And no Kore.
Without ceremony, Thalos let the camouflage drop.
Color flooded back across his scales in a cascade of opulent grace, materializing from nothing three body-lengths from the Abyssari king.
"Korrides."
Nyxarion bared his fangs, but let his Resonance gutter out and fall silent. “Asterion.”
It was a greeting delivered with the same careful indifference Thalos himself had used. Absent territorial posturing. As if it were becoming… routine.
Head tilting, lips parting to taste the current, Thalos frowned. “Where is she?” he asked before he could stop himself.
Irritated.
With himself.
Because he was… concerned.
Because Nyx had come without Kore and summoned him as if there was a great hurry.
“Is…” Fists clenched, Thalos hissed. Jaw working to crush the impulse. But the question wormed between his teeth anyway. “Is the child?—”
"Thriving." Grinning, molten silver eyes tracking Thalos’ unexpected struggle, the Abyssari king relented. Just for a moment. “Kore is sleeping. Well enough,” he added, voice dropping, laced with amusement. “to slaughter a Threnakar scholar in my throne room.”
Lips parting, Thalos blinked.
"Fine enough,” Nyxarion added, head tilting, spreading his massive hands, “to dissolve the Accord of Nisyros."
Thalos’ gills stuttered and clamped shut, his fins twitching with shock.
"And,” Nyx crooned, grinning openly now, taking pleasure in the retelling, “fine enough tostandbefore my father, at the bottom of the Black Sea, in the middle of my throne room, and declare a 'Covenant of Twin Venoms' before claiming the throne for herself."
Silence.
Jaws gaping, Thalos was rendered silent for perhaps the first time in all his life.
“She… She…what?”
The Accord of Nisyros.
Dissolved.
Eyes rimmed in white, Thalos’ lips parted. Closed. Parted again.
The audacity.
The sheer, unhinged cascade of implications. Each more preposterous, more catastrophic than the last. Centuries of law, the very foundation upon which Caelith Mare had been built. The trade agreements between distant clans, every territorial boundary that united the Shallows and divided them from the Deep.
His very power rested upon the Accord.
The authority that granted him governance over Pelagorn civilization
And a Siren—whose every breath was not technically legal—meant to replace it?
He laughed. A helpless bubble of hysteria. Embarassing how fast it rippled free. That it escaped his lips at all.
A Covenant of Twin Venoms.
