She didn't kick or thrash. Wasn't trying to escape what she understood to be inevitable.
But the Sovereign of Vorynthar was going to work for his prize.
From above, the current shifted.
At first, it was a subtle change. A tiny tremor in the current that grew. The ripples of pressure spread through the abyss.
Coming from Nyxarion.
His Resonance.
The hunting song purred through the great barrel of his chest.
A sound below hearing. Pure vibration rolling through the dark waters, it was a melodic thrum. The dirge of the hunter.
Each throb sent a pulse rippling through the water.
And she knew he could read it. Feel the vibration, the energy of what his eyes couldn't see. It was the instinct of a deep-sea predator who needed to stalk what couldn't be seen.
Still, Kore didn't move. Her scales locked in the fragile mimicry of a vacant sea. Gills hardly daring to move as she sank.
Following, tail flicking in a lazy, confident spiral, he trailed her into the dark. Bleeding. Scales fluttering in his wake as the worst of the damage saw them sloughed away.
Yet he moved with the unconscious grace of a king.
His purr chased her into the Deep. Pupils blown wide enough to reduce the silver to a crackling ring of heat, he scanned what he couldn't see. Hair billowing back from his face, every sharp line a brutal kind of elegance.
He was a predator.
Vicious. Deadly.
And unbearably beautiful, this beast who'd drowned her. Shaped her into something more.
This ferocious, callous male who'd built her a kingdom before he'd even known her name.
Who'd curled around her, defiant before his people, and declared her his religion. Fought for the right to fill her with his seed. Claim her swollen belly as his own.
Throat working, Kore's jaw flexed.
Because her body ached. Her cunt slicked with the heat of betrayal.
For she would not be his broodmare.
Her feet kissed the silt at the bottom of the trench. Soft. Welcoming. The impact sent a puff of debris up around her ankles as Vorynthar welcomed her. The Raskoril reached for her heat. Drinking in her scent, even as the parasitical coral filtered the anoxic poison from the current.
Toes curling in the sediment, Kore didn't flee.
She lay back against the coral.
Let it embrace her.
Waiting.
Scales rippling to match the coral beneath her—pink through violet, blue to black—mimicking until she was all but indistinguishable from the body of the reef.
A living shadow sewn into breathing walls.
Waiting. Fingers trailing over the coral's ridges and hollows. Feeling the pulse of something alien hum through the water. It was the reef itself.
