Chapter 23
Pain was the balast that dragged her up from the dark.
It was a fist closing around her spine, twisting until every vertebra screamed in exquisite agony. Until she arched, eyes snapping open on a strangled gasp. Pulling a ragged breath through her lips, her body went rigid.
Seizing around something enormous and utterly, terribly unstoppable.
There were voices.
Raised in anger, mocking and cruel.
It didn't matter.
Nothing did.
There was only the great pressure sawing her pelvis into pieces.
Her baby.
It was coming.
Anemones retracted in a unified wave, pulling their fronds tight against the volcanic rock. Soft corals that shifted to match her rhythm, the patterns of her contractions.
Kore's scales blazed.
White to violet, and gold, laced with a deep, furious indigo. Her chromatophores fired in a chaotic shower. Distress broadcasting the magnitude of her misery.
A shape moved through the narrow entrance of her den. One she recognized at a glance.
"Sera," Kore moaned, reaching. Fingers spread, webbing pulled taut as she tried to touch to the beautiful Virelii. Desperate to cling to something real.
Crooning that same, sublime song, Sera hummed her greeting. Tension etched around her eyes. "Big breath in, push it out through your gills," she said, filling the den with her presence. Pressing cool hands to Kore's belly. "The sea will help, if you let it."
"I don't—" A gasp carved the breath from Kore’s lungs.
Robbing her of speech and language as another contraction bore down upon her.
Fingers curled into claws, hunching around herself, Kore rode it out.
Eyes squeezed shut until it eased. "I… I don't know what to do," she sobbed, eyes rimmed in terrified white. "Sera. What do I do?"
A smile kissed the edge of Sera's lips, then. And she stroked Kore’s hair back.
Claws carding through the tangled tresses.
"I think you're having a baby, sweet Siren.
Full Pelagorn. Fins, gills, scales, and a tail.
" Hands stroking, Sera worked to gentle her.
Petting in soothing, long sweeps. "Your body knows. All you must do is submit to it.”
Shaking her head, eyes wide and liquid, Kore squealed. “I… I can’t. Sera, I can’t.”
"You will,” Sera sang, and shifted to position herself between Kore’s legs, pressing her knees apart with firm, clinical pressure. “It will happen fast. The sea’s mercy, for daughters she adopted."
A gasp chattered through Kore’s teeth, and she squealed.
Cursing as another band of pressure snapped around her ribs.
Lightning ignited in her belly. “G-Gods,” she hissed, brows sloped against the weight of her suffering.
“I… I can feel it moving. In… into position. N-Nyx,” she gasped, one clawed hand shooting out to grip Sera’s forearm. “I need… I need Nyx. Please… wh-where…”
“The old Virelii used to say a thing about dens,” Sera said, head tilting as she looked upon the laboring Siren.
Teeth bared, clenched hard enough to taste the ozone of screeching enamel, Kore groaned when another wave struck against the base of her spine. "Sera—"
"No males may enter," she murmured, hands steady on Kore’s knees. Massaging tiny, encouraging circles into that soft flesh. “Unless the Virelii seeks to birth her young and tend to her mate while the sea splits her open. They’re useless, decorative idiots, the lot of them."
Despite herself, Kore laughed. A bubble of sound that burst around a sob.
But she laughed.
"There we are," Sera crooned, and shifted closer, her braids falling forward to brush Kore's thighs.
Curling forward, Kore bore down. Because there was no choice. Because the pressure in the cradle between her hips was absolute.
"I can see it,” Sera murmured, tone low and soothing. Encouraging and firm, even as she hummed that enthralling tune. “One more breath and the head crowns. Just one more, sweet Siren, and you shall hold your baby to your breast."
Tears mixed with the sea, and Kore’s breath caught. Scales firing a violent shade of crimson.
“Now, Kore,” Sera ordered. “Push! Bear down upon it and do not stop until I say.” Turning her head without looking away, Sera issued a series of high-pitched clicks. “Nyxarion. Come catch your child.”
The next wave broke her open.
She screamed. Chin tucked forward, knuckles white where they were locked around fingers attached to hands she had no memory of gripping. Vision going grey, everything vanished behind a wall of heat. Splitting, tearing pain.
And so she did not notice when Nyxarion entered the den.
But she felt his purr.
One massive palm swept beneath her lower back. Offering opposing pressure.
“I’m here,” he murmured, lips moving against her temple. “I’m here, my precious queen. Push.”
There was no resisting it.
Kore pushed.
A ring of volcanic pain split her assunder, and then…
Release.
Sudden. A rush of pressure that vanished so fast, Kore deflated. Chest heaving, gills spreading in wide, gaping flashes.
And for several breaths, that was all she could do. Blink at the ceiling. Stunned. Her scales stuttering through a range of traumatized, ugly shades.
Until she sobbed. Just once. Reaching, arms weak and trembling. "Let me… let me see."
Nyxarion already had it. Those enormous hands cradled something achingly small. His silver eyes were bottomless, unblinking, fixed downward with an expression Kore had never seen on his face.
Awe.
Tiny gills fluttered along a throat no bigger than Kore's thumb. Translucent fins, delicate, silken fans that trembled along dainty forearms. A tail painted in the shades of a glorious daybreak.
"Virelii." Nyx's voice broke on the word. "You gave me a daughter."
Weeping, Kore reached for her daughter with trembling hands. Fingers splayed wide enough that the webbing caught the current and slowed her reach.
As if carrying the most precious thing he’d ever seen, Nyx lowered the infant against her chest. Crooning when the tiny, serpentine body settled against Kore’s breast.
"Here." Kore guided the tiny mouth toward her nipple, thumb brushing a shock of ebon hair back from her tiny brow. "Here, sweet one."
The latch was immediate. An instant of blind rooting, before she pulled that taut bead between her lips and suckled.
Entranced, unable to blink, Kore watched her swallow that first gulp of blue milk.
Small fingers curled against Kore's sternum. Each one tipped with the faintest suggestion of webbing, translucent. The baby's scales caught the den's glow and scattered it back in fragments—gold, violet, deep indigo shifting with every tiny swallow.
Kore watched her nurse. Watched the miniature throat work. Stared unblinking at her perfect little face and traced the length of her elegant tail.
"Aurora."
It came from a place she could scarcely recall. A quiet place thick with the smoke of incense, dreary with hymns.
But it was right.
"Your name is Aurora."
Nyx made a sound, curling around them both, silver eyes fixed on the infant at Kore's breast. Making the water dance as he purred.
"Perfect," he whispered, tracing Aurora’s spine.
"She is… I didn’t think anything could be more spectacular than her mother, but she is unmatched Kore. You made her perfect."
Vorynthar answered.
Not the bleached, gloomy white of torpor, nor the guttering pulse of death’s tide.
It was everything, all at once.
The glow spilled beyond the den. Through the narrow throat of stone, out into Vorynthar's corridors, flooding the bleached passages with sunrise.
Past the throne room filled with posturing, useless males.
Out through the reef's sprawling architecture and into the open water where two armies waited in the dark.
Deep blue. Violet. Gold. Cyan.
Dawn in the Black Sea.
Beyond the den, the bickering had fallen quiet.
Tearing her eyes from the most glorious thing she’d ever seen, Kore looked.
As if drawn, her eyes landed on the spot where she knew he was hidden.
Turning just in time to watch him drop the camouflage, she witnessed that hypnotic shift as his scales flexed in a cascade of opalescent white and glacial blue.
Thalos.
Floating in Vorynthar's throne room, above Threnakar's retinue and the Hollow Court's scholars. Cymareth clutched in his fist. “I refuse the call to join Threnakar in battle against this child and her mother,” he said, fins spread to their fullest breadth. Resplendent in the revived glow of Vorynthar’s light.
“The Accord of Nisyros is rendered null, from this moment forward. "
Snarling in outrage, Nyxaroth bristled. “You cannot—”
Thalos lifted Cymareth and did not concern himself with the interruption.
“The Covenant of Twin Venoms shall now govern the creation and protection of Sirens henceforth. I stand as Anchor to Nyxarion’s Tide Bound Siren, by right of venom and blood.
" Pausing to swept the throne room with frigid eyes, Thalos spun.
Addressing them all. “Aurora Korrides is recognized as the bridge between kingdoms. Vorynthar is sovereign territory.
These declarations are made before Caelith Mare's own scholars, who will carry word to every court in these seven seas. "
Aurora unlatched from Kore's breast with a tiny, wet sound. A shower of blue milk clouded her pretty face, bright enough to paint her chin in sapphire hues.
Nyx's purr had gone still. Every ridge and spine along his body stood erect, his silver eyes fixed on the corridor's throat as Thalos's proclamation settled into the bones of the heretical reef.
Speaking in low, venomous tones, Nyxaroth snarled. "You dare stand in a heretic's den and rewrite law that predates your bloodline, boy?"
“Are you challenging the authority of Caelith Mare?” Thalos returned, tilting his head as he looked down upon the elder Korrides. “You shall bring war to these seas, elder. Attack now, and you attack a newborn daughter of the Deep, born in sovereign territory.”
For a long moment, there was only the weight of Nyxaroth’s silent calculation. The silence of defeat strangled by pride too stubborn to admit it could not win.
Humming, loosing her Siren song, Kore kissed Aurora’s brow and felt her daughter's gills flutter against her collarbone. Warm. Alive. Unfathomably precious.
But in the end, Nyxaroth withdrew without a final word. He simply took the forces of Threnakar and bled back into the abyss from whence he’d come and left nothing but silence in his wake. An ominous sound of a one who intended to return.
But gone, for now.
Nyx exhaled, long and slow against her nape as the tension bled from his shoulders. His spines flattened, and he pressed his forehead to Kore's, their daughter cradled between them.
"He'll come back," Kore whispered.
"Let him."
Aurora's tiny fingers curled around one of Kore's, and her grip was astonishing. Fierce. Already holding on.
Vorynthar blazed. Every corridor, every chamber, every calcified rib and parasitic bloom burning with the colors of a world that had never seen the sun, but now held two. Gold and violet and deep, furious indigo flooding the Black Sea's anoxic tide glowed with unlimited possibility.
And at the threshold of the den, coiled against the archway with his arms folded across his scarred chest, Thalos watched them. Silver-blond hair drifting weightless in the current, his eyes soft with something Kore couldn’t name.
Infuriating. Manipulative Thalos.
Kore met his gaze over Aurora's head. Held it, her eyes lit with beguiling challenge, absent any real heat.
For the city of heretics had welcomed its princess.
And she was bound to the seas by two kingdoms, twin venoms singing in glorious harmony.