Watching it pulse in perfect sync with the memory of Kore's tight, deplorable little cunt clenching around his knot, Thalos' lips curled around a grin.
Shameless.
Greedy. His blood running hot with the thirst for… more. Another taste of what the king of the Deep had claimed for himself.
But Pelagorn spawn needed the venom of their sires to develop into healthy babes.
And in her? A Siren marked by two kings before conception had even occurred? Bred and knotted by both? Surely she would need both to ensure her child developed properly.
And who was there to say otherwise?
What was it but a gentle… push to convince them both of the risks? A little cultivated inevitability. After all… her skin was marked with his venom, too. And thus, the babe would need the attention of both potential sires…
Grinning now, Thalos dove.
Sinking into the riptide his reef breakers had braided into the poisoned tide. It was a controlled descent. A helical current, twisting through the depths. One that turned crushing pressure differential into manageable stages, sending the surface's warmth and minerals into the deep. Cycling the sluggish, ancient water in a corridor that would serve both courts.
Grant diplomatic access. Enable trade.
A polite fiction of alliance, while two kings warred over the same womb.
Descending, fins flared to catch the manufactured current, Thalos rode it down and let his scales ripple. The chromatic camouflage took him in a cold sweep of flexing scales blending with the lifeless palate of the Black Sea.
Chromatophores firing along his spine, bleeding pigment of darkness and mirroring it.
Black on black on black.
Opalescent scales shivered and vanished. Dissolving into the current, taking on the tactics of an apex reef predator. Invisible. Patient. A ghost in the tide.
All around him, the pressure built. Manageable. Squeezing his healing wounds where the scars sang in aching protest.
But he sailed through that helical, twisting current. Deeper. Past the threshold where Thalassari physiology began to labor, where his gills worked harder to extract oxygen from water that held almost none. Breathing easy in the riptide suffused with the surface warmth.
Until the spires of the forbidden city materialized below him.
Vorynthar.
No longer the fledgling reef he'd first invaded.
The heretical reef was transformed. Changed. Sprawling across the trench basin in aggressive, Abyssari architecture.
Pulsing with color that shouldn't exist in the Deep.
That unmistakable bioluminescent blue, yes. Expected. Thriving. But the city was alive with streaks of gold and crimson. Violet and silver. Colors Thalos recognized with a visceral jolt.
Hiscolors.
Woven into an Abyssari fortress.
It was… breathtaking.
Drawn deeper, he followed the light. Sailing through the riptide, past the Abyssari sentries nosing through the frigid dark. Their eyes gleaming and inky black. The vacant, ravenous stares of deep water predators scanning for movement.
Thalos slipped through the current without displacing it. Invisible. Hidden. Free to admire the grotesque formations of Nyxarion's Raskoril where no one might see his wonder. Inspecting the reef, where the coral had been twisted into eerie shapes that defied nature's order. Arches and spirals grown to suit Abyssari whims.
He saw everything and nothing.
Fixated to the source of the radiance that had pulled him back into the dark.
