A tiny, eager smirk touched the edge of his lips.
Mostlife.
He prepared to fill his lungs with the last few breaths of oxygen-rich water as he dove into the poisonous layers. Slowing his heart, readying himself to seal his gills against the searing, acidic waters he’d find at the bottom, he snaked past cliff walls that dropped sharp and jagged in the gloom. Sheer black basalt dusted in silt, untouched for eons, for the current here was mild.
Cold.
Lifeless, to all but the untrained eye.
No kelp beds swayed here. Not a single flourishing reef teeming with life.
There were only volcanic vents chugging away into the gloom. Vomiting up noxious black clouds of boiling, mineral-rich water unfit for all but the most extreme forms of life.
Mats of festering bacteria, but little else.
It was hostile. Raw. Barren and unyielding. Hideous and uninhabitable. A place so toxic that his father had refused to colonize it and rejected every attempt to plan around it.
It was the closest thing he now had to a home.
Sweeping down, driving deeper into hostile waters, the ache in his joints eased. Replaced by a blistering fury that warned of damage to his lungs that only grew with each heaving breath of brine he pulled over his gills. Chest compressing the deeper he descended, he took as few breaths as he could stand and let the trident drag him down as he conserved his energy. Dropping until he could see the bottom of that cursed basin.
He took his last breath and entered the deadly anoxic layer.
Fins flaring, he caught the current and twisted upright. Hovering for a moment, fins stabilizing his aggressive descent, he paused before striking the seabed with the butt of the trident,sending a shower of blinding blue sparks cascading into the oppressive dark.
The light died in a bronze twinkle.
Swallowed whole.
For a moment, there was nothing.
Silence.
And then…
The current lifted in foggy interest, deepest shadows curling and writhing awake in a sluggish, groggy pull. And there, at the edges of his awareness, the whisper of ancient life drawn to the flash of light.
He smiled, showing teeth.
Not so barren after all.
Just… waiting.
For a king.
Planting his hand against the basalt wall, he fought the burn in the heavy water. The hostile edge of a place that was never made to accept a ruler.
But he wasAbyssari-born.Bred for the weight and cold of the deep long before his people had been contained there. His scales were thicker than the otherPelagornspecies—his bones heavy and dense enough for depths few others could endure.
His spines flicked, wicked and deadly. Holding posture in the beating heart of the trench. In any other sea, it was a lure for the drifting scavengers of the abyss.
Predators that couldn’t endure here.
Not yet.
Still, he needed to be sure.
Thrumming low in his chest, he issued a summons.
