Chapter 299: Nerthys.”
The sea was calm that morning.
Too calm.
It stretched like liquid glass beneath the rising sun, unbroken by gulls or sails, as though the entire ocean had paused in breathless anticipation. Even the waves seemed to hush their tongues, listening.
Poseidon stood upon a jagged cliff, his trident planted into stone as if it anchored not only the earth but the weight of his rising dominion. The battle against the gods had cost him much—blood, strength, fury—but the ocean was his inexhaustible ally. He had broken Olympus’s threefold assault, shattered spears of light and chains of flame, and drowned the arrogance of those who thought him still a vessel.
He was no vessel. He was Poseidon reborn.
Yet even as power surged like tide through his veins, there was something missing. A thread he had not pulled, a shadow beneath the water that belonged not to him, but to blood.
It came with the wind first—a voice not heard, but felt. Deep. Slow. Familiar.
"Father."
The ocean quivered.
Poseidon turned.
From the sea itself, a figure rose. Not as mortals rise gasping from waves, nor as gods manifest with thunder, but as though the water had always been his flesh and merely chose to let him go.
He was tall, lean yet carved like a blade, his hair black as the abyss, eyes a piercing silver-blue that did not reflect the sky but devoured it. Where he walked, the cliff darkened, damp stone steaming beneath bare feet. His very presence was contradiction—youthful in face, ancient in aura.
Poseidon’s hand tightened around his trident. His voice was low, unreadable.
"You came at last."
The boy—no, the man—knelt briefly, though pride radiated in the act rather than humility. "I was always here. The abyss is not absence. It is waiting. And I... waited."
Poseidon studied him in silence. He had known this day would come, though even he had not foreseen the form it would take. This was not like Aegirion, the son raised by Olympus, tempered in their chains of duty. This was something else entirely.
A son born not of surface waters, but of the deepest trench.
"My second son," Poseidon murmured, voice reverberating like waves in caverns. "Named by the abyss itself."
The man lifted his gaze, and the cliff seemed to darken further at the mention. "Nerthys."
The name slithered through the air, carrying with it pressure that made even the gulls avoid the cliff. Nerthys—the Abyssal Son.
---
The Weight of Blood
Poseidon regarded him. His first son had carried promise—strength, loyalty, the might of tides. But this one... this one was different. His aura did not crash like a wave, nor roar like a storm. It lingered, pressed, suffocated. A silence that pulled everything toward it, as trenches pull light into eternal night.
"You bear not only my blood," Poseidon said slowly, "but something older."
Nerthys’s lips curled faintly, not into a smile but something more dangerous. "The abyss remembers, Father. When you drowned, when they bound you, when Olympus declared you dead—your power seeped into the cracks no god dared touch. I was born there, cradled by darkness deeper than Olympus’s chains. I am not only your son. I am the sea’s vengeance."
The words rippled across the stone like a tremor.
Poseidon did not flinch. Instead, for the first time in years, he allowed a flicker of something rare to touch his eyes—pride.
"Then you will stand beside me," he said. "The gods believe themselves eternal. But together, we will show them eternity belongs to the sea."
Nerthys rose, his shadow stretching impossibly long, almost merging with Poseidon’s own. "I do not kneel again, Father. Not to Olympus. Not to men. Not even to you."
A challenge. And yet not rebellion. More like declaration.
Poseidon’s trident pulsed once, waves crashing against the cliff below in answer. He stepped closer, lowering his voice to a whisper of thunder.
"Then prove yourself my son. Not in words. In battle."
---
The First Test
The sea answered before Nerthys could. From its glass surface, something vast stirred. The water bulged upward, splitting as scales gleamed beneath. An ancient leviathan, long bound in slumber beneath the deeps, had awoken at the call of its god.
It rose with a shriek like tearing mountains, tentacles writhing, eyes glowing abyssal green. The very air thickened with brine and rot as the creature bared rows of jagged teeth.
"Your brother bent beasts to his will," Poseidon said, gesturing to the leviathan. "Can you command them—or only drown with them?"
Nerthys did not hesitate. He stepped forward, bare feet sinking into the cliff as water coiled around him like serpents. His silver-blue eyes gleamed, unblinking, as the leviathan lunged.
The beast’s shadow swallowed him whole.
And then—silence.
Water exploded upward as the leviathan thrashed, not in triumph but agony. Its roar shook the sea, sending waves crashing against the shore. When the spray cleared, Nerthys stood on the creature’s skull, one hand sunk into its brow as though gripping the abyss itself. The leviathan stilled, its monstrous form trembling under his will.
It lowered its head. Obeyed.
Poseidon’s laughter rolled across the sea like thunder. Deep. Dark. Triumphant.
"You are mine indeed."
Nerthys pulled his hand free, stepping down as the leviathan slid back into the abyss, vanishing beneath waves. Not slain. Subjugated.
His voice was quiet, yet carried like a riptide.
"The abyss does not ask permission. It takes."
---
Olympus Watches
Far above, unseen but not unseeing, Olympus trembled. The gods felt the shift in the tides, the unnatural submission of a beast even they feared to rouse.
On her marble throne, Hera’s knuckles whitened as she gripped her scepter. Athena’s gray eyes narrowed, calculating. And Zeus, high on his storm throne, felt something he had not felt since the Titanomachy—unease.
"Another son," Athena murmured. "Poseidon breeds heirs like storms. Each one worse than the last."
"Then we drown them early," Hera snapped.
Zeus did not answer. His lightning flickered, but his silence was heavier than thunder.
For the first time, he wondered if the sea would swallow the sky.
---
Father and Son
Back on the cliff, the silence between Poseidon and Nerthys was heavier than any roar of storm.
Poseidon studied him again, and this time, there was no doubt. Aegirion was strength, discipline, loyalty. But Nerthys... Nerthys was inevitability.
"The gods will fear you," Poseidon said.
"They already do," Nerthys replied. His gaze cut across the horizon, where waves began to swell again, restless, as if answering his words. "And if they don’t yet, they will when Olympus tilts into the sea."
Poseidon stepped closer, laying his hand briefly upon his son’s shoulder. A gesture rare for the god of oceans. "Then let it be known. The sea has two kings."
And as the sun vanished into the horizon, its light extinguished not by night but by the shadow of rising waves, the world felt the truth:
A new tide had risen.
Not only Poseidon.
But Nerthys, Son of the Abyss.
And together, they would drown eternity.