Page 78 of Whispers of the Deep

“I don’t need your help!” Arges thundered. “The person who needs your help is stuck in a bubble of air halfway underneath the ocean with one of our own kind terrorizing her. I have not lost my ability to count. How long do you think it takes before our brother cracks that glass bubble? Before he drowns an innocent?”

Maketes had never been a killer. He was the brother who mourned any creatures they had to kill, even the ones they killed for food. He was the brother who took the time to value life. This must have been eating him up inside because he was going to be the reason someone died. Arges could use that to his advantage.

His brother wavered for just a second, and it was enough.

Arges coasted a little closer, still with enough distance that he could flick his tail and disappear if he had to. “She’s scared, Maketes. I moved her here because I knew Daios would want to hunt her down. I tried to get her to a place where she could be comfortable. I can understand her language now. She can give you the same device. You can talk to her. Ask all the questions that you’ve wanted to ask for ages.”

“How?”

Arges turned his head and pointed to the small pinprick of metal beside his hearing holes. “It’s so simple. A small bit of pain, nothing worse than what we’ve felt before.”

He had him. Maketes had ever been curious, and he wasn’t the brother to be so serious. Fighting wasn’t in his blood and surely he would let go. He would turn away from Daios.

But then a blast of darkness erupted through the hole in the wall and Arges knew he had lost his chance. With a grunt, he was caught around the waist and thrown through the nearest wall.

“Maketes!” he shouted. “Get out of there!”

He didn’t have time to see if his yellow finned brother made it out of the collapsing building. Daios had a thick arm around his waist and he couldn’t wriggle free from his brother’s grip. He hated how deep he had to claw through Daios’s forearm, even knowing that it was the only one left. Surely his brother was not strong enough to fight like this. He’d only just lost his other arm.

The currents blasted them far away from the human homes, closer to the shore. Daios slapped his tail against his, coiling them together until they were locked. Impossible to get out of, and even more infuriating.

He hated grappling with his brother like this. Even when they were little brood mates, just out of the eggs, Daios had been bigger. He would wrap himself around Arges and they would fight until they were both struggling for breath. This wasn’t a fair fight. Not when they were so close together.

Locked in, he wriggled until his upper body was above his brothers. And then he used the sharp spines at the base of his elbows and brought them down upon Daios’s shoulders. Over and over again, he fought against the thick water and didn’t stop, even when black blood plumed around them. He would not, could not, stop.

Mira needed him. Every moment he was away from her was another moment when she was alone. Alone and scared, and it tore at him worse than his brother’s claws.

Daios picked up speed. And for a moment, he didn’t have the faintest idea why. Was his brother going to slam him into the rocks? Was that the plan? Would he scrape Arges’s spine against the sharp ground until he had ripped all the flesh from his back?

He realized too late what the plan really was. With one more burst of his powerful tail, Daios thrust them both out of the water. But his strong arm continued the movement and with a terrible snarl, he launched Arges out of the water and out onto the sharp ground. Stones cut into his tail, ripping through the gills of his side and tearing through his hip fin.

The sound that came out of Arges was unlike anything he had ever made before. His hip fin was nearly ripped off his body. He didn’t know if he could ever reattach it, and if he could, he’d never use it like before. His arm was bleeding from where he had skidded, and it hurt to breathe through the right side of his gills. Going back into the water would be painful. Though the salt would cleanse his wounds, it would also make them infinitely worse.

Gritting his teeth, he braced himself on the ground and leveraged himself upright. He wasn’t far from the water, but dragging himself back into it would tear many scales from his tail.

Daios lifted his head above the water just as a crackle echoed through the air. Light flashed and then the sky itself cried out in anger, rumbling its rage that a creature of water was so far from its home.

“I saw you with it,” Daios said, his voice mimicking the rumble that still rocked through the skies. “I saw the look on your face.”

“She is the mission I was given by Mitéra.”

“You have feelings for her. Abominable feelings that will tear you and the rest of us down. You will die if they see what you have become, Arges. Our people will never accept her. It is unnatural, and the sea will destroy you both for how you feel.”

“How would you know?” Arges spat, his fingers curling so hard on the rocks that the webbing between his fingers split. “You have no right to speak for the gods. I have seen my future with the ancients. I know the path that I will choose, and the path I wish to choose.”

For a brief moment, there was a flash of sadness across Daios’s face. “The future you saw must be one of loneliness and hardship, then, brother. I have no interest in seeing you rip apart the very legacy you have built after years of fighting and proof that you are worth following. Your only future is one of pain.”

“Pain caused by you,” he replied.

“Yes.” Daios’s eyes flashed red, and the sea kissed the stump of his arm that had started to bleed again. “I will hunt you down for the rest of time if necessary. You will not taint my home with her scent, or any other scent of achromo. They are monstrous creatures who have no love for our home or our people. You deny our very existence by touching her.”

His brother sank beneath the sea, leaving Arges alone with the storm above his head and the thunderous noises of the land’s rage. He could feel it boiling in his own chest. Churning and tossing like he’d swallowed a kraken, and it wanted to tear him apart from the inside out.

The seas parted on a yellow gold head, and he met Maketes’s gaze. “I will take care of your brother,” he said. “But you have to know that it is a dangerous game you play. Soon enough, the land and the sea will fight again. What side will you fight on?”

With those words, Maketes left Arges alone. Stranded on the land, bleeding and broken.

Thirty-One

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