Ink through water.
A cloud of seething fury.
The Abyssari.
Merging into a single, snarling entity as they fought back with a furor utterly absent from the ethereal choir above.
Kore watched them rise, and knew.
The Gauntlet had begun.
She felt it in her scales. Thrumming in the delicate filaments of her new gills.
All around her, the water twisted in unseen shapes. Built by song. Crafted by harmonies outside of her human understanding.
But if she didn’t look right at it, she… she could see it.
Intricate spirals carved through the black waters. Ripples that shimmered with glittering edges. Transparent ribbons—some surging up, toward the light, others plunging down, into the deep frigid dark.
Both choirs shaped it.
Battling for dominance with their haunting voices.
Every few moments, with each new note, the entire gleaming structure shivered and shifted. Corridors that had led up, grew twisted and flexed. Shifting away.
And then, from opposite ends of that spiraling vortex, she saw them.
Two figures positioned at the gauntlet's outermost edges. One luminous, the other shadowed.
Both at war.
Over…her.
The clear chime of a horn cut through the water, singing in Kore’s blood.
Heart thundering in her ears, she watched with eyes better suited to the light. Unable to tear her gaze from Thalos.
The Shallow King was the water itself.
Each twist of his tail was in perfect, effortless harmony with a shift in the Gauntlet’s corridors. No wasted motion, no hedging or hesitation. He threaded through the current with a lazy twist of gleaming silver scales. Letting his fins catch the light, his every movement beautiful.
Breathtaking.
And he was gaining.
Cutting through the currents between them with mathematical precision.
Something wretched writhed in her chest, then, and Kore forced her eyes down. Away from Thalos and his deadly, hypnotic beauty. Looking into the abyss in search of her monster.
Nyxarion was there.
Bioluminescent markings pulsing in a frantic beat as he fought through the bottom layers of the Gauntlet with nightmarish brute strength.
Where Thalos slipped through the Gauntlet in a series of increasingly elegant twists, Nyxarion forced what Thalos coaxed—crashing through walls, cracking through barriers. His massive shoulders barrel-rolling through currents that meant to tear him apart.
Relentless.
And far,fartoo slow.
