The gateway opened into a broad corridor of living architecture—walls that breathed, floors that rippled with slow peristaltic motion, every surface encrusted with coral formations that threw light in spectrums Thalos recognized, but had never expected to see in the Deep.
"Raskoril," Pelagius said, voice a quiet hiss. "Everywhere. Growing in structures never documented. No carved stone. No shaped bone."
"And the color?" Syrathis pressed, as if he'd already been considering a hypothesis.
Hesitating, Pelagius' faded pewter scales caught the ambient glow, and for a moment the elder looked almost young again, bathed in light that shouldn't exist.
And then, "It glows with the hues of a coastal sunset," he murmured. Voice rough and low, as if it cost him to admit it. "Gold and violet laced with crimson. Colors that belong to shallow reefs, to warm water and sunlit places a thousand meters above us."
Thalos watched the scholars' faces—the grudging awe they couldn't quite suppress, the professional hunger warring with racial horror.
That the Abyssari reef breakers had built this kingdom? It was an affront to the scholars' ancient, Thalassari hearts.
Every arch and glowing, ravenous tendril pumping clean water into the dead zone was the work of trench-born hands.
Nyxarion's work.
"What Korrides has accomplished in this trench is impressive," Thalos allowed, and the admission cost him very little given the resplendent wonder sprawled all around them. "But it is nothing compared to the Siren."
Silence.
Left long enough to grow heavy with all that went unspoken.
"The Siren is an abomination," Pelagius droned at length, twisting, his voice injected with a hiss of venom. "The Accord exists precisely to prevent?—"
"A violation of every principle the Hollow Court has upheld for three generations," Syrathis finished, his blind eyes burning with the wrath of frigid certainty.
Vorthane's scarred tail lashed once against the seabed. "We forged the Accord in blood. Every Siren line was extinguished before your birth. For a reason. If Korrides has bred one back into existence, the sentence is death—for the creatureandits maker."
Their outrage poisoned the waters of the riptide, the scent sharp and acrid, spreading until the Raskoril polyps recoiled.
Rippling in a silent rebuke.
For a moment, Thalos let it build. Allowing the ancients to vent their fury in this empty corridor where it couldn't reach the wrong ears.
"Enough.”
“My lord,” Syrathis wheedled, barbles turning toward his king. “You must see reason?—”
"Unless you’re particularly eager to join Nerissa and die in this trench,” Thalos hissed, scales catching the light, “you will keep your opinions between your teeth.”
And then, twisting to show those who could see, Thalos displayed the vicious scars where Nyx's spines had impaled him during the Crucible of Bone.
“Nyxarion Korrides is nine meters of territorial rage coiled around every inch of that girl,” Thalos drawled, tracing his scars with the tip of his claws. “He will not stop to distinguish between scholarly objection and existential threat. You will observe," he said again, and left no room for discussion. "And you will save your moral outrage for the journey home."
It was then, as the attitude of the ancients grew hesitant and frosty, Thalos felt it. A shift. The taste of something electric and bright in the current.
Perfuming dark waters.
Slick.
Kore.
The corridor pulsed gold around them.
A summons. One he felt in his gills.
It was a sip of something warm. The slightest shift in salinity before the flavor burst across his palate. Not perfume, nor the deliberate chemical signalingVireliiused during courtship.