"There is no peace in the deep, only truths the surface cannot bear."
I sank back into my chair with a slow grace, one arm draped along the side, the other curling around my knee as I crossed my legs. The great hall had gone still again, but this time, the silence was not awkward. It was expectant, and my eyes fixed on Caelan.
He avoided my gaze at first his expression lined with that familiar exasperation, but he could feel the weight of it, feel that I was done waiting. That the room would not move, would not breathe, until he spoke. He exhaled sharply through his nose, brushing a hand back through his silver-blue hair.
"I didn't want to talk about this," he muttered and huffed, more to himself than to me, then sat straighter in his chair.
"It's old," Caelan said finally, his voice lower now, no longer laced with his usual flippancy. "Old magic. Older than even the Abyss remembers. Dark… but not chaotic. It is not mindless."
He looked up then, and for a moment, his gaze locked with mine. "It's aware."
A ripple of discomfort shivered through the room. Even Thalia stopped mid-bite, her spoon hanging suspended in the air. Ellowen watched Caelan with a flicker of unease, her fingers tightening around the stem of her glass. I remained quiet, letting the weight of his words fill the space between us.
Caelan glanced down at his hands, fingers tapping lightly against the table. "It's not rising of its own will," he continued. "It is dormant. Watching. Listening. Like it is waiting for… something. Or someone. But it is affecting everything anyway. Sea creatures are fleeing the Gulf waters. Plants are dying at the edges of the beaches. The deeper currents feel colder, like they are being drawn into something beneath the trenches."
He paused, then added softly, "It doesn't feel like a natural awakening."
My voice came quietly, edged. "Then someone is trying to rouse it."
Caelan nodded once. "That is my guess. Someone is calling to it. Drawing it out. And the more the Emerald Council spins their theories, the more time we are wasting not asking the real question."
I tilted my head. "Which is?"
Caelan looked at me and responded, "Who's foolish enough to wake something even the abyss forgot?"
A long breath pushed past my lips. "Then someone is stirring trouble," I said, rising slowly from my chair, the scraping of it loud in the heavy silence. My voice came low, sharp as a blade drawn in a quiet room. "And they are not afraid of consequences."
I walked to the edge of the high table, fingers trailing against the polished stone, pausing just enough to meet each set of eyes. "Ancient power should be left to rot where it lies unchallenged, undisturbed. The abyss does not forget. It remembers all that was buried in it for a reason."
Even Thalia, whose sharp tongue could cut through anything, watched me with caution now. Ellowen's brows were furrowed, and Ardanis's knuckles were white on the arms of his chair. Lysander looked ready to tear something apart. Caelan… Caelan only watched me, steady and unreadable.
I turned to face the room fully. "If someone is bold enough to summon it—" I let the words linger like fog in a graveyard, "—then even the Emerald Council will not leave this untouched. No crown, no banner, no ancient bloodline will shield you from what's rising." The sea whispered behind the walls, as if it too listened, and I let the silence stretch until I could feel their unease coil like salt in the air. "Choose what you want to be remembered as," I added, voice soft now, lethal in its calm. "Witnesses to destruction or those wise enough to stand clear of it." Then I turned away and walked back to my seat.
The silence after my words was a heavy, reluctant thing until Lady Nerisca exhaled sharply and stood, her silken robes whispering like waves over marble.
"Then it must be you," she said, voice steady, chin high. "His Majesty Morkai, the Abyssal Sovereign. The only one with enough power to face whatever darkness stirs beneath us."
I snorted.
A bitter, mirthless sound scraped out of me as I leaned back in my seat, folding one leg over the other. "You speak of legends, Lady Nerisca. Stories told in salt and song." I tilted my head. "I am just a drowned prince cursed to linger in a castle of ghosts. I want nothing to do with gods or monsters."
Thalia chuckled dryly from the corner, arms crossed. "Finally, something I agree with."
Beside her, Lysander hummed his agreement, his golden eyes gleaming beneath his braid. "Let the world burn itself out. We are owed our peace."
But peace had always been a lie with a pretty face, and Ellowen rose. Her presence was quiet but commanding, like moonlight on deep waters.
"I won't ask you to fight, Morkai," she said softly, yet every word struck with weight. "But the Emerald Gulf Council has no one powerful enough to identify what is rising. To know what is coming." Her gaze met mine with something close to pleading. "If we do not understand it, we cannot prepare for it. We will be blind. Exposed."
I looked away, jaw tightening.
Ellowen did not sit down, and her voice was too soft for how hard her words hit. "The realm is too vast, Morkai. Too filled with innocents. If this rising is born from someone's ambition… someone's greed… then we cannot let it unfold unchecked."
Her words sank like iron into still waters, and it was when her gaze shifted toward Caelan that something in me twisted. A knot. A tight, unwelcome one that cinched behind my ribs. I could not breathe around it. Caelan, for his part, said nothing. He simply looked down, as if her words had cornered him in a way no walls ever could. As if he knew exactly what she meant, and that was the problem.
My jaw locked, and I rose, slow and quiet, my chair scraping back against the pearl-stone floor with a low groan.
"I will be back late,r "I muttered and walked away, and no one dared follow me.
Not Lysander, who tilted his head but did not speak, nor Thalia, who narrowed her eyes with a whisper of curiosity. Not even Caelan, whom I did not look at, and especially not him. I walked out, my steps echoing down the arched hall, the silence behind me pressing like a tide I did not want to face. I moved to the water so fast, the wind barely had time to scream before it vanished behind me. The sea welcomed me like a familiar breath, cold and bracing as it broke over my skin. I did not hesitate, I dove, shifting mid-motion, the bones of my legs snapping and sliding into sleek scales as my body rippled into its true form.
The merman in me is the Abyssal Sovereign beneath the skin. I pushed through the water like a spear, the current parting, the castle's shimmer fading into the distance above me. The deeper I went, the quieter the world became. The silence, at last, was sacred.
Ellowen's words clawed at the inside of my skull. "The realm is too vast… too filled with innocents, someone's greed…"
I snarled beneath the surface, the sound breaking into bubbles and disappearing into the ink-dark trench. I hated that it got to me. That it festered. That it made sense. I swam until the pressure tightened around my ribs like the fingers of a god. Until the faint glow of the trench shimmered in soft bioluminescent blues and greens, home of the forgotten and the cursed.
The Abyss opened at my call, slow and wide like the yawning mouth of some ancient beast.
"Come to me," I whispered.
It responded, and a swirl of deepwater magic twined around my fingers, humming, pulsing, ancient. I hovered there in the dark, tail swaying, listening to the voices that lived only here. Not mortal. Not sane. But bound to me.
"Tell me," I murmured, reaching out with the full breadth of my power. "What stirs?"
The Abyss did not speak in words. It spoke in impressions, in shadows, in shivers that wrapped around the spine. I clenched my jaw. Something was rising. That much was clear, and it was not mindless. It was guided. I closed my eyes and reached farther deeper. Beyond the currents. Past the veil of life and into that crawling, ancient place of things that should never rise.
And then I bumped into a power wall. It slammed into me like a fist, cut off the link so fast I gasped, bubbles ripping from my mouth. My body jerked backward in the water from the recoil. My head ached. My magic trembled.
"Damn it," I hissed.
Someone was blocking the Abyss itself, and I turned slowly in the water, staring at the nothingness beyond the trench, heart thudding in the eerie stillness.
"Who the hell are you?" I muttered. And more importantly, "Why now?"
I floated in the shadow of the trench, tail coiled beneath me like a serpent, watching the dark swirl around my fingers. The Abyss, usually so eager to whisper its secrets, had gone silent. And silence from this place was not peace. "This isn't natural," I muttered, gaze narrowing into the black.
The water around me trembled slightly an unnatural ripple. From above. Like something on land was bleeding magic down into the water, infecting it. A single speck of bioluminescent light floated upward like a drifting star, and I followed its path, lifting my hand as it passed by my face.
And still I felt it, it was corrupted, touched by something it should not have been.
"I've ruled these waters for centuries," I murmured aloud, the words falling to no ears but the trench itself. "I have kept this realm safe even when I did not care to. But this…"
Because for the first time in a long while, I felt something twist in my chest, dread and it settled cold and heavy, like stone dragging me under, even when I was already submerged.
I reached out again, just a pulse, just a whisper of magic, and the moment I did, I felt it again.
"Coward," I whispered, the word edged in fury. "Hiding behind wards while poisoning my waters."
Something flickered at the edge of my perception, distant and hollow, a soundless chuckle. I bared my teeth. "You want my attention?" I snarled. "You have it now."
The Abyss stirred at my fury, and this time it responded, swirling around me like a shroud, hissing against my skin. I turned and swam to the trench floor, pressing my palm against the stone. A seal pulsed there a rune I had carved myself, centuries ago. It glowed faintly, but even that light looked dimmer.
I let out a long breath, bubbles rising past my face and knew that the power rising had the strength to reach the trench to block me in my own realm then the Emerald Gulf Council had every right to be afraid. And if Caelan had truly sensed this power before any of us, I needed to know why. I lingered there for another breath, just listening. The Abyss hummed again uneasy with the realization that the waters were no longer mine alone.