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.
