And it had felt divine.
It was written just there, in the hard set of Nyx's jaw. In the way his chest heaved, his grip growing tight where Kore was pinned to his chest. Drunk on his venom. Writhing. Tiny sounds peeping through her lips.
"Rewriting her, stroke by stroke?" Thalos murmured, rolling as he slid through the water. "Flooding her after I've touched what you claimed? There's no ecstasy in the ocean that compares," he drawled, daring to enter Nyxarion's kill radius. "Is there?"
Before Nyx could respond, Kore keened.
The toxin in her veins surging, she uttered a sound that spiked through Thalos' skull with more precision than even Cymareth might boast.
Siren song.
Scales blazing gold-to-violet in rolling waves, her fingers curled into flimsy little claws against Nyxarion's shoulders.
"Please," she gasped, gills flaring. Dainty fins spread. "Please, I need it… I can't… ithurts," she hissed, staggered and stuttering. Desperate.
And from below, deep in the bottom of the trench, Vorynthar pulsed. A deep, arterial throb of light radiated up from the dark. Blurred by the great distance, it was a golden hum of light that had no business existing in this once sterile sea.
The water grew thick with the scent of a Siren.
Slick.
Electric and bright.
Citrus and ozone.
But beneath it? Something sweeter. A thing that hooked into the hindbrain and pulled.
Going still, Thalos stopped circling.
Polar eyes wide as the pupils yawned and swallowed the glacial blue, Thalos looked. At her. Seeing not the marvel in the Deep, but Vorynthar’s living heart. And then, helplessly, the chromatophores along his spine fired in a cascade of silver and violent gold that he couldn't suppress.
Gaze dropping to Kore's belly, hidden under Nyxarion's burly forearm, he drank it in. The biolume pulsing in colors that belonged to both and neither.
Gold bleeding into violet.
Cyan fractured by silver.
A spectrum of living colors not seen since the Accord of Nisyros had been signed—perhaps not even before that. Because even before the Accord that was older than both of them, creating a Siren was not a thing done by two males at once.
And certainly not by two kings.
Nerissa's face surfaced behind Thalos' eyes.
Not the way she'd looked in life—aVireliiwho defined elegance, her chromatophores always perfectly controlled in that maddening way of the ancients.
No.
Thalos was doomed to remember her the way she'd looked at the end.
Fins shredded.
Scales dull and cloudy. Milky and growing a mossy film.
Her body draped across his chest while the venom she'd poured into healing his wounds ate her alive from within, and her mouth moved against his ear with the last breath she'd ever draw.
Bring them back, Sovereign. Swear it.
He had. Pledging his life to Nerissa's final gift without hesitation. Not because he was dying.