Page 34 of Song of the Abyss

That rotting mouth fell open, and to his horror, the gills along the sides of her neck flared in with a breath. “You killed me,” she said, her voice little more than a death rattle. “You left me there to die.”

“I would never have brought any of you there if I had thought for a second that I would lose you.”

“You knew. You just didn’t want to listen.” The dust swirled around her body, and he could see the ragged hole in her chest where her life had leaked out. “And now you will kill another.”

“I don’t want to kill again,” he desperately replied. “I know now the price of my hubris and I don’t... cannot suffer this again.”

“You have stolen yourself a mate,” she said, her one remaining eye rolling in the socket. “You have taken her and tried to forget what you have done. You think you will find a haven in this creature who will see you as nothing more than a monster?”

A flash of light in the distance parted the dust. And then he saw them. Bodies raining down through the water, all limp and revealed only in the bright flashes of light. The achromos? Had they returned for him? Had they finally hunted him down as their greatest beast to destroy?

He was the monster who had attacked their city, and the monster who had failed. Fleeing from them as his brothers had dragged him into the depths while all the others fell.

A rotting hand grabbed onto his chin. He could feel the brittle tips of her claws, and the lack of webs that were the first to rot from her body. Daios couldn’t breathe as she dragged his face closer to her, forcing him to look at the nightmarish features that remained. There was nothing left of her. Nothing of the woman he had found so intriguing.

“You wanted me,” she hissed. “You would have taken me if I had given you the chance. I was the greatest of my clutch, the strongest and best hunter of our pod. And you think an achromo can replace me?”

“I don’t want her.”

“But you do. You’ve already fluttered for her. Your body has betrayed you, warrior, and it makes me sick.” She tossed his head to the side so hard it felt as though she’d struck him.

Frozen with his head turned away from her, he squeezed his eyes shut. “This isn’t real,” he told himself. “This is all in your mind.”

“I am not real?” her voice still cackled, and then he heard her snarl in his ear, “I promise you this, Daios the Destroyer, you will kill her just as you have killed all of us. You are a monster, and you are unworthy of anything but the depths of the sea.”

Hand clenched into a fist, his entire body shaking, he felt a single word snap out of his mouth and thrust into the sea. “No!”

The word echoed as he finally opened his eyes again. Spinning right and left, he searched the dust for the corpse of the life he might have once had. But there was nothing and no one to be found in the red tinged light. Nothing at all.

He was alone. As he always was. And as he was cursed to always be.

But he couldn’t get his breathing under control. He didn’t know what this feeling was. Pressing a hand against his chest, he tried to rub at the uncomfortable ache beneath his ribs. Both of his hearts were racing and he couldn’t get them to slow. No matter how hard he pressed his hand against them or how many breaths he took through just his lower gills. He was... Something was wrong.

Daios tried to take a deep, long, steadying breath. But it rattled as that wrong emotion made it hard to take a breath in without stuttering. His jaw shook, chattering as he stayed at the cold bottom of the sea where there was no one and nothing but him.

At some point, it felt as though the current had grabbed onto him. The sea herself shoved him away from the muck that was seeping underneath his scales and clogging his gills. She tossed him upward, toward something. And so he rode the current. He allowed her to carry him away from that place, even though he knew she had not forgiven him for what he had done.

The sea moved him higher into the water, much higher until he saw what it wanted. There was a small school of tuna. Already picked apart, it seemed. There were too few of them, or perhaps they had been sliced away from the rest of the group. He was high enough that light speared through the sea, and he could watch the silver flashes of their bodies as they spun and turned away from him.

It was beautiful. He thought, perhaps, the sea wished to remind him that no matter what, there was still life in the water. There was still a reason for him to keep fighting, even if it felt like there wasn’t.

Bowing his head, he murmured, “I honor your reminder. The darkness and the depths do no favors for my state of mind. I should not seek out the shadows when there is so much to see in the light.”

But then he felt the current nudge him again, closer to the tuna. Again and again she pushed until he realized she wanted him to take one of the creatures for himself.

Sighing, he shook his head. “I have no wish to cause more death. Not today.”

Another nudge, another push.

The sea was insistent, it seemed. One of those tunas was for him, although he could not understand why she would wish for him to take prey that large. He certainly couldn’t eat all of it himself. He couldn’t...

The achromo.

The sea wished him to feed the achromo.

“No,” he snarled, baring his teeth in denial of the order. “I’ve already stolen her. I will not and cannot feed her. These are mating games you wish me to play and I do not want to play them.”

This time he was shoved so hard toward the tuna that they scattered. And then the current disappeared entirely, as though the sea was warning him that he had been out of her favor for a very long time. He’d fought against everything she’d thrown his way in punishment, and she was giving him a chance to get back in her good graces.

---