something horrified and quiet, the devastation spilled from his lips in a breath.
Thalos drifted to his side, his mirror as they watched it spread.
And then, from somewhere deep in the outer corridors, an Abyssari voice echoed that shock.
Then another.
Before there were dozens of voices united in horror as Vorynthar took on its Queen’s ghostly shade.
The dreadful absence of death. Abyssari song swelled through the trench as Nyxarion watched the spread.
Helpless, utterly unable to do anything to slow the bleeding. To close a wound that wasn’t open.
Fingers landed on his forearm. Squeezed.
Nyxarion didn't shake it off. Didn’t look to see those pale fingers gripping him in some grotesque attempt to offer comfort.
He couldn’t tear his eyes from the grey woman staring at nothing. Couldn’t hear anything beyond the roaring static crashing against the inside of his skull.
The archway darkened.
Serakh hit the antechamber in a blur of black scales, braids streaming behind her, eyes sweeping the throne room as she processed the scene in a single sweep. And then, “Move,” she snapped, and dove between them.
One palm flat against his chest, she shoved Nyxarion back, and with the other, caught Thalos across the sternum. Shoving them both aside without regard for rank, for her eyes were locked on Kore.
Touching her gills, fingers moving absent any whisper of hesitation, Sera weighed the pulse fluttering in Kore’s throat. Mapped the swell of her belly, still flickering with the whisper of the child’s light.
And then, in a slow sweep, she straightened. Turning to face them, her eyes blazing with a glare that might have cost any other Pelagorn their fins, she said, “She isn't dying, you absolute fools."
Lips parting, Nyxarion’s throat worked around an aborted sound.
Hands sweeping toward the bleached coral, her scowl flicked between kings, lips peeling back to expose wicked teeth. "Kore is nesting."
Without waiting for permission or offering an explanation, she swept Kore into her embrace. Lifting her from the throne, she snaked past the throne and slid through the hidden crack beyond.
Where Nyxarion had built a nest, thinking himself clever. Prepared to tend his pregnant bride.
The sovereigns followed Sera without a word, slipping into that hidden den.
Heat bloomed bright around them, gushing from distant volcanic vents.
Rich with minerals from the deep earth. A place lined with coral and fat, anemone fronds swaying in the thermal drifts, their tendrils trailing through the water.
A small, intimate space filled with Raskoril blooming along the ceiling and walls in clusters of color. Petals lush and dense.
It was a den.
Vorynthar was a fortress built to contain exactly this—its precious, beating heart. A place where Nyxarion had meant to worship his dynasty. Not bury it.
Sera lowered Kore onto the cushion-coral bed.
The moment her spine touched the surface, Kore eyes flickered open.
Hands that had been limp and taken by the current twitched before they moved.
Her fingers, pale and ghostly, slipped through the flora, testing the textures.
Issuing a tiny sound when something pleased her.
Rejecting one, selecting another. She gathered a fistful of petals and pressed them against her lips before discarding them.
Crooning when she reached for a patch nearest the vent.
Nyxarion watched, awe and terror braided together in his chest. Unblinking as he watched her settle in and anchor herself to the reef.
And it was Thalos who broke the tense silence. "This is… nothing like Thalassari nesting. But perhaps this is merely part of what we’ve written in venom?”
Sera glanced back, eyes narrowed as she looked between them.
“She needs food. Constant nutrition. Anything and everything.
Sun clams, trench roe, marrow kelp, thermal krill.
I don't care if you strip the seabed and the shallows.
She must eat. As much as she will take." Sera's jaw tightened, her fins tucked flat as she slipped from the tight confines of the nest.
Hesitating, before she added, “Nesting Virelii will redirect every nutrient in her body to the child. Every mineral. Every reserve of fat she has built over the last tides will be cannibalized. Muscle first, then marrow. And then she’ll sacrifice her organs, until there is nothing left to give.”
Nyxarion’s breath caught.
Hitching between his gills.
"The temperature will accelerate gestation." Sera gestured toward the floor, where thermal currents shimmered upward through the coral. "Warmth quickens development. The child will grow faster here than anywhere else, but it means the drain on Kore will be exceptional."
Sera pinned her king with a look that spoke volumes.
"If she is not tended properly,” she said, and her tone was deadly soft, “if she is left to fast while your territorial idiocy consumes you, Kore will give everything she has to that child.
" She blinked. Once. Gills spreading as she drew a slow breath between her lips.
"Everything, Nyxarion. Do you understand?”
He did.
The ultimate sacrifice.
Surrender at the bottom of the world, piece by piece, until the life he’d put inside her consumed her.
"Yes,” he rasped, holding Sera’s gaze without ire. "Yes. I understand."
A flash of silver in the dark was his only warning before Thalos moved, pale fingers working against the tie keeping the pouch of mollusks at his hip.
Without a word, Thalos passed the bag to Nyxarion.
He took it.
Cracking their shells, Nyx slipped that succulent flesh between Kore's lips and watched her take it.
Watching her throat work as she swallowed, he held his breath and waited for the color to return to her pale cheeks.
It didn’t.
For beyond the nest, the antechamber had gone completely white. The corridor beyond was the same. And beyond that, faint and growing fainter, the keening of his people carried through halls that no longer glowed.
Vorynthar was synchronizing with its queen.
The entire reef surrendered, echoing dreadful solidarity to match the woman at its heart.
But in the warm dark of her den, Kore's belly pulsed with the only color left in the dark.