Descent

The trench loomed before her like a mouth.

Medusa hovered at its edge, the water thick with ancient silence. Even the fish avoided this place. The pressure here wasn’t just physical—it was ancestral.

This was not a trench for hunting or hiding.

This was where the sea buried what it couldn’t kill.

She drew her cloak tighter around her shoulders, eyes scanning the fissures below. The glow of the seals was faint now—like dying stars—but she could still feel the echo of their original pulse. Thirteen bindings. Thirteen oaths.

Her hand brushed the seal she bore—burned into her skin at birth. She had never been given a choice. No one in her bloodline had.

She descended.

With every foot deeper, the light above thinned. Her body shifted as it always did in darker water—her skin cooled, her senses sharpened. The monstrous form she kept suppressed beneath surface civility slipped closer to the surface.

Here, she didn’t have to hide.

She reached the ledge where the symbols had reawakened. She could see the disturbance in the trenchstone—the way it had cracked and opened, not from external force, but from within. As if answering a call.

She knelt beside it, pressing her palm to the stone.

It thrummed. Like a heartbeat that wasn’t hers.

Erebus, she thought. What did you say to her?

A current shifted behind her.

She stood sharply, hair coiling into defensive formation—but no one was there.

Only the water.

Only the voice.

“You tried to forget me.”

Medusa froze.

The words did not come from outside. They came from inside. From behind her eyes. From before language.

“You turned your back on what we are. You gave your child to a world that would never accept him.”

“I gave him a chance,” Medusa hissed aloud.

The water churned slightly. Not angry. Amused.

“He was never meant for their world. He is not your shame. He is my return.”

“No,” Medusa whispered. “He’s mine. He’s not yours to awaken.”

The water stilled.

But a promise remained in the silence.

“He already has.”

Medusa stood alone now, heart pounding, stone beneath her fingers still glowing faintly with Erebus’s energy. Her worst fear wasn’t that Ceto had found her son.

It was that Erebus had gone looking for her.

The ocean was not still.

King Triton stood at the peak of the Coral Spire, high above the palace. The currents here touched the sky—thin, glistening veils of salt and starlight.

But even they were wrong tonight.

He could feel it in the pressure behind his gills. In the strange resistance of the water when he moved. The sea had always listened to him. Obeyed him.

Now, it whispered behind his back.

His trident leaned against the stone beside him, humming low with old magic.

“Three surges in two days,” murmured General Lyron, approaching quietly behind him. “One near the Whispering Shoals. One in the Rift. And one deep beneath the old trench.”

Triton didn’t look away. “The seals.”

“Yes,” said a third voice—calm, clipped, and unmistakable.

Queen Thalassa.

She emerged from the current with regal poise, silver eyes fixed firmly on the king. A single shard of her hair was out of place—rare, and telling.

“You saw him,” Triton said, already knowing.

Thalassa nodded. “The boy. Erebus.”

His fingers tightened against the stone.

Thalassa’s tone was not accusatory. Not yet. “You know what blood flows through him. What she kept from you.”

“I knew,” he admitted. “Not at first. But I suspected… long before he could speak.”

“Then you also know what she carries,” Thalassa said, stepping closer. “What she is.”

Triton turned, eyes flashing. “She is not the threat.”

“She was the thirteenth. And her son is the crack in the gate.”