Chapter 21
Drawing a breath through his gills, slow and deliberate, Thalos savoured the scent of blood in the water. Of his victory. His Siren, approaching estrus. Letting his eyes drift closed when the delicious music of her scream rippled over his skin.
Perfect.
He paused, waiting for the chime to announce the end of the Spiral. Watching Nyxarion sink, observing as the ribbons of blood followed him down.
Tail limp, frozen in a full, stunned flare, the trench king drifted. One hand pressed to the gills on the right side of his neck. Desperate to draw a breath that wouldn't come.
Rolling his shoulders, ignoring the splintering agony slicing through his ribs, Thalos grinned. Watching as Nyxarion's biolume guttered and flicked. Going dim.
The chime would sound.
His win would be announced to the gathered courts.
Turning his glacial eyes toward the audience of Pelagorn, sweeping over the Hollow Court and the trench-born, Thalos turned until he found his prize.
Kore.
His bride.
The instant that chime sounded. She'd be his. Sanctioned by Spiral law.
Flicking his tail, he started to turn.
When light caught his eye.
A shimmer.
One he recognized.
Intimately.
Thalos stilled.
Watching the pattern shift. Different than the glitter and swirl of the Pelagorn moving around the mid-ground. This was reflective. Translucent. An opalescent sheen that flickered with the ragged pulse of her terror. Her Abyssari biolume dimmed with every shift of color.
And he knew.
At a glance.
What it was.
Chromatic camouflage.
Gills flaring on a shocked breath, Thalos blinked.
It was proof. Evidence that his Thalassari venom had fostered change within her. Fundamental change, affording her one of the Asterion line's most sacred gifts. Invisibility in the hunt.
He forgot the chime that would signal his victory.
Abandoned the sight of Nyxarion sinking into the deep.
Neglected the court, his wounds, and any whisper of his ego.
All of it, forsaken.
For this.
He snaked closer, leaving a trail of ichor in his wake. Refusing to blink, his eyes fixed to her grotesque, perfect scales.
The Siren flinched. Her beguiling eyes going wide, rimmed in white. And her scales. They rippled. Lifting, venting heat, pulsing. Reflective, translucent, and then… gone.
Just for an instant.
There.
There.
Written in the elegant script of her terror. An instinctive, desperate attempt to flee what she couldn't possibly escape. It shone through.
A beacon just learning to shine.
"Beautiful," Thalos whispered, head tilting.
Watching the way she flinched back from him.
Drinking it in. Every desperate, fluttering pulse.
Drunk on the implication, for the Hollow Court would see it.
They'd recognize the Asterion claim stamped all over a mutant body they'd condemned as abomination.
And they’d be forced to accept his claim.
Thalos' grin grew sharp. "The Crucible will conclude," he said, speaking to his people without tearing his gaze from that alien, horrified glare.
"By right of combat, I will lay claim to the Siren.
" And then, just to let his voice carry, to ensure Nyxarion might hear it as the dying king was swallowed by the black, he added, "She will be bred in service to Caelith Mare.
And we shall see what comes of allowing her to live. "
Shocked murmurs swirled all around the mid-ground.
An elder Thalassari hissed, dorsal fins snapping rigid in outrage—he could feel it rippling through the current. A buzzing against his scales and gills. "He means to keep it?" the elder snarled, his voice a lash of static and ice. "The Accord is clear—"
It was a protest drowned in a tide of something that had not known the brutality of war.
The young.
Weaned on history over slaughter, the youth pressed closer. Pupils flat disks of desperate interest, not daring to breach the ring where sovereigns did battle, yet a hum of excitement made the water shimmer.
The scent of estrus had threaded through the current. Overpowering the blood of kings.
Grinning, drunk on the flush of victory, Thalos watched a youth drift too close. His fins trembling as he tasted the water.
Nerissa turned her head, that ancient, ghostly gaze sending him flicking back into the swirl.
But a dozen more lingered. Ravenous. Enthralled by the promise of the biology they might one day know for themselves—a heresy their elders would never forgive.
One they'd fought a ruthless, bloody war to obliterate.
Inhaling, Thalos turned back to his court. There was work to be done. Convincing to navigate—
The impact drove the very breath from his lungs.
There was no warning.
Not a whisper of danger.
Just the impact.
A dull thump that caught him in the ribs and sent him veering wildly away from his prize.
And then…
Agony.
White-hot. An explosion of blistering heat.
Eyes wide, fins pressed flat to his scales as he was dragged back through the current, Thalos looked.
Impaled.
Spines, obsidian black. Barbed.
Both buried in his belly. Under his ribs.
Convulsing, Thalos couldn't draw a breath.
Chromatic scales flickered wildly, trying to shift. Brilliant crimson bled to sickly yellow. A pulse of violet that betrayed the true nature of the distress flooding his system.
It was a display meant to communicate surrender. Danger. Alarm.
Involuntary.
The shade of a desperate, mortal blow.
"You talk too much, Asterion," the trench king snarled, scarcely audible through the damage marking his gills. Eyes chips of molten, seething silver. His biolume dim and flickering with the evidence of his own grievous injuries.
One palm pressed flat to savaged gills, his other arm hanging limp. Body etched with the dozens of brutal lacerations.
But his tail.
That endless, serpentine length.
And then, with the sort of clarity that came with blistering hindsight, Thalos realized his fatal mistake.
The chime hadn't sounded.
He hadn't won.
And then the venom hit his blood.
Spine twisting, impaled, Thalos' teeth flashed. Pressed flat to the bulk of Nyxarion's tail as the trench king dragged him through the black waters. He felt the molten flood of fire pumping through his veins. Absent any whisper of modulation, his body was flooded with Abyssari venom.
Raw, uncontrolled savagery.
It was a taboo.
One that forced his scales to ripple in desperate submission. Chromatic camouflage strobing in a wild effort to process the heat when he'd been born for the cold.
Crimson, cerulean, veridianamberyellowblueblackblackblackblack—
Vision blurring, he clawed at the scales. Raking the dense muscle, forcing him down.
Nyxarion dragged him closer, grinning. "Sloppy, Asterion," he rumbled, voice a deep hiss of tectonic plates grinding through the Deep. "But you were right," he said, a plume of ichor spilling over his fingers. "My Siren deserves far better than this."
Glacial eyes rimmed in white, Thalos' throat tightened. Constricting as Abyssari venom ignited in his veins. A clenched fist forcing his respiratory system into vicious spasm.
Bewildered.
Utterly.
Because he'd seen it. Watched Nyxarion's biolume gutter into darkness.
But the chime hadn't sounded.
He was a fool. A stupid, doomed fool.
As if to mock him, to confirm that his injuries were mortal, the chime rang through the current.
A single haunting tone that sang in the gaps between the heartbeats of everyone watching the spectacle.
It said one thing—Nyxarion Korrides. Victor.
The trench king grinned, tearing thalos off his spines.
Agony followed the barbs where they tore through his meat. His chromatic display hemorrhaging color violently, in wild, nauseating pulses.
Thalos couldn't so much as scream as his blood—dark red, almost black—pulsed from his wounds in thick, ominous plumes.
Thrumming deep in the barrel of his chest, Nyxarion roared.
A raw primal sound that belonged to the volcanic rifts in the deepest trenches. It was a sound that rolled through the mid-ground. A violent declaration.
A summons for the Abyssari to indulge in their victory.
And Nyxarion. He hung in the current, spines flared. Not unscathed, wounds wretched, ribboned with lacerations that helped to turn the black waters red.
Grinning.
Spines tucked flat, Thalos was immobilized. Body locked. Abyssari venom searing his veins.
Nyxarion didn't spare him another moment of attention. Not a glance.
The trench king whirled, moving his massive, serpentine body, displacing the wall of Pelagorn who'd come to watch the Hollow Court dominate, he moved to claim his bride.
Nerissa was curled around the Siren. A protective twist that spoke volumes.
But Nyxarion would not be denied access to his prize. The prey he'd slithered through death itself to claim. Extending his functional arm, silver eyes burning through the haze of gore poisoning the mid-ground, he spoke a single word. "Kore."
Her name trembled through the water with a sub-audible hum.
A summoning.
A mistake.
Thalos saw it.
Even through the haze of venom sending him into spasm.
Kore gasped, gills flaring wide. Flushed crimson. Grey-gold eyes rimmed in white, shot through with shock.
Fear.
The primal instinct of prey.
Her scales rippled.
Just once.
But it was enough. Her edges softened. Dissolved into a teasing pulse of that Abyssari biolume, before it dimmed. Ink dispersing through the tide.
Flickering once.
Twice more.
And then she vanished.
Nyxarion lunged, just an instant too slow.
She was gone.
Silence crashed through the mid-ground.
And Thalos, frozen and hemorrhaging, laughed. Because he'd given her the power to escape the Abyssari king, if she chose.
Roaring, Nyxarion launched after her.
Thalos watched.
As long as he could.
As long as his fracturing vision would allow, knowing it was futile. That Kore wouldn't get far without a tail to propel her through the abyss. Not with her estrus upon her. Her scent a beacon that would lure her king toward her, despite the forbidden veil disguising her flesh.
She'd falter, the precious thing.
Inexperience would betray her, and Nyxarion would reclaim his bride.
It was a thought that should have filled him with a seething, jealous fury. Might have ignited the tempest that had driven Thalos through three trials.
But there was only the lingering heat of Abyssari venom.
And Nerissa.
Pale, her wretched scales drifting into his view.
The ancient Virelii was haggard. Sickness clung to her every glittering curve.
Yet she moved with grace that betrayed her great age.
Elegance in motion, Nerissa's milky eyes drifted over his ruined abdomen.
And then, "Sirens," she murmured, her voice a low thrum that cut through the brutal clang of Nyxarion's hunting dirge. "You see, now."
Filaments blanching white, Thalos' gills fluttered. Weak. Failing.
"I shall save you, Sovereign," she murmured, her webbed fingers reaching to touch the edge of tattered flesh.
"I shall honor my duty to the Hollow Court.
One last time." Milky eyes, blanched with age, bore into those that were glacial and wide with the kiss of death.
"But you shall undo what your father did.
Return the Sirens to these seas. Go. Claim one for yourself. "
It was a command.
Imperial.
One Thalos understood intrinsically, for it was written in scars, etched into the surface of his very bones.
Nerissa wasn't offering a service—she was ordering a revolution.
The repair of everything the Accord of Nisyros had dismantled, the sum total of everything Thalos himself had been tasked with upholding.
It was the price of his life.
Throat working, Thalos nodded
Just once.
It was enough.
Nerissa's weathered face was serene. Impassive. Reflecting nothing. Not relief nor triumph.
There was only a cool, sure acceptance.
A new accord.
One paid for in blood.
Pressing both hands to his wounds, she began to sing.
It was a melody wrought from the ancient times, one far older than the Virelii sacrificing the last of her strength to give him another chance.
Older than the war that had silenced the oceans and extinguished the Sirens.
A healing chant, blended with precious sacrifice.
And even as each note peeled the years from her aging form, she began to fail.
Scales lifting in beautiful, elegant sheets. Glittering petals that were carried through the current in a twisting ribbon of aching beauty.
The flames of Abyssari venom were banked. Gaping, savage holes in his belly knit together as the breath returned to his chest.
"Thank you," he tried to say…
… but the darkness swallowed him first.