The Siren flinched. Her beguiling eyes going wide, rimmed in white. And her scales. They rippled. Lifting, venting heat, pulsing. Reflective, translucent, and then…gone.
Just for an instant.
There.
There.
Written in the elegant script of her terror. An instinctive, desperate attempt to flee what she couldn't possibly escape. It shone through.
A beacon just learning to shine.
"Beautiful," Thalos whispered, head tilting. Watching the way she flinched back from him. Drinking it in. Every desperate, fluttering pulse. Drunk on the implication, for the Hollow Court would see it. They'd recognize the Asterion claim stamped all over a mutant body they'd condemned as abomination.
And they’d be forced to accept his claim.
Thalos' grin grew sharp. "The Crucible will conclude," he said, speaking to his people without tearing his gaze from that alien, horrified glare. "By right of combat, I will lay claim to the Siren." And then, just to let his voice carry, to ensure Nyxarion might hear it as the dying king was swallowed by the black, he added, "She will be bred in service to Caelith Mare. And we shall see what comes of allowing her to live."
Shocked murmurs swirled all around the mid-ground.
An elder Thalassari hissed, dorsal fins snapping rigid in outrage—he could feel it rippling through the current. A buzzing against his scales and gills. "He means tokeepit?" the elder snarled, his voice a lash of static and ice. "The Accord is clear?—"
It was a protest drowned in a tide of something that had not known the brutality of war.
The young.
Weaned on history over slaughter, the youth pressed closer. Pupils flat disks of desperate interest, not daring to breach the ring where sovereigns did battle, yet a hum of excitement made the water shimmer.
The scent of estrus had threaded through the current. Overpowering the blood of kings.
Grinning, drunk on the flush of victory, Thalos watched a youth drift too close. His fins trembling as he tasted the water.
Nerissa turned her head, that ancient, ghostly gaze sending him flicking back into the swirl. But a dozen more lingered. Ravenous. Enthralled by the promise of the biology they might one day know for themselves—a heresy their elders would never forgive. One they'd fought a ruthless, bloody war to obliterate.
Inhaling, Thalos turned back to his court. There was work to be done. Convincing to navigate?—
The impact drove the very breath from his lungs.
There was no warning.
Not a whisper of danger.
Just the impact.
A dull thump that caught him in the ribs and sent him veering wildly away from his prize.
And then…
Agony.
White-hot. An explosion of blistering heat.
Eyes wide, fins pressed flat to his scales as he was dragged back through the current, Thalos looked.
Impaled.
Spines, obsidian black. Barbed.
Both buried in his belly. Under his ribs.
