Page 70 of Brine and Bone
There was a moment of silence charged with a thing Thalos could not name. “Dissolving the Accord is going to need more than fucking merit,” he snapped, off balance. Hating it.
Teeth flashing, Nyx nodded. "It’s a pact that might serve us both.” Silver eyes gleaming, voice too soft to carry further than Thalos’ own ears, Nyx said, “It could return Sirens to the seas, Asterion."
CHAPTER 16
The sounds came first.
Tiny plips. Crackling pops that pattered against her eardrums.
Kore frowned. Eyes squeezed shut.
It was an irritating thing. A sound that threaded through the heavy pall of deep slumber and tugged her up from the fog. Insistent. Plinking and strange. Something she didn’t recognize beneath the usual symphony of tides and movement in the trench.
Groaning, she squirmed. Exhausted beyond anything she’d ever known. This wasn’t the ache of early pregnancy nor the bone-deep weariness of transformation.
It was worse.
Fatigue that reached all the way to her marrow.
As though every nerve in her body had fired at once and now lay spent, smoldering in the aftermath.
The plips continued.
Pattering and insistent. A rhythm of monotony she couldn’t ignore.
Sighing, she opened her eyes.
The throne room.
Nyxation’s father. That ancient, vengeful face carved from bottomless contempt. Threnakar’s scholars. Reaching, greedy hands. And the promise to harvest her baby. To tear it from her womb.
Dissect her body.
The fury reignited in her veins before she drew her next breath. Scales flaring hot, blazing with the heat of her temper. And in an instant, the irritating crinkle was forgotten.
Usurped by something new.
A crackle of electric rage.
Queen's lightning still lurked inside her. Waiting. Sparking and dying and sparking again across the smooth, rounded horizon of her belly where her baby squirmed in sleepy circles.
Looming in the dark, a shape emerged from the gloom.
Serakh.
The Abyssari general Nyx adored. Palms raised in supplication, fingers spread. TheVirelii'slips parted, and a low, crooning song shivered in the throne room.
"Peace, sweet Siren," Serakh hummed, fins fluttering as she approached. "All is well. Your baby is safe. Nyxarion has left you well guarded."
Trembling, Kore made a sound as that melody settled into her chest. Warm and soft. Singing to the bottomless well of female rage boiling inside her. Startled that her muscles flinched, then relaxed. Soothed by the female voice crooning an ancient hymn of comfort.
One she hadn’t realized she needed, for it was a balm to a wound she hadn’t felt hemorrhaging until the antidote was thrust upon her.
Loneliness.
There was no other name for it.
That she’d been so utterly consumed by merely surviving Nyxarion and her transformation. The endless, territorialposturing of kings. By the precious, delicate baby growing inside her. Absorbed by the weight she hadn’t realized was sinking her until Serakh’s aria had flooded through the cracks and forced her to feel it.
