And then he’d vanish before the next tide, leaving Nyxarion to his silent vigil. To feed Kore in careful dollops, while she languished in her pale torpor.
Eyes fixed to the steady pulse of light where her belly grew, for it was the only whisper of warmth left in his kingdom.
Fingers flexing around the Trident’s shaft, he settled against the bleached wall of her den and watched. Guarding his precious, divine flame.
Vorynthar's fragile beating heart.
It was a stillness that couldn’t last.
He felt it on the current. A shift. The borders of the Black Sea hummed with something vast, screaming through the silent corridors of his frozen city. Gills flaring, eyes slitted and narrowed, Nyxarion’s gills flared. Pupils constricted to tiny dots of furious wrath.
The Trident blazed a brilliant, frothing white when the ancient weapon tasted his wrath.
He knew the flavor poisoning his tide.
Threnakar.
His father had brought the army of the Deep Court into the Black Sea.
Eyes sliding toward the throne room, Nyx turned. Pupils bottomless pools of seething black. The Trident’s tines glowed with enough heat to separate brine from the tide. Boiling the dark waters when he turned away from Kore’s steady breathing.
“Justice!” his father called, taunting and loud enough for all to hear the wretched tenor of his cruelty. “Retribution! I have come to claim what I am owed. To cleanse this putrid trench and exterminate the abomination you thrust upon us. To rid us of her stink. But here I find something far more… poetic.”
Spines flaring, Nyx’s scales pressed flat to his length. Keeping the heat trapped tight to his muscles as he readied himself for war.
“Have you killed another, boy?” his father called, voice flooding the quiet with a tone heavy with delighted cruelty. He laughed, then. The sound a deep thrum that set Nyxarion’s teeth on edge. “A dying reef filled with ghosts. Tell me, exile, has your bride been crushed by the weight of your heresy?”
Blue light hummed between obsidian scales, coiled energy desperate for an outlet, but Nyxarion had gone still. The trident steaming in the current the only whisper of what boiled in his chest.
"You built an empire on rot,” his father crooned, treading closer now. Just outside of the throne room. “Tell me you didn’t truly believe such a thing might hold the Black Sea?"
Nyx didn’t move. Not one fin. Not a single blink.
He remained still.
A leviathan coiled at the mouth of his bride’s den, guarding the only light left in the abyss. Ready.
Laughter rolled through the corridors as Nyxaroth approached. “Bring it to me, boy,” he crooned, gloating. Drunk of a victory not yet secured. “Deliver the Siren to me, face your judgment,” he called, voice lilting with the practiced cadence of a speech memorized. “Surrender the creature and I will allowthis”—he paused, voice laced with fathoms of endless contempt—”outpostto remain. Under Threnakar’s banner.”
Nyx almost laughed.
At the audacity. The nerve of such daring to call Vorynthar an outpost. To deign to strip the heretical reef of sovereignty, as if it might only exist at the elder Korrides’ pleasure.
But he could feel them. The Deep Court. Dozens of bodies moving through the water, touching Vorynthar’s arterial passages as they slipped into the city. Cutting off exits. Claiming chokepoints.
And he knew. That his father hadn’t come to bother with negotiations.
He’d come for her.
Their child.
Spines lifted, Sera’s silhouette flickered in his peripherals. Assuming a position at the antechamber’s mouth. Silent. Surrounded by two sentries ready for battle.
But they were three bodies against an army of trench-born, brute strength forged in the crushing dark of the Tonga Trench.
The full weight of his own army numbered fewer than thirty soldiers. Threnakar’s numbers would be ten times that number. Perhaps more.
They would die here. All of them.
