Chapter 17
Gills fluttering, Nyx hung suspended in the crushing embrace of the deep. Eyes closed. Brow furrowed. Cradled in the frigid dark at the bottom of the trench, he reveled in the balm of his element.
Soothed by the pressure.
Made whole by the depths he’d been born to rule.
Alone.
Recovery was slower this time. His lungs labouring, even now.
Cracking one eye, he watched the current take a handful of scales and scatter them across the sea floor.
There was a toll.
A price.
One he was willing to pay to claim his prize, yes, but expensive nevertheless.
The effort to breed her had flayed him, savaging sensitive skin, strip by agonizing strip. His every heaving breath acidic, every glint of the sun a flensing blade that had left him ragged and raw.
Lungs meant to sieve oxygen from brine sizzled with the surface’s wretched poison. Scales designed to protect sensitive skin were scorched by the sun, dried out, and flaking off his hide in great, glittering sheets.
He coughed, a convulsion of muted agony. Lungs still dry, despite his return to the trench. Blood—thick and dark—spiraled from his gills in a lazy plume that curled in the current. Twisting before his eyes as the trench stitched him back together in silent judgment.
This was the cost of feeding Kore in a world that hated his kind. A world that punished those who refused to bend.
Thalos’ world.
He spat, watching another dark ribbon unspool. Trying to soak in the chill.
To heal.
It wasn’t working.
He wasn’t recovering fast enough—he could feel it.
The brutal, crushing weight of being on land lingered even when he’d returned to the clenched first of the trench.
And the gaps between breeding his delicious little captive and recovery only grew.
Yawning wider as a warning knell sounded in the deep.
The Thalassri King was coming.
His vision blurred. Bones aching, skin burning.
This pace…
It wasn’t sustainable.
At this rate, he’d die before he might see what she’d become. Before Thalos arrived with his legion of Thalassari to quell this fledgling rebellion.
Nyx glanced up, squinting through the pain throbbing behind his eyes. Up, toward the distant twinkle mocking him from above.
He’d have to push her harder.
That soft, breakable thing.
What had she called herself?
His chalice.
Grinning now, Nyx’s fins flared when the current tried to lift him. Holding him in place despite the force trying to move him. One hand darting out to seize his trident, his cock flexed behind his slit.
It was the memory.
That tiny, human cunt. So much less responsive than a Virelii.
But it was the way he didn’t quite fit. The way she’d gripped him, milking his shaft for every drop of cum.
Begging with words and slick. Belly inflating with his seed.
And when her legs had locked around his waist?
When she’d screamed and bucked and begged?
He’d forgotten the agony of his task.
The looming pressure of time running short.
Forgot everything except the silken grip of a slit redesigned just for him.
One he’d remake, so she could take more.
Oh, yes. He’d push his little human. Harder. Faster. Forcing his venom into her, corrupting her until he washed away her revolting humanity and forced the bloom that had gotten him exiled. Cast out. Punished for daring to claim what no other could fathom.
It was taboo to take a human and give it to the sea. Something the Thalassari courts had outlawed before he’d even been spawned.
He spat into the black waters.
The Accord of Nisyros.
It had cost him the throne, never mind that his people—the Abyssari—were inching ever closer to extinction. That the restrictions imposed upon them by the Thalassari king were going to kill them all.
Lip curled, Nyx flicked his tail.
Cowards.
Too afraid of the Thalos to venture even the tip of a fin out of line. Even if it meant their doom.
Planting his trident into the seabed once more, Nyx sent a cloud of silt billowing into the current. The triple-pronged tips gleamed with ominous intent.
He would not submit.
Not to Pelagorn law.
Not to open-water kings, or the laws of the trench-born.
Not to her.
This was the Black Sea, and here, Nyx was law.
The trident pulsed. Unused since his exile, hungry for battle, eager to serve. A weapon only the Abyssari-born king might handle.
Around him, the trench responded.
Sluggish, at first.
Quiet.
But alive. As if waking from a long sleep after a gluttonous feed.
The sand shifted, silt dancing against the current to reveal the bedrock. A canvas on which he would paint his second greatest creation.
Establishing what was to be his seat of power.
In defiance of Caelith Mare, where Thalos ruled, and in solemn tribute to his ancestral home, Threnakar, where his father was content to wither.
This was to be a new court, one not of the deep nor the shallows.
Vorynthar.
The name rang with the clear trill of truth.
A heretical reef born of Raskoril Coral. Fed from his own blood, his venom… and, of course, whatever hapless fools dared to drift too close.
Nyx grinned, pleased with the progress of the colony that bore his mark. Tending to every barbed, bony finger that lifted in greeting with a wave of semi-sentient reverence.
He dragged his palm across the trident’s obsidian tips.
The pain was crisp. Clean. Ritualistic.
Before the current could erase it, he pressed his wound to the tiny polyps.
The coral drank.
Tiny mouths gnawed at the iron-rich feast offered.
It grew.
Faster than it should have, twitching before fanged spirals curled out from bone-white sockets. Barbed and coiled, growing in time with his pulse.
He watched it bloom around the bones of Thalos’ sentry.
Not a throne.
Not a nursery.
It was to be a vault.
One meant to contain a treasure.
The ghost of the shape flickered in the deep, pulled straight from the sinister corners of his imagination, built on a Thalassari skeleton. Knitting itself along a bony frame, invisible even to his keen gaze.
Ribs of hollow bone flickered in the dark.
He smiled.
And the coral drank.
Soon.
Soon, the sound of her panting would echo through the depths. Her cunt clenching, milking him dry as her body begged for more.
And he would give it to her.
Knot her before the eyes of the court.
Claim her for the Black Sea and start a new era.
His cock burst from his vent, swollen and eager. Remembering her defiance. Her pleas and tears.
The perfect little whore was the first brick in the foundation of his fledgling kingdom. One that Thalos could never simply take, for it was to be built on a bride who would break only for him.
“You are the tide.”
Showing teeth, Nyx flicked his tail and brought one of his spines forward. Stabbing the eldest polyp at its base, and letting it drink the toxin Kore would need to complete her transformation from grotesque to regal.
Consumed by his task. Giving everything he could spare.
The pain was exquisite.
Lancing through his body in ripples, sharp and cleansing as the venom gland pulsed and emptied. Beneath him, the reef shivered. Hungry larvae flexing as if swallowing his toxin deep into their lattice.
Barbs flared. Thin spirals grew calcified and thick. The whole structure throbbing in tandem with his heart, glowing with a luminous blue light as unnatural veins grew tuberous and sluggish with his essence.
Back arching, his gills flared wide. Scales fanning out to vent the heat of his effort.
He would bleed for his kingdom the way Thalos would never understand, sacrificing his own health in the privacy of the treacherous Black Sea.
A place so hostile, none of the Pelagorn had ever dared to colonize it.
But he would.
Already, his reef was filtering the basin’s anoxic, poisonous layers, making it rich with oxygen. Fertile with all the ingredients needed for his bride to thrive in the harshest possible clime.
Breath coming short and hard, Nyx reached for the next fragment—and froze.
The current shifted.
Hardly perceptible.
But laced with something familiar.
That scent.
It rippled through his gills.
Filled his lungs.
His own seed laced the current.
Drifting.
Diluted by the sea.
Tainted with the sweet nectar of the bride he cultivated.
“Defiant slut,” he snarled, low and vicious. Fear pulsing through his veins, he tore his hand away from the reef and dislodged his barb with a howl so black, the ancient kings would shiver and cringe.
That scent in the water could only mean one thing.
She had gone into the surf.
Long enough for the plug he’d crammed inside her to dissolve and send a torrent of sperm gushing into the water.
She was trying to escape.
Or worse.
She’d been found.
Spines flaring, lips peeled back in a soundless snarl, for it was too soon to return, his body nowhere near recovered from the effort he’d expended to fill her womb.
Pain lanced through his system when he whirled.
He ignored it.
Kore was fleeing or taken, and he would not lose another bride.
Gills burning, skin tender and raw, he snarled—at his back, the Raskoril hissed. Reactive to the surge in his pulse, it spat a plume of bubbles from tiny chambers, as if recoiling from his vicious temper.
A low groan rumbled through the trench, and with war in his heart, Nyxarion Korrides, first Sovgerine of the Black Sea, reached for the trident.
Thalos would not have her.
It thrummed the moment his fingers touched ancient metal. Obsidian-dark, the shaft grew resonant with the hum of power it hadn’t tasted in years.
Not since he’d failed.
Exiled from the kingdom he should have ruled.
The trident remembered war.
He wrenched it from where it had been embedded in the sediment with a howl of rage. Tail thrashing off the bottom, he launched himself toward the surface. Eyes gone black and fathomless in an instant as he made the ascent at a speed that would kill any other creature in the ocean.
But he was no longer a king.
No longer a builder of something profound and new.
He was a monster ascending.
A predator on the hunt, seething with the need to punish and claim. Drunk with a surge of possessive violence and territorial hunger, he shot through the poisonous layers. A bolt through the dark. Carrying enough speed to leave a trail of scales glittering in his wake.
Every stroke of his tail dragged fire through his chest. Left his gills burning and raw. His lungs squeezed tight as he abandoned the snug embrace of the deep and returned once more to her domain.
The surface.
Pulsing in his grip, the trident thrummed with an ancient power. Ready to enact the frothing wrath festering in his heart.
Ready for war.
He didn’t just want her swollen and full, oh no. This time, he’d see her ruined with it.
He’d either rut her over the broken corpse of his enemies or punish her for daring to flee.
Vibrating in his grip, the trident shimmered, eager for battle. Humming with the thirst for carnage. To pin her to the beach and make her learn exactly who she belonged to.
He burst from the surf with a snarl.
Eyes scanning the brilliant, radiant sunlit beach for traitors.
White-hot agony lanced through his lungs, but he didn’t slow. The sun blindingly hot overhead, salting the flayed strips of scales peeling from his flesh.
None of it mattered.
She had gone into the surf. Dared to flee.
And he would make her pay.
Trident gripped tight, the shaft bit his palm, and drank his fury. Feasting on the rage. Luxuriating in the tempest boiling his blood.
The beach shimmered ahead.
Utterly absent any hint of Pelagorn—Thalassari or Abyssari.
So she’d tried to flee, then.
He grinned, and it was terrible.
Propelling himself from the surf, Nyx slithered.
Planting the trident into the beach, carving deep gouges in the stone of unseen bedrock, he moved.
Labourious. Determined. Ignoring the blistered skin, the flaking scales.
The coppery tang of blood from gills straining to draw enough oxygen into his lungs.
He was a storm.
Something possessed.
Gills clattering with effort, he inhaled the blistering air. A thunderous scowl marred his brow. Eyes gone dark as pitch scanned the beach for his wayward prize and found her absent.
Wrath, pure and unfiltered, threatened to consume him, for she wasn’t in the surf. Not sprawled out on the beach.
She was gone.
For a moment, panic threatened to eclipse his temper. That she would dare. Risk herself to scorn his gift.
But a tangle of darkness caught his blackened gaze.
The cave.
The place where he’d fuck her into the stone until she learned what it was to belong to the sea.
Hefting his tail, snaking up the beach without the tide to ease his passage, Nyx used the ancient weapon as a crutch and not the god-killer it was meant to be. A trail of tattered scales left glittering in his wake, gills hissing with every laboured breath he dragged into soggy lungs.
She was there.
Curled in the back of the cave, as far from the sunlight as she could get. Sleeping. Hands cradling a flat belly. A tiny shadow wrapped around the center of what had once been a human girl.
And her skin…
… it was glowing.
His vision—meant for the endless black of abyssal things—caught the shimmer in an instant.
Bioluminescent scribbles pulsed beneath her skin.
A dainty webbing scrawled across her throat, spirals painted over her collarbones.
Elegant swirls snaking up her arms, where her veins pulsed with the heart of the sea.
A flush of desperate want rolled through him, slaking his lust for war with a wave of need.
The transformation had taken root.
His cock stirred, twitching with primal instinct. Obsessive, carnal want of a thing he had no business craving but couldn’t ignore.
He should have waited—the flaking scales and misted blood clouding his every breath was proof enough of that. That his body was failing. Gills shredded, lungs spitting fire, blood filled with bubbles and too thin to endure the punishment of the surface for much longer.
But there she was.
Empty, waiting to be filled.
His human chalice.
His Siren bride.
The trident hummed in his grip. Whispering dark promises. Punishment and violence, an offer to claim her. Cage her. Mark his little human in a way she hadn’t yet imagined possible. Its pull was ancient, a relic of kings and tyrants.
Enticed, he dragged himself forward. One arm at a time. Bulk bunching and shifting behind him, as the thump of the trident crashed into stone.
When he reached her, he paused.
Just long enough to breathe.
To watch.
Memorize the light blooming beneath her skin, and know.
She could run.
But she could never leave.
Nyx let his fingers slide down the trident’s shaft, releasing the insidious power. Abandoning the trident where it was embedded in the stone.
And then he threw all caution to the poisonous wind…
… and reached for his bride.