Chapter 22
Tides bled one into another.
Time that yawned in an endless blur of vigilance.
Kore did not wake. Not truly.
She stirred when food was pressed against her lips. Hummed when seeking warmth, and shifted occasionally only to burrow deeper into her nest.
But that was all.
Nyxarion held his vigil. Counting every flicker of her gills. Obsessing over each pulse of light across her belly where the child grew. All the while watching something irreplaceable dim by excruciating degrees.
And the Trident never left his grip.
He couldn’t help the need for it. The way his palm ached without it, or the instinct that screamed that if he set it down, even for a moment, disaster would strike. Annihilation would rob him of everything he cherished.
Vorynthar was a tomb. Glowing with a nauseating pale hum that felt wrong, diseased, the reef was still. Mirroring her. Barely eating, the Raskoril was still, as if frozen. No longer growing at the reef breakers' commands, it was a silent skeleton of the glorious kingdom he had built for her.
Coiled at the mouth of the den, his back to the throne room, Nyxarion waited. Trident at the ready.
Silent. Awaiting anything bold enough to test his fragmented patience.
Only Thalos dared.
Swimming between the surface and the trench, Thalos moved with a restlessness that hinted at something dark.
Mania. Relentless travel, ceaseless movement.
He was gone only long enough to return with pouches of sun clams bursting at the seams. Hunted krill and brought shimmering roe in jiggling bunches.
And then he’d vanish before the next tide, leaving Nyxarion to his silent vigil. To feed Kore in careful dollops, while she languished in her pale torpor.
Eyes fixed to the steady pulse of light where her belly grew, for it was the only whisper of warmth left in his kingdom.
Fingers flexing around the Trident’s shaft, he settled against the bleached wall of her den and watched. Guarding his precious, divine flame.
Vorynthar's fragile beating heart.
It was a stillness that couldn’t last.
He felt it on the current. A shift. The borders of the Black Sea hummed with something vast, screaming through the silent corridors of his frozen city. Gills flaring, eyes slitted and narrowed, Nyxarion’s gills flared. Pupils constricted to tiny dots of furious wrath.
The Trident blazed a brilliant, frothing white when the ancient weapon tasted his wrath.
He knew the flavor poisoning his tide.
Threnakar.
His father had brought the army of the Deep Court into the Black Sea.
Eyes sliding toward the throne room, Nyx turned. Pupils bottomless pools of seething black. The Trident’s tines glowed with enough heat to separate brine from the tide. Boiling the dark waters when he turned away from Kore’s steady breathing.
“Justice!” his father called, taunting and loud enough for all to hear the wretched tenor of his cruelty.
“Retribution! I have come to claim what I am owed. To cleanse this putrid trench and exterminate the abomination you thrust upon us. To rid us of her stink. But here I find something far more… poetic.”
Spines flaring, Nyx’s scales pressed flat to his length. Keeping the heat trapped tight to his muscles as he readied himself for war.
“Have you killed another, boy?” his father called, voice flooding the quiet with a tone heavy with delighted cruelty.
He laughed, then. The sound a deep thrum that set Nyxarion’s teeth on edge.
“A dying reef filled with ghosts. Tell me, exile, has your bride been crushed by the weight of your heresy?”
Blue light hummed between obsidian scales, coiled energy desperate for an outlet, but Nyxarion had gone still. The trident steaming in the current the only whisper of what boiled in his chest.
"You built an empire on rot,” his father crooned, treading closer now. Just outside of the throne room. “Tell me you didn’t truly believe such a thing might hold the Black Sea?"
Nyx didn’t move. Not one fin. Not a single blink.
He remained still.
A leviathan coiled at the mouth of his bride’s den, guarding the only light left in the abyss. Ready.
Laughter rolled through the corridors as Nyxaroth approached.
“Bring it to me, boy,” he crooned, gloating.
Drunk of a victory not yet secured. “Deliver the Siren to me, face your judgment,” he called, voice lilting with the practiced cadence of a speech memorized.
“Surrender the creature and I will allow this”—he paused, voice laced with fathoms of endless contempt—”outpost to remain. Under Threnakar’s banner.”
Nyx almost laughed.
At the audacity. The nerve of such daring to call Vorynthar an outpost. To deign to strip the heretical reef of sovereignty, as if it might only exist at the elder Korrides’ pleasure.
But he could feel them. The Deep Court. Dozens of bodies moving through the water, touching Vorynthar’s arterial passages as they slipped into the city. Cutting off exits. Claiming chokepoints.
And he knew. That his father hadn’t come to bother with negotiations.
He’d come for her.
Their child.
Spines lifted, Sera’s silhouette flickered in his peripherals. Assuming a position at the antechamber’s mouth. Silent. Surrounded by two sentries ready for battle.
But they were three bodies against an army of trench-born, brute strength forged in the crushing dark of the Tonga Trench.
The full weight of his own army numbered fewer than thirty soldiers. Threnakar’s numbers would be ten times that number. Perhaps more.
They would die here. All of them.
Sera grinned.
But Nyxarion turned back. Eyes seeking the flickering ember glowing in the dark.
And chose her.
Chose to let Vorynthar fall, if he must. Let Threnakar swallow every corridor and claim every bleached bone. Let his father's army pour through the passages and find him here, blocking this door with his corpse if it came to that.
He would not leave Kore to die in her nest.
Not even for a moment.
But it was then, as he watched his bride in her quiet tomb, the crush of death’s sweet tide closing in around him, that Nyxarion felt it.
A hand.
Strong fingers closing on his shoulder.
Fins flicking, Nyxarion stilled. But the Trident reflected his surprise, flaring white-hot as he twitched, for there hadn’t been a whisper. Not a hint of someone close enough to taste what the Trident held in check.
Thalos.
Invisible under his camouflage.
Steady and silent.
And with him, Cymareth. The Waveblade. Swift and just as deadly as the ancient javelin clenched in his fist.
Nyx didn’t turn or shift. Did not betray so much as a twitch of his jaw that might suggest anything had changed.
One fin flicked.
A single lateral adjustment that tapped Thalos’ unseen scales.
That hand on his shoulder squeezed, claws dimpling his muscle.
And then Nyxaroth penetrated the throne room. “Ah,” he crowed, flanked by enormous Abyssari warriors. “Nyxarion. The exiled prince. My deepest shame.”
“Father,” Nyxarion returned, lifting one great shoulder. Fingers wrapped around the Trident’s hilt. “You’re looking sickly. Was the travel difficult?”
The old king sneered. “Silence,” he spat, fins spreading wide. “You have invited war into the seas with your impiety. Violated the Accord that has stood longer than you’ve been alive.”
The litany of accusations filled the throne room. Rolling over Nyx without touching him.
He blinked.
Fingers tight where the Trident seethed.
And that unseen hand on his shoulder held him in place.
“You endanger us all in service to your cock. To breed a creature the sea rejected generations past.” Lifting his tail, Nyxaroth flicked his tail and approached the thrones.
Relics of two kingdoms. Bones already taken by the parasitic reef and remade.
His lip curled. “You chose a human over your own kind.
Your own blood. And for what? Another failed attempt at breeding a Siren? "
Nyxarion’s eyes narrowed.
Muscles tightened, readying to defend his bride—their unborn child from such vile slander.
“Steady,” Thalos whispered, a ghost of sound. Lips moving against his ear with the quiet authority of a king who held secret leverage and knew just when to pull the handle. “Wait.”
Teeth bared, the Trident frothing in his fist, Nyx shivered. Vibrating with the burden of violence scarcely restrained, desperate to reject that whispered temperance and slake his bloodlust.
A tiny throb of light pulsed in the dark.
And he held.
Unaware, Threnakar’s king had grown bored of posturing. “This is your chance, boy. Surrender the Siren to Threnakar’s authority, or,” he drawled, spreading his hands, “I will exterminate every living thing in this dead sea and return it to the anoxic tide where it belongs."
Silence fell upon them.
Heavy.
A suffocating thing, breathing in the deep as it loomed above them all and filled the sea with the ominous pressure. It was a moment poised between. Dangling over a chasm. A gaping, ravenous maw.
Pupils gleaming, Nyxaroth waited. Flanked by twelve. Guarded by more in the corridors beyond.
But at his shoulder, Thalos’ fingers remained. His grip tight, unwavering. Urging restraint.
And Sera—she held the line. Positioned between Threnakar and the only path to Kore. A position she would hold until the water ran red. Until she could not hold it any more.
Head tilting, Nyxaroth sucked his teeth. Tsking. “Always so predictable. Such a bitter disappointment.”
The Trident crackled and hissed, making the current dance as tiny bubbles roiled from its tines in curling ribbons of steam.
And then the current shifted.
Not from below, where war was brewing among the ghostly shadow of the heretical reef.
But above.
Bodies spiraling through the riptide, bringing the harmonic, insufferable Resonance of bodies not meant for the deep. Dozens of them. Scores upon scores.
Nyxarion's gills flared.
The Hollow Court.
Thalos's hand tightened on his shoulder.
Laughing, Nyxaroth threw back his head and bellowed.
Triumphant. A gale of vindication. “Oh, this is rich! By the Accord of Nisyros,” he said, and vented the heat trapped next to his body, “I call upon Caelith Mare to stand with Threnakar.
To fulfill the covenant sworn in blood between our kingdoms." His voice swelled, filling every dead passage with a crescendo of malice.
"Obliterate the Siren. Purge this heresy from the sea. "
Nyxarion's blood turned to ice.
Every inch of his body stiffened and grew cold. Frigid.
Despite the grip still clinging to his shoulder, unwavering and strong, doubt bit into Nyxarion’s marrow. Braced for the betrayal.
For Thalos to strike when he was at his weakest.
But although his breath held, locked tight behind ribs that would not move, the Hollow Court held their lofty position and did not breach Vorynthar’s walls.
Instead, a fragile ancient slithered through the corridors. Appearing in the antechamber in a show of tattered, gossamer fins. Irate. Muttering about the great inconvenience of the cold in the Deep. The toxic waters.
Pelagius.
Calcified and venerable. A relic from a time before the Accord.
“We have come,” he said, eyes moving around the throne room with the look of one utterly unaware of the great tension blistering the tide, “to witness the Song of the Black Sea.” Fins fanning in a slow, lethargic sweep, he tilted his head at Nyxaroth, and then, “The courts of Caelith Mare have come to bear witness to the Siren’s birth. ”
Jaws working, a soundless bubble of wrath plipped from Nyxaroth’s lips.
And for a moment, it seemed that he would not be able to muster a sound.
“Spectators?” he spat, blustering. “You bring spectators?” He laughed, and it was a feeble thing.
Deplorable in the lack of depth, given that he was an ancient king of the Deep Court.
“I invoke the Accord! Caelith Mare is bound by blood oath to stand with Threnakar! Fulfill it!"
Bewildered, Pelagius turned to face Threnakar’s king. Cantankerous, when he opened his lips and said, “Only Thalos Asterion himself commands the armies of Caelith Mare, Sovereign. And he is not here.”
Nyxarion's grip on the Trident ached, while Vorynthar hung suspended. Swallowed by a chasm, caught between slaughter and spectacle.
But Thalos squeezed his shoulder. Tugging him back, pressing his lips to Nyxarion’s ear, he whispered, “Look.”
In the mouth of the den, where a Siren was held in the merciless grip of a pale torpor, a single pearl of color speckled the wall of ghostly white.
Pink.
Faint, so delicate, that at first, he dismissed it as a trick of the competing biolumes battling in his throne room.
But another followed—pale gold bleeding through bleached white near the den's threshold. Then violet. And indigo.
Color.
For the first time since the nesting began.
And Nyxarion turned just in time to watch a new dawn rise at the bottom of the sea...