Page 74 of Song of the Abyss
It was a good feeling, even if it was a little terrifying.
27
Daios
Daios was cast down into the muck and mire of the depthstrider home. Long ago, when he was just a child, he remembered hearing so many stories about these creatures. They were pale from lack of sunlight. They were dangerous, with claws much larger than his own, and eyes that saw into the future.
There were rumors that the woman who ran their pod, Mitera, was descended from them. It was why she appeared more like a jellyfish than the other People of Water. She could see the future with her multicolored eyes swirling as she peered into a person’s very soul.
Dangerous creatures, indeed. They could look inside someone they touched and know what and how and when they were going to swim throughout their lives. He’d been terrified of them. Or perhaps he’d been more terrified of what they would see.
His back ached as he struck the ground. Dust plumed around him, pressing against every part of his body and threatening to choke him through his gills. This was the same as the first time the depthstriders had brought him here. Years ago. He had been young and foolish, then.
A part of him had always thought he was better than the others. Pride had been his downfall. And when Arges was given the esteemed position of taking over their pod of warriors, he’d lost his mind. His ego had sent him careening into the depths as though he could change what had happened. Just like now, he’d been struck in the side and thrown into the dirt.
Daios was big. This creature was so much larger.
Breathing hard, he curled his fingers in the muck at the bottom of the sea. He knew what he would find when he looked up, and still he had to steel himself for what he would see.
Pale skin on the male’s chest tapered into a deep purple that was only seen this far in the abyss. The depthstrider who loomed above him did not have fins that flared on his sides like the other undines, but tendrils. Tentacles that ended with bulbous tips that lit up with his anger. Though he still had the tell-tale fins on the sides of his face, his hair was much finer. Where Daios’s locks were tangled into their own similar tentacles, this one had fine strands that billowed around his head like a plume of dark ink.
A severe face etched white as the moon, with lines of deep purple that streaked down from his eyes like tears, stared down at him. Powerful muscles flexed, his tail stretched so far behind him that it disappeared in the meager light both of their bodies let off.
“Fortis,” he snarled.
“You have returned too soon,” Fortis replied, his voice crackling with misuse. “Or perhaps far too late.”
The tips of his tentacles glowed brighter, their ends reaching for him with what he knew would be an electric zap that would render him unconscious.
Rolling, he flicked his tail to get away from the much larger male. It was rare to meet anything in this sea that was larger than him, and it always made him uncomfortable.
Fortis grabbed onto his fluke, claws digging mercilessly into the delicate membrane there. Daios arched his back, his teeth bared as white hot pain raced up his spine all the way into the small of his back.
He fought. Writhing and wriggling like he could get away from this much larger creature who had absolutely no intention of letting him go. He fought until blood filled his gills, flowing out of the deep wounds that Fortis continued to rip through him. And still, he was stuck. Like a fish on a hook.
Hissing out an angry breath, he stilled. “What do you want with me, Fortis?”
“I wish for you to see.”
“I have seen enough from your kind,” he spat. Twisting so he could see the other male, he bared his fangs and gnashed his jaw. “Or did you forget how long I was here last time? Because I did not. I know exactly how long I was here and how much you plied me with your sulfuric medicine. It took me months to get it out of my system.”
“Because you had not yet seen,” Fortis replied, those soulless black eyes meeting his and uncaring of the discomfort he caused. “Now you have seen some, but not enough. You have been summoned.”
“By who?” Daios snarled.
“By all of those who have been before, all of those suffer now, and those you meant to save.” Fortis’s voice raised until the booming sound nearly made Daios’s ears bleed.
The depthstrider reeled him in, clawed hand over clawed hand, digging into his scales and ripping through his tail until the much larger creature could hold him in front of his face and snarl, “You didn’t listen the first time.”
In those black orbs, he could see colors moving. He fought harder, wrapping his own claws around the wrist that held onto him. Daios dug his talons in, tasting the black blood of the depthstrider that was so tainted with sulfur and metallic poison that it filled his lungs as though he had ingested the drug himself.
Maybe if he had both arms, he would have been able to fight harder. He would have been able to grapple with the other creature better, rather than just use his body like a battering ram. He couldn’t get out of this depthstrider’s grip, and he couldn’t stop the darkness that swept around them both.
The colors in Fortis’s eyes slowed, then stopped. That blackness sucked him in and suddenly he wasn’t Daios any more. He wasn’t anyone at all.
There was the briefest moment when he could still feel hatred that depthstriders could do this. That they were so connected to the sea itself that they could take a person out of their body and show them something that the sea wished for them to know. He had always hated how powerless moments like this made him feel. And Daios was tired of feeling weak.
Fortis sent him careening not through the ocean, but through a memory that flashed through his mind as though he was there. One moment, he was Daios at the bottom of the sea with a creature who had his hand wrapped around his neck. The next, he was back in Alpha.
