Chapter 6
In death… your Siren will be free.
The words pinged around in Kore’s skull, rattling and sharp. It wasn’t a threat, but a verdict already passed.
A promise.
Judgement.
Chest seizing, gills fluttering, a sense of horror flooded her veins, and she twisted, seeking Nyxarion through the gloom.
Her anchor.
He was there, poised beneath them. The length of his tail coiled in fury, and in his fist, the trident hissing as the water boiled around its teeth. Molten silver eyes met hers—desperate and furious—but he didn’t approach.
Because he couldn’t.
In Thalos’ fist, that curious weapon with no blade. An equal to the trident’s mystic power, for Kore had seen Nyxarion control the waves once before.
And she was watching it happen again.
With every errant flick of Thalos’ hand, the current obeyed his whim.
And she knew, then. What had halted Nyxarion on the edge of violence.
It was the threat of war.
Pulse hammering in her gills, body crying for the male who’d ruined and remade her, Kore spread webbed fingers and tried to claw her way down. Fighting against the current. Body screaming for Nyx—his cock, his seed, the thick, brutal promise of his knot sealing it all inside.
She needed him. The weight of him. The certainty that she was anchored to something real in the abyss. Something that could stop her from floating away, swallowed by the endless dark.
Because Thalos was right.
She didn’t belong.
She was… grotesque.
A mockery of the natural order, a violation condemned to a life between forms. Neither of the land nor the sea, she was abhorrent. Tragic.
Doomed.
Still… she reached for Nyxarion, her biolume pulsing a frantic pattern.
Spines flaring wide and deadly, Nyxarion snarled at her anguish but didn’t approach.
Despite the terror pulsing bright and obvious on her skin.
A cloud of bubbles stole her scream, and Kore floundered. Swimming against Thalos’ current. Up. Away. Thrashing against an impossible weight, feeble and frail.
Thalos laughed. “Pathetic,” he hummed, flicking his wrist to pull her back down.
His judgement hung suspended in the dark waters, echoing with the careless cruelty he wore so beautifully, before glacial eyes slid down.
Dismissive. “Look at it struggle. It is a parody with legs. Even its form is a betrayal that condemns it to suffering.”
With a snarl that shook the dark waters, Nyxarion surged up. The trident glowing white as the waters around its teeth began to boil and froth.
But Thalos merely lifted a hand. “The Hollow Court will bear witness to its fate.”
And then, as if obeying his every whim, the current shifted.
They came from above.
Emerging from the black, dozens of sleek, glittering forms slipped through the current.
Liquid silver. Molten flames. Breathtaking blues and chilling purples.
Silver and cerulean, coral-pink and mother-of-pearl white, they moved with unearthly grace, their scales catching and reflecting light until the black waters blazed with a brilliance Kore had never known before.
A constellation of beauty.
Their fins—elegant fans of translucent silk edged in crimson and gold—fluttered and trailed as they descended.
Jaws parting as she stared, Kore hung suspended. Eyes watering with awe, for this was not the Abyssari’s haunting glow.
This was radiance. Pure. Ethereal. Moonlight washed through stained glass.
Her chest ached just to look upon them.
“Stunning, aren’t they?” Thalos crooned, watching her with a cruel smirk, his voice curling through the water, intimate despite their growing audience. He gestured to his people the sort of casual pride that knew only victory. “The Thalassari. Refined. Elegant.”
He moved.
Faster than her eyes could track.
The tip of that invisible blade notched beneath her chin—she could feel the slicing edge slip through the first layers of her skin.
“Behold,” he murmured, watching her with hooded, icy eyes that did not blink, “what you can never be.”
A sound escaped her then, as he tilted her head back with that deadly point—the first sound since slits had erupted through her flesh and Nyxarion had drowned her.
A whimper.
Thalos’ lip curled. “You see now, don’t you? The Abyssari are trench crawlers. Feasting on filth and darkness.” Gesturing at his gathering court with his free hand, silver scales glinting as his fingers flicked, he shrugged. “You are born of rot and decay.”
His eyes raked over her body, then. Lingering on small, half-formed fins. The patches of emerging scales.
It was enough to see Kore fold in upon herself, trying to hide her grotesque form from their perfect beauty. Curling away from his invisible blade.
“Enough,” Nyxarion snarled from below, the timber of his voice deep enough that it brought a surge of slick gushing from her pussy. Igniting the need humming in her blood.
Shame flushed through her, hot and savage.
Because he could smell it.
They could all smell it.
And, fury boiling over, the darkness surged as the Abyssari were summoned once more by Nyxarion’s wrath. Pulsing blue in the gloom, the Deep answered its exiled king.
And it was Nyxarion’s turn to laugh. It was a sound that echoed through the trench.
“You think your court untainted, Shallow King?” Trident pulsing, the dark waters surged, swirling with crackling power as the pressure rose around them.
“Superior? When your people suffocate in the Deep. Crushed by the pressure even a Siren tolerates with ease.”
Coiling closer, snaking through the current, Nyxarion grinned and it was wicked. “You rule the Shallows because the Deep would devour you whole.”
Thalos’ face remained serene, but something flicked behind that narrowed glare.
“My bride breathes where even you would die,” Nyxarion thrummed.
“She bears a dose of venom that would stop your weak heart in seconds. She will birth a generation of Abyssari strong enough to conquer every trench from pole to pole, while the Thalassari wither. Breeding your own cousins as you cling to pure blood. Don’t speak to me of grotesqueries that pervert nature, Thalos.
Though I suppose you are the one true authority there. ”
But Kore had stopped listening.
She was frozen.
Hanging suspended between sovereigns.
Unable to look anywhere but up as the Thalassari descended.
Hair drifting around them in silken ribbons of moonlight and pearl, adorned with spiraling shells and etched coral jewelry, drifting in a cloud, as if their every movement was by design. Deliberate. A court that moved as one harmonious body.
Thalos turned his head, acknowledging them with a single nod.
The Hollow Court had arrived.
And Kore—twisted, malformed, grotesque—hung naked before them all.
Slick poured from her pussy in a humiliating rush, bright and glowing as it dispersed into the current. Her fins flared involuntarily, scales pulsing with the light of her fear.
Her every mutation, each revolting grotesquery on display.
Covering her face, she cowered away from their inspection. Chest seizing, she tried to make herself smaller. To disappear.
But there was nowhere to hide.
The choir of Thalassari shifted.
Breaking formation, one elegant creature slipped toward Kore, then. Radiant. Her scales shimmered in tones Kore had never imagined before. Her fins were translucent. Nothing like Kore’s half-formed vestigial things, she carried a great age that did nothing to mottle her beauty.
Breathtaking.
Resplendent.
So much that Kore couldn’t look away. Couldn’t blink or draw a single, sodden breath.
“Nerissa Voralis,” Thalos announces, his voice carrying through the trench. “I have chosen the Tide Mother to attend the Siren. My right as challenger.”
As if struck with a bolt of lightning, Nyxarion bristled. Spines flaring wide, he snarled, and the trench brightened with his outrage. “You will not—”
At the same time, Thalos spoke over his counterpart. “The Spiral demands—”
But Nyxarion cut him off, voice dropping to that subsonic register that rattled Kore’s bones.
“—claim my bride through your underhanded, cowardly Thalassari corruption,” Nyx growled, shaking the entire trench.
“She carries Abyssari venom. She is the heart of the Deep, Shallow King. If you dare enforce this choice of Tide Mother, then Kore remains here. In Vorynthar, where her transformation shall continue unimpeded by the weak pressure of shallow tides.”
At this, Thalos threw his head back and laughed. “Nerissa cannot remain in the Deep, exile. I won’t allow it.”
Showing teeth, Nyxarion continued without pause.
“That your kind aren’t meant to endure the Deep is of no concern of mine,” he hummed, and gestured to the gathered Thalassari.
Already, their fins drooped. Gills flaring crimson as they worked to pull enough oxygen from the black waters.
“Can you feel it already?” he hummed. “The pressure. The cold?”
Tension grew thick. Violence hummed between males, floating on the edge, but a single breath from eruption.
Until Nerissa moved.
“I accept.”
For the first time, a frisson of something other than placid serenity could be seen on Thalos’ face. His head whipped toward the ancient female. “Nerissa, you cannot—”
With a single glance, she silenced the Sovereign of Caelith Mare, for it was the sort of gaze that had outlived kings.
Watched dynasties crumble and wash away.
A glare that had known lifetimes of pain and joy.
Thalos’ teeth clicked shut.
Sweeping forward, Nerissa ghosted closer.
Kore flinched. Cringing back from the expectation of revulsion and disgust.
Instead, gentle hands fell upon her shoulders.
Warm.
Careful.
“Breathe, child,” the Tide Mother murmured in a voice layered with the sort of harmonics that lulled Kore into a slow blink. And her touch… it soothed her heaving chest, calmed her fluttering gills.
Hands sweeping down, gentle against tiny, soft scales and half-grown fins, the Tide Mother hummed, “I am Nerissa. And you are not alone.”
Kore’s chest hitched.
Her ribs grew shadowed.
Kindness.
The first sip of tenderness she’d known since before the Oracle had burned at Delphi.
It cracked something deep inside her. Exposed the fissures Kore hadn’t known were growing wider with each betrayal.
Trust.
It had been stripped from her. Flesh from bone.
Stolen by the priests of the Sun, who’d offered her innocence to a god who’d never answered. And then by a leviathan from the Deep, who’d remade her to suit his pleasure, only for another to condemn her to death in the name of mercy.
Nerissa’s fingers traced the ridge of new scales along Kore’s ribs. Gentle, clinical, but laced with awe.
“I hear you, daughter,” the Tide Mother whispered. “I see you.”
That was all it took.
Another sound tore free from Kore’s throat. Raw. Garbled. Not a sound she’d ever made before, it was as alien to her as the biolume pulsing and throbbing at her edges.
And then grief poured through the cracks, in violent, choking waves.
For the Oracle who’d burned.
The sisters who’d choked on the very sea that now seeped through her gills.
And for herself.
Her body—violated. Rewritten. Displayed and exposed.
Nerissa pulled her close.
Collapsing, Kore clung to the female, the ancient Virelii whose skin carried the scent of deep time.
The gathered Pelagorn watched in silence.
Thalassari from above.
Abyssari from below.
Nerissa held her.
Humming a haunting melody as the girl who’d drowned twice wept for everything she’d lost.
Mourning the death of the girl she’d been.