The chambers of Submareth were still heavy with the memory of the night.

The sea outside moaned against the walls, and the faint phosphorescence of coral cast the table in shifting hues of violet and blue.

Caedrion sat opposite Thalassaria, his hair damp, skin still carrying the scent of salt and the queen's perfume, something floral and ancient, impossible to place.

She lounged across from him in a languid sprawl, the silk of her fins trailing lazily in the current, her posture unconcerned in that way only a woman who knew she possessed could manage.

She smiled faintly as she plucked apart a slice of spiced kelp bread with her claws.

"You were quieter this time," she said, the tease so soft it might have been mistaken for affection. "Perhaps you're learning."

He didn't rise to it.

He couldn't afford to. Instead he tore his own bread, sipped from the cup of black wine, and let her have the satisfaction of silence.

Then, as though the jibe had never left her lips, her tone shifted.

"The ruins have always been there. Older than the tides, older than your mortal histories. I remember them from when I was a child. Great doors of stone and light, sealed by the Eidolons themselves before they vanished from this world."

Her amber eyes burned brighter in the gloom, and for once she looked not like the possessive queen who tangled herself around him at night, but like a woman who had carried a hunger for ten thousand years.

"For centuries I clawed at them, Caedrion. I bent abyssal currents, I poured the lives of cities into the attempt. And still they did not open."

He set down his cup, the weight of her words anchoring him. "Why?"

Her lips curved, bitter and soft all at once.

"Because they were not meant for me. No abyssal hand could touch them. They require a resonance… a light I thought long extinct."

She leaned forward, elbows on the black pearl table, her gaze searing through him. "The light of the Architect. The same rhythm that burns in your veins."

The words sank into him like a hook.

He shifted, remembering the princess of rustlight beneath Dawnhaven, remembering the way she had touched his chest and whispered the same truth.

Thalassaria saw the flicker in his eyes, and her smile grew, not cruel this time, but desperate in its own way.

"Do you understand? When I found you, my little guppy, I realized chance had gifted me the impossible. For millennia I told myself the truth of my people was buried forever. And then you fell into my sea."

She leaned closer across the table, the light catching on the scales along her jaw, the faint echo of the night's intimacy hanging in the air between them.

Her tail brushed his ankle beneath the water, not as queen to consort, but as something nearer, rawer.

"I don't crave these ruins for power alone. I crave them because within lies the truth of who I am. Who we were. Why we were abandoned."

Her voice trembled then, just a breath, but enough. "And now, at last, I can reach them."

Caedrion's chest felt tight, not from her coils, but from the weight of the vow forming unbidden in his mind.

He met her gaze and said, low but firm:

"Then we'll open them. Together."

Thalassaria smiled, slow and radiant as dawn breaking on the waves.

Her claws tapped against the table, but her eyes softened. "Together," she echoed.

Caedrion hesitated, feeling the words press like sand in his mouth.

Thinking back to the discussion he had with the little Princess.

How she said her mother's blood ran through his veins.

The hidden meaning behind such an idea, that even she didn't quite understand.

But Caedrion did.

It had been gnawing at him for months.

Ever since the words were spoken.

And yet he still forged the key.

The key whose weight at his hip felt sudden and absurd, something practically weightless now held the density of a neutron star.

An instrument of doors, of memory, but it was also a blade that might cut everything he loved into new shapes.

"What if some doors should not be opened?" he said finally, voice low.

He watched Thalassaria closely as he spoke, as if searching for the exact point where she might unravel.

"What if the Eidolons were not kindly ancestors, but tyrants? What if the past you thirst for is the very thing that broke the world? Knowing could bind you to what was done to you, rather than letting you choose who you will be now."

For a beat she froze, the current around her stilled in response to the sudden change in his tone.

Her pupils narrowed, not with the immediate hunger he'd grown used to, but with something like surprise, soft, like a hand not yet sure whether to close.

He had not meant to wound her.

He only wanted to offer her another path: memory surrendered for a future she could shape on her own terms.

It felt like charity, like steering a beloved away from a cliff.

Thalassaria's lips parted.

A shadow of feeling crossed her face, tenderness, the faintest unguarded ache, and for a moment she looked almost small, as if his words had brushed some old sleep from her eyes.

She reached out, and her fingertips ghosted along his jaw in a touch that was equal parts comfort and claim.

"You think the truth might destroy me?" she asked, quiet as the underside of waves.

He met that question honestly.

"I think it could change the shape of what you want. Or who you feel you must be to survive. I don't think your life should be dictated by bones older than memory. You could be more than what those doors remember."

The motion that crossed her face then was fragile and ferocious at once.

She laughed, not a sound of joy but of disbelief, like wind skimming a cliff, and something like anger flared behind her eyes.

Her coils tightened imperceptibly, the water around them brightening with the strain of her restraint.

"If any other mouth dared say such filth to me," she said, voice low and dangerous, "I would drag them into the deepest trench and let the pressure unmake them."

Her hand curled, nails like pearls of black obsidian skimming his skin.

The threat hung in the water, sharp and absolute.

But the hard edge softened when she looked at him again.

The possessive glint returned, threaded with a sudden warmth that made her dangerous speech feel like a bizarre kind of benediction.

She leaned closer until their foreheads almost touched and, in a voice that folded around him like silk, she added,

"…but since it is you, my little guppy, who dares to be blasphemous at my table, I will do what I do for foolish things I love."

He felt the breath of her words against his lips.

For a moment the world narrowed to the bowl of the table and the slow beat of each other's chests.

"I will not open the ruins today," she continued, each syllable measured.

"I will take the day to consider your words. You will have rest, and food, and warmth. I will watch you sleep to be certain you are whole when you wake."

A curious tenderness crept into the possessiveness now, less like a chain and more like a shawl, heavy with intent.

Her fingers found his hand and enclosed it, nails gentle as if promising and warning at once.

"You speak dangerous thoughts, Caedrion Ferrondel," she murmured,

"but I will entertain them, because I want to know the shape of your mind as much as the shape of these doors. Rest, then. Consider that perhaps the future we make is the truth that matters most."

He let out a breath he hadn't known he'd been holding.

The decision hung between them, fragile as a shell cupped in a palm.

She had conceded the hour. She had not surrendered the hunger, only postponed it, wrapped it in a promise that smelled of salt and silk and something infinitely older.

Under the water's slow light, her coils loomed around them like a palace.

He let himself be led away to the small, curtained alcove the queen had prepared, the Architect's key humming faintly at his side and the echo of Thalassaria's last words still warm against his skin.

As for Thalassaria she fulfilled her promise to Caedrion and thought deeply upon his words, the wisdom behind them, and what possible hidden knowledge me might have to provoke such meaning.

Was it possible he had already been touched by the grace of divinity?

Did he know something about the eidolons? Perhaps some ancient tome buried beneath the surface of that ancient castle he called home.

And if so, was he trying to spare her a harsh truth that shattered a world of lies, and false perceptions?

In the end… All his words had done was stoke her ancient hunger, to be far more ferocious and terrible.

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