Between the Blood and the Crown

The chamber was vast and pulsing—stone veins glowing faintly, like a heart too long at rest.

Erebus stood in its center, back turned.

He heard them arrive before they spoke.

Triton slowed first, his trident lowered, his face caught between awe and grief. Medusa was beside him—tense, guarded, afraid of what her son might have become… and of what he might see when he looked at her.

Erebus didn’t move.

Medusa took a breath that felt like it scraped her lungs.

“Erebus,” she said.

He flinched.

Even her voice had power. Still. Always.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said quietly, still facing the stone wall. “I thought you’d run like last time.”

“I never ran from you,” she said. “I ran from what they wanted to make of you.”

“Same thing, isn’t it?” His voice cracked—barely.

Triton stepped forward. “Erebus.”

That made him turn.

His eyes were darker now—shot through with veins of silver. The mark of the seal glowed along his forearm like a brand. But it was his face that made Triton freeze.

So young.

So hurt.

“You,” Erebus said, staring at him. “You knew.”

Triton’s voice was low. “Yes.”

“All these years. You let me think I was a mistake.”

“I didn’t know how to be anything else,” Triton said. “I failed you.”

Erebus laughed—short, bitter.

“Too late.”

“No,” Medusa said, moving beside Triton. “Not yet. Look at me, Erebus.”

He did.

And for a moment, it was just a mother and her son. Two hearts shaped by the same loneliness.

“You were never a mistake,” she whispered. “You were the only thing I got right.”

He blinked hard, chest rising sharply. “Then why do I feel like I was born wrong?”

Medusa stepped forward. “Because the sea fears what it cannot control. And your power is older than their laws. But power isn’t evil, Erebus.”

Triton added softly, “It’s what you do with it that matters.”

The stone beneath Erebus shimmered again. The seal responded to his pulse. The voice in his mind stirred—but he resisted. For the first time, he questioned it.

He looked between them—his mother, defiant in her sorrow; his father, regal even in remorse.

“You really think I can stop this?” he asked.

Medusa stepped into the circle, extending her hand. “We’ll stop it together.”

His fingers twitched.

And then—

He reached.

But before their hands could touch, the chamber trembled.

Above them, the current tore open with a shriek of gold and steel—

The Wardens had arrived.

The command deck of the Abyssal Mantle was all angles and pressure-forged coral, its hull reinforced with wards older than most bloodlines.

Thalassa stood at the prow, her cape fanning out behind her like a regal current. Twelve armored Wardens hovered behind her—each cloaked in black-scale plate, each bearing weapons blessed in the depths of the Leviathan Catacombs.

The sea trembled beneath them.

“Target?” one of them asked.

“Confirmed,” Thalassa replied. “They’ve converged at the fracture. All three.”

She didn’t say their names.

She couldn’t.

Triton—her former consort, her greatest rival, the one she had trusted with the sea’s soul.

Medusa—the curse she had never forgiven.

And the boy. The child of prophecy. Of war.

Erebus.

She turned to the Warden commander, a hulking mer who bore the Eye of Abyss on his helm.

“You are not to kill the child,” she said. “He must be bound.”

The Warden bowed slightly. “And the others?”