Chapter 2
The black waters rippled around him, thick with the scent of her.
Sunlight and lightning.
Citrus and dusk.
The aroma of a Siren flirting with estrus.
His precious, living flame.
Vorynthar reeked of her delectable perfume, even now, when she was sealed safely away. Locked safe in the clenched fist of his parasitic reef, the Raskoril that served his every whim. She was protected from any but him, until he was ready to put her on display before his court.
Nyx grinned.
She was perfect.
His.
Cock aching and heavy behind his slit, swollen with the need to knot her placid and drift with her for hours, he snarled.
Frustrated.
Denied.
She was close.
Floating on the edge of her first heat, ready to be bred and fucked pregnant with the first of his many offspring.
A low rumble shook his throat.
But the Abyssari had arrived.
He could sense them lurking, just there. Beyond the edge of his kingdom.
Summoned by his call, drawn in by her scent.
He couldn’t go to her. Not yet. Not until it was safe.
The Deep was restless.
Stirring for the first time in aeons.
The old blood circled in the shadows, drifting through the dark.
Gills flaring, Nyx pulled the black waters through his lips and sent it gushing over his gills. Tasting the current.
One of the ancient ones was pressing at his borders. Testing the edge of his patience. A relic. A living reminder of the wars, this was a male who’d lived long enough to know the scent in the current. To be drawn to the memory of it. A Siren flirting with estrus.
Old enough that he would try to take her, Nyx knew. That he would attempt to slaughter his bride in some misguided attempt to appease the Shallow King and avoid another war.
Nyxarion’s lips peeled back in a snarl.
Let them try.
He would tear them apart. Feed their bones to the Raskoril, and make an example of any blood traitor foolish enough to choose the Shallow King over Abyssari survival.
Fins flaring, fingers tight on the trident’s shaft, Nyxarion stretched and caught the current. Drifting in a slow, deliberate arc as he surveyed his fledgling rebel kingdom from above.
Flexing his claws, Nyx rolled his neck and let a pulse of light shiver down his spine—his biolume. It throbbed in perfect harmony with his fledgling reef. Synced to his unique patterns, his signature in an unspoken language used by the creatures of the deepest dark.
It was time.
Thrumming, the hum began as a single breath. A guttural sound beyond hearing. Pressure that drummed in his chest, rattled his ribs, and was answered in the pulse of his reef. Glowing blue as the polyps flexed and shivered, reacting to his call.
The Resonance blended with the water—a sub-audible purr that rolled off him in waves. Lifting his scales, venting the heat of his colossal body.
His biolume pulsed. Violently blue. A beacon in the dark that traced his every ridge and serpentine curve.
Eyes half-lidded, trident clenched in a merciless fist, Nyx lowered his head and let his purr roll through the trench.
It lifted the sluggish, ancient current. Growing thick as the deep hung on the sound that wasn’t. Carrying his summons beyond, to where he knew they waited.
He could sense them poised on the edge of his kingdom.
Waiting.
Scales lifting in rows of healing, iridescent armor, Nyx shed the heat trapped close to his skin. Letting it roll off him in shimmering swaths that agitated the bacteria nested in the grooves between his scales.
He was a beacon in the dark.
Eyes flicking open, Nyx watched the black around him ripple with the hum of his Resonance.
Ascending beyond the ridge of coral, he released a final note.
Pure and commanding.
The melody of kings.
It echoed through the deep, dense with promise and challenge both.
When his lips curved, it was not an expression of joy.
No.
It was hunger.
Greed.
A longing to see the Abyssari gathered together once more.
It didn’t take long for the first of them to penetrate the dark.
The shadows bulged and flexed, then birthed a shade with teeth. Frothing currents that blistered with cautious motion.
The Abyssari.
At first, a trickle of Pelagorn slipped through the current. Hesitant and unsure, but from the gloom, they came.
Dozens, then hundreds.
Coiled and wary as they were granted entry into the Black Sea—no longer a toxic basin void of all life.
Vorynthar was thriving. Already. Even without the reef breakers to guide the coral’s growth. Faster than he’d expected, given how poisonous the Black Sea’s throat was.
It was her.
Kore.
Gods, the way she’d taken him. Glassy eyes beseeching in the dark, pale flesh stretching to swallow every aching inch.
His cock lurched, twitching at the taste lingering in his every breath. The memory of that silken grip that clutched his shaft with desperate need, milking and clenching, begging for his knot. Longing for a true rut that would take hours and see her safely into estrus.
And he’d denied her.
Used her to perfume the black waters.
Something… foreign twisted in his chest, then. Something that ached at the thought of her silent pleas, her liquid grey eyes. Her silly twisting fingers as she’d begged to be fucked while her voice was silent.
But he set her aside, for he couldn’t afford the distraction.
Not now, with an audience of Pelagorn who’d been his people, once.
Before they’d exiled him.
He saw the young males first. Their gills flaring wide with the first true taste of her. Dark eyes flicking over the reef, they searched for the source of that perfume they craved but couldn’t name.
Slick.
That unique liquid that gushed from a Siren, tacky and thick. A lubricant meant to gloss his passage, even in the most turbulent sea.
Once the pleasure of Abyssari in every known trench, but now? After the war?
It was a thing as rare in the seas as Kore herself.
Ambrosia that curled through his every breath, a call woven into the very tides. Currents laced with a potent magic that hadn’t been seen in any sea since before the Accord of Nisyros had been written.
It was bait, to use her this way.
The sort most wouldn’t even recognize, even as they reacted to it.
Slick, in the water.
A blatant challenge for the oldest of them—those last remaining Pelagorn who’d survived the war and watched the last Siren die.
A predatory smile curled at the edge of his lips, and he glanced down. Looked to the glowing fist of coral clenched in Vorynthar’s heart where she was hidden away.
His bride.
Concealed. Protected.
Safe, until he was ready to reveal her to their luminous eyes, split her open with his cock, and lock her to him until her belly swelled with his spawn.
The elders were slower to enter his kingdom. Wary, their spines rigid with outrage, their biolume flickering a furious warning.
He let them come without comment or challenge.
Allowed them to circle Vorynthar’s jagged perimeter and bask in the glory of what he’d built without them.
In exile.
“Nyxarion Korrides,” one of the old blood snarled. Voice laced with a Resonance deeper than even his own. “You dare to break the Accord a second time?”
Nyx let a savage grin spread across his lips. Fins stretched to their limit, his tail flicking through the black water with a deliberate grace that saw the Raskoril pulse beneath him. His command over his kingdom was absolute.
Molten, silver eyes sweeping over them, gleaming with the promise of violence, he said, “This is the Black Sea. It is to be a haven. A new beginning. The seat of Abyssari power is no longer in the crumbling ruins where my father rots. It is here. In Vorynthar. And here,” he said, eyes gleaming with malice, “in the Deep? The laws of the Shallow King are meaningless.”
Bristling in outrage, the elder male let tattered fins flare.
“You risk us all,” he snarled, baring teeth.
“Poisoned the currents with the stench of your whore. This… this creature you created to suit yourself. Thalos will scent her just as easily as we have. He will come, and with him, war will sweep through the Deep. A price we will be made to pay. Not you.”
Shivering from scalp to the tip of his fluke, Nyx laughed. Crimson filaments flaring as he pulled a breath through his lips to taste his bride, before he exhaled. “Then why did you come?” he drawled, taunting and cruel.
Gills pulsing, the elder’s jaw worked around an outraged retort. “We’ve come to extinguish this creature. To stop you, exile. From killing us all in a war born of arrogance.”
“You came,” Nyx hummed, and flicked his tail through the current to waft her scent across the faces of the young ones, “because you taste her. Because, already, you ache to know what I have created. To know if I succeeded. Your blood remembers what the Thalassari tried to take.”
A younger male, fins still translucent with youth, nosed the current. “That scent—what… what is that?”
Nyxarion grinned, sweeping his hand wide to encompass them all when he said, “That, my brother, is your blood right. She is a stunning creature, my bride. The first true Siren in a thousand years. Soon, she will bloom. Her voice will lift the currents and fill the Deep with life once more.”
“It is the scent of treachery!” the elder howled. “If you dare to bring her into this sea, Thalos will drain the black waters and slaughter us all. This is war,” he growled, bristling. “You’ve risked us all for a cunt. Your abomination cannot be allowed to survive.”
With a laugh, Nyx allowed himself to sink.
Facing the elder at his level. “You lived through the war. You remember the carnage of countless Pelagorn lost when the seas ran red. Entire bloodlines wiped out.” He paused, then.
Letting his grip on the trident slip, just a little.
Enough to draw those ancient eyes to the weapon of his blood.
And then, “I understand your fear, grandfather. But I was born after the war ended. All I have ever known was the silence. The slow, suffocating decay of what remained of the bloodlines you fought and died to protect. Our young grow weaker with every generation. Their Resonance is fading. Their scales grow dim, their venom weak and thin. And their power?” he laughed, but the sound held no mirth.
“We are dying. Under the Thalassari rule, we will continue this slow drift toward extinction.”
Between his fingers, the trident spun. Lazy and deliberate—each revolution a silent promise of violence while his words simmered between them.
Hanging heavy in the current.
Ominous.
True.
And then, showing teeth, Nyx’s smile grew wide. Canines glinting to reflect the dim glow of Vorynthar’s pulse, when he said, “You speak of my bride with venom on your teeth. Call her an abomination, even while your gills sample the truth of her excellence.”
“She is a poison,” the elder snapped, but his voice warbled, absent the righteous fury that had brought him forward in the first place.
“An abomination your forefathers fought and died to defend. They were my brothers. And they are dead. Long taken by the tide, in defense of Sirens. And for what? If you allow that creature into these waters—”
At this, Nyxarion’s grin grew savage and sharp. His grip on the trident slipped as he swept his hands down, eager to make them look. “Ah, you misunderstand, grandfather. She’s already here.”
At first, there was nothing.
The silence hung heavy as his words rippled through the current, and the generations of gathered Abyssari reacted to the claim.
And then, “Impossible,” the elder hissed, but his fins tucked flat, and he couldn’t help the way he descended into the heart of Vorynthar. Biolume dimming with alarm. “You lie.”
To this, Nyxarion said nothing at all. He let the reef answer for him.
Vorynthar shuddered.
The reef groaned.
Shifting, a cloud of bubbles burped free of the clenched fist where his treasure was hidden.
The living flame, burning in the heart of the Black Sea.
Kore.
Sleeping in that human way of hers.
Curled in a tiny, delicate ball. Pale skin luminous with the beauty of the setting sun, where she gleamed in the ravenous dark and shivered when the chill of exposure touched her. Veins glowing blue as a fresh wave of slick flooded the current.
Sunshine and lightning.
Citrus and dusk.
Pandemonium.
The young surged forward, pulling as much of that bright flavor through their gills as they could manage. Reverent as they circled the tiny thing sleeping in a cage of coral and bone.
But it was the elder who spoke, fists going lax at his side, as he whispered, “Impossible.”
Nyxarion laughed, and it was a jubilant thing. “She thrives where even Thalos would suffer.” Fins flicking, he let the trident’s colossal weight drag him down. “Do you see? She will be our rebirth. A lost art reclaimed. And she is mine.”