Eyes half-lidded, trident clenched in a merciless fist, Nyx lowered his head and let his purr roll through the trench.
It lifted the sluggish, ancient current. Growing thick as the deep hung on the sound that wasn’t. Carrying his summons beyond, to where he knew they waited.
He could sense them poised on the edge of his kingdom.
Waiting.
Scales lifting in rows of healing, iridescent armor, Nyx shed the heat trapped close to his skin. Letting it roll off him in shimmering swaths that agitated the bacteria nested in the grooves between his scales.
He was a beacon in the dark.
Eyes flicking open, Nyx watched the black around him ripple with the hum of his Resonance.
Ascending beyond the ridge of coral, he released a final note.
Pure and commanding.
The melody of kings.
It echoed through the deep, dense with promise and challenge both.
When his lips curved, it was not an expression of joy.
No.
It was hunger.
Greed.
A longing to see the Abyssari gathered together once more.
It didn’t take long for the first of them to penetrate the dark.
The shadows bulged and flexed, then birthed a shade with teeth. Frothing currents that blistered with cautious motion.
The Abyssari.
At first, a trickle of Pelagorn slipped through the current. Hesitant and unsure, but from the gloom, they came.
Dozens, then hundreds.
Coiled and wary as they were granted entry into the Black Sea—no longer a toxic basin void of all life.
Vorynthar was thriving. Already. Even without the reef breakers to guide the coral’s growth. Faster than he’d expected, given how poisonous the Black Sea’s throat was.
It was her.
Kore.
Gods, the way she’d taken him. Glassy eyes beseeching in the dark, pale flesh stretching to swallow every aching inch.
His cock lurched, twitching at the taste lingering in his every breath. The memory of that silken grip that clutched his shaft with desperate need, milking and clenching, begging for his knot. Longing for a true rut that would take hours and see her safely into estrus.
And he’d denied her.
Usedher to perfume the black waters.
Something… foreign twisted in his chest, then. Something that ached at the thought of her silent pleas, her liquid grey eyes. Her silly twisting fingers as she’d begged to be fucked while her voice was silent.
