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 toPelagornlaw.
Not to open-water kings, or the laws of the trench-born.
Not toher.
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 theAbyssari-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 hissecondgreatest 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.
