Chapter 15
Bubbles bled from his gills. Tiny fizzing things that tickled as he drifted through the current. Sinking, while he tried to simply draw breath through ravaged filaments. His every wound burning with the sting of brine.
Eyes that were meant for the dark had a disturbing white cast that lent a fog to everything he could see.
His fins were blistered and oozing, sunburned and crisped from exposure, and his scales—once the envy of Pelagorn from the deepest trench to the warmest shallows—were curling. Peeling up at the edges.
He welcomed it.
The pain.
It was the price. Merely what he must endure in exchange for fucking his sun-kissed bride through her transformation. His divine flame. His obedient little whore, who spread those flimsy legs as wide as they might go and welcomed him inside. She’d commanded him to break her, the wild little thing.
Feckless, beautiful fool.
So eager to be his.
Kore Dionari.
His divine flame.
Perfect. A symbol of what he meant to do, the taboo he’d committed by taking a human from the sun, so he could drown her in the trench.
Her name rolled through his mind, making his cock throb, still swollen with the ghost of her scent. Echoing the moment she’d broken open around him.
Kore. Kore. Kore.
Soon.
It wouldn’t be long before he could have her completely.
Black and endless, the trench yawned beneath him. A distant glow of bioluminescent blue calling to him from the deep. He sank, fins tattered and sailing as he folded in on himself, letting the pressure mend what the surface had ruined.
Blood heavy and thick, he snaked into the dark.
His passage disturbed the reef larvae still drifting through the trench—they clung to the tears in his scorched hide. Brushing against seared flesh and shredded scales.
A greeting from the Raskoril, his parasitical reef, they tasted his wounds. Cleaning away dead, flaking tissue. Feeding.
He thrummed, making the water tremble. Summoning the remaining larvae, he sent a purr rattling through his gills, letting the Resonance drum deep in his chest.
Shrouded in a cloud of ravenous larvae, Nyx sank through the heavy dark until the basin revealed itself. A bloom of soft light pulsing in the abyss.
In his absence, the reef had grown. Whole spires risen from volcanic vents of black heat. The entire basin breathed life into the deep.
An incredible feat, but one that could not sustain his bride. Not until the reef could produce enough oxygen-rich water to keep her alive, at so fragile a point in her transformation.
She was progressing rapidly, his Kore. Outpacing her predecessor by a degree he wouldn’t have believed possible, if he hadn’t felt the way she’d clenched and milked his cock. An exquisite mimic of a Virelii cunt, his little human was ravenous for everything he could cram inside.
It wasn’t enough.
Not nearly enough to cradle the precious thing he’d drag into the dark.
Blue veins flickered through the dark. Fevered lightning, the Raskoril demanded tribute. Alive. Growing.
Hungry.
The reef was starving in the anoxic dark.
Settling on a shelf of barren rock, he brushed the feeding polyps off his scales and sent a handful sparkling into the dark. Watching the phantom of his fledgling kingdom shimmer and spread.
But he was too depleted, too injured to feed the reef, to force the growth at the same pace his bride had set.
He would heal. Rise again. Pay whatever the cost to keep her. Tame her.
The trench was quiet beyond the distant boom of tectonic heartbeats.
Still, except for the hum of the current endlessly pounding at the shore above.
And then the current shifted—subtle, at first. A scent he didn’t recognize. One that didn’t belong.
Nyx’s spines rose.
Intruder.
Pelagorn.
He took a slow breath and tasted Thalassari.
Open-water scum.
Lip curling, Nyx scanned the trench with pupils blown wide and dared not move a muscle. Pain rippled beneath his scales anyway.
A scout.
One on a mission from the Thalassari king, no doubt. Drawn in by the scent of a Siren in the water, for it was a lure more potent than any other.
Forbidden.
His.
Glancing toward the distant basalt shelf where his trident stood embedded in the sea floor, Nyx hissed. Silent. Cursing himself for the blind stupidity of settling so far from that ancient forge of war.
Too far.
Too wounded.
Useless now, for a fight would finish what the surface had started.
And what would become of Kore, then? Half transformed. Abandoned.
Sensing his tension, the reef flashed a vibrant, hungry blue. Fragile tendrils stretched in the gentle current, microscopic maws gaping all around him.
Blind and searching for nutrition.
A shadow flicked through the dim light, trying to penetrate the fathomless dark.
The intruder.
A young male, inexperienced in the wars of kings.
Something sinister flicked over Nyxarion’s face, then, and, sagging against the rock shelf, he feigned stillness.
Watching the other circle, drifting in a cautious arc as he descended deeper into the cursed basin that shouldn’t exist. Entranced by the glimmer of life in a place notorious for brutal absence.
The fledgling reef carpeted the sea floor.
Pulsing and glowing.
Impossible.
The scavenger neared. Close enough that Nyx could see the brilliant color of his scales and knew him to be Thalassari—of the warm, shallow seas and rich, easy living. Pretty and elegant, a creature of sunlit reaches. Ill-suited for the trench warfare he’d just floated into.
A halo of silver hair fell in silken waves over broad shoulders. Every unsure flick of his tail a fusion of opalescent silver and green. Color woven to catch the eye, and fins flared in a graceful spread. Wide and elegant, sailing on the sluggish current of toxic water.
Moving not to conquer, but to enchant.
Effortless seduction.
Eyes open wide to cling to every fragment of blue light, flicked with unease. Scanning the eternal black.
Nyx could taste his fear. More poisonous than the trench, it was a stink that singed his ravaged gills with a noxious fume.
Lips twisting, he watched the pretty fool gasp for every whisper of oxygen he could filter from the abyssal tide.
Waiting until he reached for a cluster of polyps that could be seen by even his weak Thalassari eyes.
Ravenous filaments uncoiled, brushing outstretched claws. Light flashed in the gloom, as if in greeting.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nyx hummed, making the other Pelagorn whirl with a hiss of exposed spines. “You’ve come far from home, Thalassari. These are… dangerous waters.”
The intruder ejected a plume of violet venom, emptying his venom sacs. “This—what you’ve done—it’s an abomination!”
Nyxarion laughed, tail flicking through the dense current. “This is progress, boy. This is survival.”
“This is—you can’t do this! No human brood are to be seeded after the Accord of Nisyros. Your own father stripped you of title for breaking the Accord. For risking Thalos’ wrath with your repulsive crimes. And you dare to—”
“Dare?” Nyx hummed, unable to stop his spines from twitching. “This is the Black Sea, boy. I conquered it. Fed it. Your every breath here is a gift of my making. I dare nothing. Because here, my whim is law.”
“Thalos—”
A vicious snarl erupted from between Nyx’s clenched teeth. “The open-water king has no dominion here.”
But the interloper would not be deterred.
“I followed her scent! It’s in the current.
Her perfume reaches all the way to the Dardanelles.
It fouls the Bosphorus with the truth of what you’ve done here, Nyxarion Korrides.
If Thalos hasn’t scented her yet, he will.
It will ride the next tide. Undeniable.”
Tattered scales lifting to vent the heat of his fury, Nyx said nothing. Choosing silence as the interloper drifted closer in all his righteous fury… closer as ravenous tendrils unfolded with delicate grace that his weak, Thalassari eyes couldn’t see.
“Look at you,” the intruder continued, oblivious, gesturing at Nyx, where he was coiled on the shelf.
“Haggard. Scales flaking away with the tide. Sunburned. Pathetic the way only an Abyssari can manage,” he sneered, fins flicking a delicate dance.
“Fucking trench-born. Can’t handle the surface.
You were born for the dark, but still, you dare to take another bride after your abysmal failure with the first?
” A sharp bark of laughter sliced through the dark, and his spines ejected another spurt of violet venom.
Bright and beautiful and deadly. “Thalos marked your name, exile. He’ll come, just as I did.
Drawn in by the putrid scent of your whore. And then he’ll tear this place apart.”
Not bothering himself to move, Nyx tilted his head. Watching as the interloper drifted much, much too close. “Is that so?”
“An example will be made,” he blathered on. “Her bones shall be used for decoration in the gleaming halls of Caelith Mare. Her flesh peeled to feed the tides as a reminder for all that the Accord of Nisyros is what allows you revolting detritus-eaters to continue on—at Thalos’ pleasure.”
The reef flared a warning too subtle for Thalassari eyes to perceive, reacting to the wrath festering in Nyx’s veins.
“She is mine,” he crooned, letting his voice carry the full weight of his station.
“From her, I will reclaim what was stolen, and your pathetic accord will rot in tides that will remember a new sovereign.”
Grinning, Nyx flicked his spines and silently commanded the reef to strike without moving so much as a fin in the interloper’s direction.
Tiny filaments latched to pretty, glittering scales. Gentle at first, too soft for the other male to notice.
“Thalos will hear of this,” the interloper promised, unaware his song had already ended in horror. “You have hours, exile. Thalos will turn this trench to silt before you can breed her.”
Nyx’s grin only grew, for without any effort at all, the filaments pierced scale and muscle, dragging the other Pelagorn down with a startled shriek that bubbled as it left his doomed lips.
“Oh, she’s already been bred, Thalassari,” he hummed, shifting to slither from the shelf.
Swimming closer to watch the struggle of his parasitic reef when it sent thousands of tiny barbs into muscle.
Siphoning what it wanted from the struggling male’s blood and bone.
“She progresses fast enough that even I, First Sovereign King of the Black Sea, struggle to prepare for my bride to drown. But here you are,” he said, and laughed when the other thrashed and struggled even as his flesh was sloughed from bone.
“Bringing gifts for my coronation. An example will be made,” he mocked.
“Your bones shall be used to tether my bride at my side. In death, you shall keep her open and ready for my knot. Your scales saved for decoration that will be used to please my bride as she is bred before my court.”
“Vile fucking—” He tried to scream, but the sound rose as a wall of bubbles. Fragile and cut short, for the Raskoril encircled the interloper’s throat in a milky curl that sent blood misting through the black. Polyps glowing an excited, violent blue, they claimed the Thalassari song as tribute.
Nyx thrummed, letting the Resonance rattle as the other’s body was stretched taut. Purring as he watched joints burst and viscera spill in garish ribbons of fetid gore.
Lingering, savoring the display as his fledgling reef swelled against the bedrock. Each crunch echoed his savage pleasure as his unspoken whim was obeyed.
And in return, the Raskoril feasted.
Flesh melted to pale jelly.
Blood siphoned into the heart of hardening coral.
Until there was nothing left but scale and bone. Gleaming white. A cage clutched in coral fist.
“Perfection,” Nyx hummed, brushing a finger along one of the ivory ribs. “You’ll be given true purpose.”
Satiated, the Raskoril quieted. Its glow dimmed as it worked to digest the prize it had been given.
Nyxarion inspected the bone lattice—the curve of the spine, the robust cage of rubs—and saw her within it. Thrashing against her inevitable surrender, perhaps. But kept safe. Hidden from what would come.
He knew it now.
Thalos.
The open-water king.
Time was running out.
And this would be her cradle.
Her throne.
Lingering a moment as exhaustion spread through his limbs, he pressed a hand to the surface and commanded the Raskoril to obey, letting it taste his intention through his blood. “For you,” his voice rippled. “So no false king may touch what is already mine.”