The laughter that answered was not carried on the wind—it blood inside his skull. It was ancient, cold, and maddening, like the shifting grind of glaciers under the sea.
"Child of mortality," Thalorin’s voice slithered, deep as the abyss. "You wear a god’s na like a mask, but nas do not make gods. Power does. And mine is older than Olympus, older than ti itself."
The waters around Poseidon darkened, a pulse of shadow spreading out from his chest. For a heartbeat, the ocean seed to bow to sothing deeper than him, sothing buried. His lungs tightened, his hands trembled, and his trident flickered with unstable light.
"No," he hissed through clenched teeth, forcing his knees to lock. "I’ve already lived powerless once. I won’t live it again."
---
The storm cracked with lightning, the sky split open, and a tidal surge rose—not by his will but by Thalorin’s. The wave towered like a mountain, and in its curl, Poseidon saw faces. Faces of drowned sailors, gods in chains, monstrous leviathans shackled in kelp and bone.
He flinched back, his breath hitching.
Thalorin pressed harder. "You felt it, didn’t you? When you drowned in weakness. When your blood turned against you. That fear, that helplessness, is your truth. But with —you will never kneel again. No god, no disease, no fate will chain you."
The abyssal wave ca crashing down.
Poseidon raised his trident, planting his heels into the seafloor, and roared. His roar wasn’t just his—it was threaded with sothing older, sothing monstrous. The trident split into three beams of blinding aqua light, cleaving the wave before it could consu him.
The waters hissed into vapor. The sea churned, unsettled.
Poseidon gasped, shoulders heaving, his body slick with seawater and sweat. He had fought waves before, but this one had not been of the sea—it had been of himself.
"Not yours," he spat into the void, knuckles whitening around the shaft of his trident. "I’d rather break than be yours."
---
The response ca not as words but as a sudden, violent tearing. The world around him warped, the ocean dissolving into a realm of obsidian water and pulsing veins of crimson light. A Rift. A prison, a mory—no, a battlefield.
Poseidon staggered as the ground beneath him solidified into blackened coral and jagged rock. The air was liquid, pressing on him from all sides, suffocating, heavy.
And there, in the center of this warped space, rose Thalorin’s form.
He was not whole—he was a phantom, a colossal silhouette of a man with tendrils of water for hair and eyes that glowed like drowned stars. Each step he took sent ripples through the Rift, shaking Poseidon’s bones.
"Do you think you have choice?" Thalorin bood, his voice rattling like tectonic plates. "You are my vessel. The gods above already taste your scent. They will hunt you. They will tear you apart. But if you yield to , if you let go of your pathetic human na—"
He spread his arms. The darkness writhed around him like worshippers bowing before their king.
"—then together, we will not be hunted. We will hunt."
---
The trident trembled in Poseidon’s grasp. He could feel it—how easy it would be to give in. To unleash everything. To drown Olympus in a single, rciless tide. His mortal heart pounded a rhythm of fear and fury. He rembered the hospital bed, the sterile white lights, the machines humming as his body failed.
He rembered what it was to die powerless.
But he also rembered hands holding his, voices whispering comfort, the humanity he had left behind. He rembered fighting not just to live but to matter.
And that mory cut through the abyss like a blade.
Poseidon leveled the trident at Thalorin. "I will never be your puppet."
Thalorin smiled. And then he attacked.
---
The Rift exploded.
Water condensed into spears, lashing forward with impossible speed. Poseidon spun his trident, deflecting two, shattering a third. The impact still knocked him back, his spine slamming against coral so hard the stone cracked. He spat blood, gripping his weapon tighter.
Thalorin moved like a storm given flesh—fists of current, whips of sea-serpents born from shadow. Every strike carried the weight of millennia, of oceans unbound. Poseidon was smaller, weaker, but his movents were sharp, desperate, alive.
He ducked under a wave-whip, drove his trident forward, and unleashed a concentrated burst of power. The sea itself answered his call, a spiral of azure energy slamming into Thalorin’s chest.
For a mont, the ancient being staggered. For a mont, Poseidon saw victory.
But Thalorin only laughed. His body reford, the wound stitching shut like ink in water.
"You strike like a god," Thalorin rumbled. "But you think like a man."
---
The fight dragged on, a war of attrition. Poseidon’s muscles scread, his breaths turned ragged, but he refused to drop. Every strike he made carried defiance, every wound he took carved resolve deeper into his bones.
And then—sothing changed.
The trident glowed not with just his power, but with a resonance deeper, older. It was as if the weapon itself had chosen to defy Thalorin, had chosen him. For a heartbeat, the Rift faltered, light splitting through the cracks of its darkness.
Poseidon felt it: a path, not of surrender but of balance.
"You want to drown the world," Poseidon growled, standing tall despite his battered fra. "But I won’t destroy the seas to claim them. I’ll master them."
The trident blazed.
He drove it into the heart of the Rift.
---
The world shattered.
Light consud shadow, the crushing weight of the abyss peeled away, and Poseidon fell—back into the real ocean, back into the storm, gasping as though breaking the surface for the first ti. His trident pulsed in his grip, warm and steady, no longer trembling.
But the voice lingered.
"You may resist today," Thalorin whispered, distant yet coiled like a tide waiting to return. "But every drop of blood you spill, every soul that drowns in your na, will be mine. And when Olympus turns on you—as it will—you will beg for ."
Poseidon sank to his knees, the waves calming around him, the storm slowly dispersing. His chest rose and fell, every breath a victory, every heartbeat a warning.
He was not free of Thalorin. Not yet. But he had drawn a line.
And sowhere far above—on Olympus—eyes were already watching.
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