The words hung between them like a blade.
"I know," Thalassaria had said, as casually as if he had confessed the color of the sea.
Caedrion’s breath caught. "You... knew?"
The Queen of the Deep smiled, her fangs glinting faintly in the teal glow of her leylines.
Her coils tightened just enough to remind him that escape was a fantasy. She leaned close, voice soft, almost tender, yet heavy with venomous possessiveness.
"Of course I knew. Do you think I would not? I see everything that touches my waters. I hear whispers from ships that never return. You think a little girl playing wife in your stone city could hide from me?"
He stiffened. Aelindria’s face flashed in his mind, her hands on his cheek, the bond they shared burning faintly even here in the depths. "She is not..."
"She is not worthy." Thalassaria’s voice cut through him, sudden steel beneath silk. "She may cling to your hand and call herself your bride, but only I... only I can truly claim you."
Her hand cupped his face, her thumb tracing his lips.
Her eyes blazed with a hunger that was more than lust, it was obsession sharpened to a point that terrified him.
"You are mine, Caedrion. My guppy. My storm-crowned darling. You can play at stalling, invent excuses, but in the end..." Follow current novels on ɴovelfire.net
she leaned closer, her breath warm against his ear, "...you cannot deny what we both already know."
He trembled. He had resisted for weeks, months, feeding her excuses, hiding behind careful words.
But now, cornered in her coils, confronted with the fact that she knew all along... his resolve cracked.
His mind spun.
Could I even escape without her will? Could I survive beyond her sight when even the sea bends to her? And what if I did return? Could I face my people, my family, with nothing gained but shame?
The thought dug deeper. This was not Earth.
Here, kings had more than one queen. Lords more than one wife. Alliances were forged in blood, in bed, in power.
Aelindria for the land. Thalassaria for the sea.
A dual crown. A throne above and below.
His pulse thundered in his ears as reason gave way to something darker, something he could no longer name as simply duty.
Thalassaria saw it, the hesitation, the fracture.
Her gaze softened, and for the first time her regal mask slipped. Her coils loosened, and she pressed her brow to his, her voice trembling.
"In ten thousand years I have never met a man worthy enough to call me his bride. Until I saw you... And yet for two months you have rejected me all the same. I must admit I am bewildered... and enticed all the same. Do you not desire to be my first where legions of men have failed?"
Her words pierced him deeper than threats.
There was no malice now, only raw, aching vulnerability from a queen who had always been adored, never denied.
And Caedrion broke. His throat burned as the truth tried to tear itself free.
"I... I...."
Before he could finish, her lips brushed his, gentle and inevitable, and the sea around them darkened as the scene faded into silence.
Caedrion awoke slowly, suspended in the dim light of the abyss.
The currents carried a faint warmth around him, rippling against his skin like a cradle.
His body ached, not from violence, but from surrender.
His mind rebelled at the memory, yet the taste of her lingered on his lips, and the coils around him left no room for denial.
Thalassaria lay beside him, if such a word could describe the way her endless length encircled him, cocooning him in scales and silk-fine hair.
Her head rested against his chest, listening to the beat of his heart as though it were a hymn.
Every breath she took shivered through the water like a tide.
When she stirred, her smile was soft, almost girlish.
A terrifying contrast to the queen who could drown fleets with a thought.
She pressed her lips to his collarbone, then his throat, her hands tracing lazy patterns over him as if she feared he might vanish.
"My guppy," she murmured, her voice muffled against his skin. "You see now. You belong to me. And I to you. Nothing can undo that."
Caedrion’s throat tightened.
He wanted to speak, to tell her it was a mistake, to remind himself of Aelindria waiting above the waves. Y
et the words curdled before they left his tongue.
I broke my oath.
I betrayed her.
And yet... part of him whispered otherwise.
This is not Earth. This is not the world I came from. Perhaps... perhaps this is survival.
He lay still, staring into the endless teal glow of the abyss.
Each time he thought to pull away, Thalassaria’s grip tightened, not in menace, but in devotion.
She did not sleep, she watched him, as though every blink risked losing him.
When he finally stirred, her expression brightened, scales shimmering like starlight through the sea.
She cupped his face in both hands, pressing her forehead to his.
"You will never leave me now," she whispered, joy bleeding into every syllable. "Not while the sea still answers to my call. You are my king-consort, my storm-born jewel, my eternal tide."
Caedrion forced a smile, though his stomach roiled with guilt.
His mind churned with calculations, with strategies, with a single bitter truth: if he could not escape Submareth by force, then perhaps he could only survive by leaning into the role she demanded of him.
Thalassaria kissed his brow and curled tighter around him, humming low, like the ocean’s heartbeat.
Her devotion was madness, but it was also genuine.
And that, more than her power, more than her beauty, was what threatened to break him entirely.
---
In the world beyond the Shivering sea, the mountains lay silent, veiled in frost.
Even at midsummer, their peaks cut against the sky like shards of glass, their flanks buried beneath glaciers that never thawed.
Winds shrieked down the valleys, carrying knives of snow that flayed exposed skin raw.
Below, the forests, the plains, even the coasts, knew warmth.
But here, above the clouds, only winter reigned.
In such a world, one might be confused how any life could truly survive.
But life endured even in the harshest of climates.
And in this frozen realm dwelled those who bore the blood of something ancient, and terrifying.
The fox-kin. The children of the Glacial.
Villages of stone and timber clung to the cliffsides, roofs laden with snow, banners snapping in the gales.
Their people moved with ease across ice, tails brushing the ground in plumes of white, ears twitching against the howling winds.
Hunters clad in furs tracked beasts across the tundra, their bows strung with gut that never stiffened in the cold, their breath misting in rhythm with chants to their patron.
Children played in snowdrifts taller than houses, their laughter bright even in the bleak white.
And above them all, watching from her temple upon the highest ridge, sat their sovereign.
The Nine-Tailed.
Her throne was carved from a single block of ice that had never melted, not once in ten thousand years.
Upon it reclined a figure more apparition than flesh: her skin pale as milk, her hair whiter than snow, her eyes frozen shards of purest frost.
Across her body ran the faint traceries of leylines, glowing with the same glacial blue as the heart of a glacier.
They pulsed with the rhythm of something far older than mortal blood.
For she was the daughter of an Eidolon, the spirit of winter itself, the endless cold that preserved and destroyed in equal measure.
Below her, fox-priests sang their rites, tails swaying in unison as they cast bowls of ice crystals into braziers that never burned with flame, only with frost.
Their voices rose like the wind through crags, echoing across the peaks.
But the Nine-Tailed did not listen.
Her eyes were turned outward.
Not to her people, not to the mountains. But to the horizon.
To the faintest tremor that rolled through the bones of the world, carrying from the sea.
The Shivering Sea.
For millennia, its depths had been a wall.
A boundary of silence, keeping her and her kin apart from the realms of men.
Beyond it, she knew, the High Elves schemed in their crystal towers, their arrogance unbroken. The humans squabbled, their lives too brief to matter.
But something had shifted.
Something quaked beneath the waves.
A faint tremor of a light long since believed to have been snuffed out by the passage of time, and the world’s cruelty.
Her lips curved, revealing foxlike teeth sharp as icicles.
"That little serpent..."
she whispered, her voice carrying a frost that crystallized the air before her lips. "She has found herself something interesting."
A ripple of power coiled through her tails, each one swaying like banners in a silent storm.
Her priests shivered at the sound of her words, ears flattening.
For though they did not know what stirred beneath the Shivering Sea, their queen did.
And the Glacial’s Daughter smiled.