Chapter 11
From above, the piercing ring of a horn made Thalos flinch. Reeling back as if scalded.
And with a hiss of breath, he released his unnatural grip on the current. Drifting back. Away.
Gasping, lungs burning as she coughed, Kore felt her fins spread wide. Like tiny little fingers growing from her skin that reached for the current, putting distance between them.
But his smirk only widened. Growing sharp with a predatory edge.
For a moment, Thalos lingered, eyes raking over her with a deliberate slowness. Laced with something she couldn’t name.
Gills fluttering, her breath coming hard, Kore watched his fins unfurl in a lazy sweep. Vast, opalescent membranes that caught the glow of the reef below and threw it back in fractured rainbows.
Perfect.
Dripping elegance.
Everything she wasn't.
He circled her slowly, each movement a declaration of his superiority. And then, “I won't enjoy this," Thalos said, his voice a low, cultured hum. “Rutting a creature born of desperation and venom.”
Something flinched behind her ribs, then.
Something aching and small.
“Alas,” Thalos sighed, “duty demands I claim you. Demands I take what he made, and break it with my own hands. A shame,” he whispered, then grinned. Cold and cruel.
And with a flick of his tail, he turned. Vanishing into the current above.
With a gasp, Kore lunged for freedom. Trying to flee the instant Thalos was out of sight.
She slammed into something unseen.
An unnatural bubble of current that bound her on all sides. Fighting her every attempt to flee.
Trapped.
Held immobile in the middle of the abyss.
“H-help,” she called out, hands reaching for something—anything—that might anchor her. Too terrified to bother marvelling at the return of her voice, to note the changes in pitch… in tone. There was only… this.
Current she couldn’t see, sound beyond hearing.
She tried again, saying, “Please!” in a voice that cracked. Splintering into dulcet tones she’d never heard before. Layered. Alive. A tone that sent water shivering as the syllables danced inside her invisible cage. “Please… Nyxarion… help me…”
The abyss yawned around her. Below and above. An inescapable sphere that resisted her every pathetic attempt.
“N-Nerissa… a-anyone. Please…”
But there was no one.
Nothing.
Only the hum of distant sound she couldn’t identify.
Twisting in place, her fins flared to their limit, Kore tried to break through it. Clawing at water that wouldn’t yield.
“Help me!” It was a desperate plea, one that burst from her throat in a voice she didn’t know. That wasn’t hers.
But the abyss swallowed it whole.
No one came.
There was only the quiet roar of the current keeping her aloft.
Alone.
Adrift.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Kore curled around herself. Knees tucked to her chest, wrists crossed above her head. Hands kept carefully away, to avoid touching the alien parts of herself. Trying to block out the terror of being abandoned in a school of predators slavering for the kill.
“Nyxarion…” she whined. “Please…”
With each ragged breath, her fins trembled. Gills flaring wider with every panicked inhale.
“Please don’t leave me here,” she whispered, but there was no mercy. No leviathan surging up from the dark.
Only a distant thrum of sound.
A storm in the dark.
It was…
… electric.
A sound beyond hearing.
Something felt.
A chime both crystalline and piercing.
Dancing on the fine currents. So delicate, she didn’t know what it was at first. Not until she looked up.
Movement.
Shadows flitting through the distant light, edges fuzzy yet unmistakable.
From above, the Thalassari.
Suspended in a twist of luminous color against the black, their fins spread in synchronized elegance as they spiraled around her.
A vibration kissed her edges, then. Haunting. A melody that slipped through her marrow and lifted her scales in a shiver.
They were… singing.
Weaving their voices into the black waters, building barriers she couldn’t see but was unable to breach.
Their song built the gauntlet.
Kore watched. Transfixed.
Enthralled by their terrible beauty as they built her prison and seeded the trap that would be her doom.
But the Abyssari would not be outdone.
From below, an avalanche of sound. A subsonic roar that vibrated Kore’s bones and made her teeth ache in her gums. Primal. Furious. The sound of the deep itself rejecting the pull of the light.
Trembling, slick gushed from Kore’s slit as the pressure in her skull pushed at the edges of her bone.
Surging up, black and cobalt scales pulsed with their own light. A net of writhing bodies snaking up from the dark.
It was… horrible. A dark beauty that saw a tiny grin tug at the edge of her lips.
Ink through water.
A cloud of seething fury.
The Abyssari.
Merging into a single, snarling entity as they fought back with a furor utterly absent from the ethereal choir above.
Kore watched them rise, and knew.
The Gauntlet had begun.
She felt it in her scales. Thrumming in the delicate filaments of her new gills.
All around her, the water twisted in unseen shapes. Built by song. Crafted by harmonies outside of her human understanding.
But if she didn’t look right at it, she… she could see it.
Intricate spirals carved through the black waters. Ripples that shimmered with glittering edges. Transparent ribbons—some surging up, toward the light, others plunging down, into the deep frigid dark.
Both choirs shaped it.
Battling for dominance with their haunting voices.
Every few moments, with each new note, the entire gleaming structure shivered and shifted. Corridors that had led up, grew twisted and flexed. Shifting away.
And then, from opposite ends of that spiraling vortex, she saw them.
Two figures positioned at the gauntlet's outermost edges. One luminous, the other shadowed.
Both at war.
Over… her.
The clear chime of a horn cut through the water, singing in Kore’s blood.
Heart thundering in her ears, she watched with eyes better suited to the light. Unable to tear her gaze from Thalos.
The Shallow King was the water itself.
Each twist of his tail was in perfect, effortless harmony with a shift in the Gauntlet’s corridors. No wasted motion, no hedging or hesitation. He threaded through the current with a lazy twist of gleaming silver scales. Letting his fins catch the light, his every movement beautiful.
Breathtaking.
And he was gaining.
Cutting through the currents between them with mathematical precision.
Something wretched writhed in her chest, then, and Kore forced her eyes down. Away from Thalos and his deadly, hypnotic beauty. Looking into the abyss in search of her monster.
Nyxarion was there.
Bioluminescent markings pulsing in a frantic beat as he fought through the bottom layers of the Gauntlet with nightmarish brute strength.
Where Thalos slipped through the Gauntlet in a series of increasingly elegant twists, Nyxarion forced what Thalos coaxed—crashing through walls, cracking through barriers. His massive shoulders barrel-rolling through currents that meant to tear him apart.
Relentless.
And far, far too slow.
The battle of war song clashed in a frenzy of subsonic harmonics, vibrating Kore’s teeth as they tried to carve easier paths for their sovereigns.
Nyxarion roared—the sound shaking the invisible bonds that suspended Kore in the middle of the Gauntlet.
But raw power couldn't match Thalos's precision. The Shallow King slipped through each corridor with an effortless grace. Almost lazy as he displayed his every sleek line, each glittering, decorated curve. Close enough that she could see his grin as he rode the current.
Halfway.
Nyxarion slammed into another unseen bend in the shifting prism.
Recoiling, dark tendrils of blood curled from a fresh gash across his shoulder.
And for one breath, Kore saw him clearly—obsidian eyes locked on hers, lips peeled back in a snarl of desperate anguish.
Fighting to reach her with everything he had, gaining speed and momentum, but… it wouldn't be enough.
She could see that, now.
The blood pulsing from Nyx's gills with every breath. Every miscalculation cost precious seconds he couldn't spare.
“Such raw power,” Thalos hummed, and she flinched. Whirling to find him so close. Only a few layers away.
He grinned.
All teeth.
The smile of a hunter who'd already calculated his prey's final breath.
Stomach twisting, Kore tried to scramble back, whispering, “No,” under her breath as her fins flared wide. Twisting. Helpless. “Poseidon, n-no…"
“Oh, yes,” Thalos grinned, snaking under a gleaming blade of crystalline water. “I wonder,” he crooned, “if raw power will be enough?”
Thalos was close enough now that Kore could see the cruel light in his eyes as he darted through the currents. "I've never felt a Siren's slick," he mused, his voice a melodic promise. "Perhaps before I kill you, I'll—"
A violent tremor cut his words short. Not from within the Gauntlet, but outside it.
Something massive surged from below.
She felt the basin shift.
Ruffling her scales before the sound reached her ears. Before her bones could ache.
It was a surge.
A void.
Jaws hanging slack, Kore watched with wide, shocked eyes as the wall of water surrounding them went white. Frothed by violence. Moving at a nauseating speed, as if rushing to fill a crater.
A massive undertow imploded. Leaving a vacuum that seized the Thalassari choir in a clenched fist that shattered their formation.
Radiant bodies tumbled down, their synchronized singing replaced by shrill notes of terror. High, elegant harmonies twisted into shrieks of alarm as they were ushered into the abyss.
The effect was immediate.
The Gauntlet trembled.
Thalos snarled, his perfect composure shattered. Fins caught on a corridor that collapsed, sending him reeling back with a frustrated snarl.
She laughed.
A pretty chime of surprise escaping her lips as she looked, and saw Nyxarion.