Her webbed feet stayed planted on Vorynthar's basin while the reef hummed beneath her soles, matching her pulse. Gold-violet chromatophores pulsed across her hips, belly, ribs—colors no Pelagorn had ever worn flashing warnings creatures of the Deep should have recognized as deadly.
Should haveheeded.
The first scholar reached for her shoulder.
His heavy palm settled against her skin…
… and the Black Seaboiled.
Violet light tore through the water around her. A detonation of everything she'd repressed. The discharge rippled out, flooding the antechamber between heartbeats.
The hand on her shoulder went rigid, fingers curled and locked in place.
Incandescent lightning surged through brine and bone.
Frozen. His fingers seized as the power raced through him. Violet light glowing vivid and bright beneath his scales.
The shape of him, thetrueshape of him, burned brighter than anything else.
Bones.
His skeleton.
The stark, alien difference between all of them. An absence of legs, where his spine was long and serpentine.
It was all there, seared into the dark between blinks.
Jaws frozen open in a soundless scream, elegant spine locked in a garish bow, for a long, horrific moment, they were frozen in tableau.
He, the pillar of grim suffering.
She, the chalice of wrath spilling over.
Before he was nothing—and she waseverything. Radiant. Ripe and growing heavy with life.
The silence washed in and swept away everything else.
All except the violet afterimage burned into their eyes.
And for several long moments, there was nothing at all. No movement. No sound.
Just a room at the bottom of the Black Sea, filled with leviathans of the Deep and a woman who shouldn't be.
It was a breathless vacuum.
A declaration.
It was her coronation.
And then…Nyxarion.
Uncoiling from where he'd been pressed back in the shadows, he approached from behind. Hands greedy when they covered hers, cradling their child where it was nestled inside her. Safe from corruption.
His touch was worship.
Heavy.
But his grin was all fangs and feral, greedy pride as he touched the female who'd just slaughtered a trench-forged Abyssari male without lifting a finger. "You sweet, precious girl," he murmured against her gills. Checking on her. The babe.