“You flatter me.”
She rolled her eyes, smiling. “And you’re the best voice in Thalassia. They don’t ask you to lead The Choir every season because of your charming personality.”
“Rude,” I muttered—but the compliment lodged somewhere hopeful, anyway.
Maleia had always seen past the mark. Past the whispers. To her, I wasn’t a prophecy or a problem. I was just her younger sister—the one she smuggled sea grapes for just to see me smile. The one whose hair she braided, telling terrible jokes to keep my hands from shaking before The Choir.
She made Thalassia almost feel like home.Almost.
Maleia fit here. Perfectly. Engaged to an Abyssal Sentinel—our mother’s choice, but one she claimed to welcome. The court adored her. The pods loved her—even the Mabonyn, and they disliked nearly everyone. She knew who she was. Where she belonged. Who would stand beside her.
I did not. No one wanted to tether themselves to a question the Tidekeepers couldn’t answer. Suitors had approached once or twice—curious about the girl born beneath a cursed sky, the strange light behind her eyes. But curiosity curdled quickly under pressure. Under warnings. Under the weight of what I might become.
My heart wanted something different anyway. Something wilder than duty. More dangerous. Not a polite partnership. Not a carefully brokered bond meant to keep pods politically balanced. I wanted a love that felt like a storm. Like fire underwater.Something that would see the parts of me that frightened everyone else—and stay.
I didn’t know whether such love existed.
“Are you ready for tonight?” Maleia asked softly.
No. I never felt whole afterward. Restoring the balance of the ocean is exhausting.
“Yes,” I lied.
She cupped my face, and for a moment, the restless ache quieted.
Then the current shifted. A cold ripple swept through the water—the subtle tug of the Court calling. Maleia’s fingers slipped from mine as duty tightened between us like a net. We swam toward the coral towers. Thalassia’s Court rose from the seafloor in spirals of opalescent stone, mosaics catching the glow of drifting jellyfish and refracting it into a thousand fractured colors. To an outsider, it might have looked like something out of legend—a radiant palace carved from the sea.
The water grew still as we crossed into the main chamber. Conversations tapered off. Eyes turned. Light fractured across the marble floor in precise patterns.
At the chamber’s heart stood the throne—massive, carved from pearl, faintly pulsing with cerulean light. And upon it sat Meris. Sea Goddess. Queen of Thalassia. Her hair moved like deep water, dark and endless. A crown of coral and gold curved overher brow. Her skin shone like a polished shell—flawless. Cold. She did not need to speak to quiet a room. The sea itself seemed to hush around her. Her gaze slid to me—cool, measuring. Once, when I was young, I had imagined warmth in it. Now I know better.
Around her, the Tidekeepers clustered in their kelp-robes, coral staffs gleaming. Calder, the eldest among them, watched me openly. His eyes were pale—sunlight striking ice.
“She doesn’t belong among us,” he had said more than once, his voice heavy with disdain.
The Court laughed.
I felt it now—the sensation of being counted. Measured. Not by the sea, but by eyes that lingered a moment too long. The feeling passed as quickly as it came. I shook it off, heart thudding at nothing, and turned my focus back to the altar.
Conversation dimmed as I passed, voices lowering just enough that I noticed. When I glanced back, smiles returned—carefully arranged, their masks slipped neatly into place.
The Choir began.
The pods arranged themselves in sweeping arcs facing the throne, their leaders at the fore. I took my place where I always did—slightly apart. Not aligned with any of them. Close enough to be watched.
An expectant silence fell.
I inhaled.
The first three notes left me, and then—
The scents hit—ozone, copper, crushed violets. My senses flooded, overwhelmed. The sensation tore through me too fast, too deep, leaving my limbs slow to respond when I tried to move.
A ring of glowing water spiraled around me, forming a rotating halo.
Violet-white light ripped across my skin, burning through the chamber in a violent pulse. For one impossible heartbeat, I felt weightless—like something had split open inside my ribcage.
A shockwave tore outward, cracking a marble tile beneath Meris’s throne.
