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 theDeep, 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.
