And then he saw them.
Sprawled across the trench floor, nine meters of obsidian muscle and plated scale was twisted through the reef. Nyxarion's fins were shredded, his gills clapping and ragged where they bore fresh scars to match Thalos' own.
Still healing from the Crucible.
The beast looked… diminished.
But his arms were full.
Impaled on his knot, wretched, alien legs splayed in a lewd embrace, the Siren was draped across his bulk. A body slumped in a blend of exhausted bliss.
He could see it in her scales.
Etched in her skin.
The sunset burning at the bottom of the sea.
And her belly.
Still small. Hardly enough to fill his palm, but noticeable now. Alive with the shifting color pulsing throughout Vorynthar's cursed corridors and reaching, ravenous spires. Hypnotic waves of color that shifted in a contented rainbow.
Gold. Violet. Indigo. Pearlescent silver.
One massive hand cradled her skull. Nyxarion's claws were buried in the floating silk of honey brown as his chest rumbled with a subsonic hum.
Hanging motionless above them, watching and invisible, Thalos lurked.
Drinking in her scent.
Citrus and ozone,yes, but richer now. Deeper. Layered with something warm and animal that pregnancy had made thick. Real. It curled through the water, threading past his stillness and his silence and his invisible scales to settle on his tongue.
His pupils dilated.
Watching Nyxarion trace the blade of her jaw. Petting her. The tips of wicked claws Thalos had felt tear through his flesh, dragged over her delicate edges, drawing faint, elegant trails of biolume in their wake.
Crooning to her as she dozed impaled on his knot. A tectonic rumble, pitched well below hearing. It was felt. Echoed through the structure of the reef, until Vorynthar hummed in tune with its creator.
It was the sort of gentleness that was obscene to behold from a beast meant to crush bone and rend flesh.
Intimate.
Raw, animal contentment between lovers.
Sedated by the beast, Kore was still. Her chest moving in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Gills fluttering in a soft pattern he didn't quite recognize.
Not at first.
And then understanding bloomed.
She was…asleep.
Dreaming.
Like a human.
Surrounded by predators who never stopped hunting. Never slept, for the ocean did not pause, and neither did its sons and daughters.
Pelagorn merely… dimmed. Maintaining vigilance, a perpetual half-awareness that kept predators alive and prey moving.