Chapter 123: The Harbor 2
The harbor was no longer a harbor.
It had become an arena.
The sky hung low and heavy, clouds swirling in jagged spirals above the boiling waters. The sea was a battlefield — and at its center, Poseidon and the trench-beast tore at one another with a violence that defied mortal comprehension.
Tentacles the width of towers lashed out, smashing stone, snapping masts like twigs. Waves rose higher than the Bastion’s walls, crashing against the city in relentless rhythm. Lightning ripped the sky in jagged streaks, striking the water and lighting the combatants in stark, alien brilliance.
The serpent beneath Poseidon coiled and struck, sinking its fangs into the beast’s massive shell. The trench-beast’s roar rolled across the city like a landslide, its tentacles snapping out to seize the serpent and drag it into the deep.
But Poseidon would not yield.
From his throne of water he rose again, trident flashing with abyssal light, and drove it down between the plates of the beast’s shell. Black ichor gushed into the sea, staining the waves.
Yet the trench-beast did not weaken. If anything, its movements grew faster, more erratic — the fury of an ancient thing roused from centuries of sleep.
---
Beneath the city, in the Vault of Currents, the Seal’s chamber trembled.
Veyrus and the gathered magisters fought to keep their footing as the ocean’s power battered the wards of the vault. The great Trident Seal on the altar glowed brighter with each heartbeat, its lines of ancient script burning in a shade that was neither gold nor blue but something older — something that belonged to the deep itself.
"This is it," Veyrus said, voice hoarse. "We cannot bind one without binding the other."
Magister Elnath looked up from the array of glyphs he was maintaining. "You mean—?"
"I mean," Veyrus cut in, "the only way to stop them both is to drop the Seal’s deepest anchor. To return them to the deep, locked together."
The other magisters went pale. That was no light decision — the Deep Anchor was not meant for living beings. It was a chain forged in the first age, used only once before, and the sea had not forgiven that binding.
"It could crack the bedrock beneath us," one magister warned.
"It could sink the city entirely," another added.
Veyrus slammed his hand down on the altar. "If we do nothing, there will be no city left to sink."
---
Above, Poseidon was beginning to understand the trap.
The pylons still stood in half a dozen points across the harbor, their light pulsing faster now, forming threads between them that shimmered like fishing lines in the water. He could feel the pull — not as a chain on his limbs, but as a whisper in the currents, urging him downward, urging him to surrender to the deep.
His eyes narrowed.
So, the landfolk had decided to gamble.
---
The trench-beast felt it too.
It roared in defiance, tentacles smashing through another pylon in an eruption of shattered stone and boiling steam. But for every one it destroyed, another flared brighter. The Seal’s will was no longer trying to separate them — it was drawing them together.
Poseidon realized the danger a heartbeat before the trap closed.
If they were pulled into each other’s reach and the Deep Anchor was set... neither of them would ever surface again.
---
"Now!" Veyrus roared.
The magisters poured every drop of power into the Seal. The glyphs blazed so bright they seared afterimages into the eyes of everyone present. The altar shook, the air thickening until it felt like breathing through water.
In the harbor, the pylons’ light surged upward into a dome, sealing both combatants within.
The currents turned against their masters. The water no longer obeyed Poseidon’s will — it surged around him like a thousand invisible hands, shoving him toward the trench-beast.
---
The collision was apocalyptic.
Trident met tentacle. Shell met spear. The shockwave shattered what remained of the seawall and sent waves tearing through the lower districts. Ships were lifted like toys and flung onto the shore.
And through it all, the Seal’s light wound around them both — a tightening spiral of luminous chains.
Poseidon’s eyes burned with rage. He drove the trident forward again and again, each strike fueled by the ocean itself. But for every wound he dealt, the beast gave one back. Its tentacles wrapped around his waist, his arms, trying to crush the divine strength from him.
---
Below, Veyrus felt the resistance.
"They’re fighting the bind," he warned, teeth gritted. "If they break free—"
"They won’t," Elnath said through clenched teeth. "We’ll drown before we let them."
The Seal’s power deepened. The chains of light thickened, their color shifting from gold to that same abyssal hue that came from the oldest parts of the sea.
---
Poseidon realized then that this was not the magisters’ doing alone.
The ocean itself had decided.
It wanted both of them gone.
---
The trench-beast’s bellow became a scream as the chains coiled tighter. Poseidon felt them sinking past flesh and bone into something deeper — binding not the body, but the essence.
And in that moment, for the first time since claiming his name, Poseidon faced the possibility of being unmade.
His fury broke into something sharper.
If the landfolk thought to bury him in the deep for eternity, then he would make sure their city went with him.
---
He summoned every current, every tide, every hidden stream beneath the bay. The sea rose at his command, a wall of water taller than the Bastion, rushing inward toward the city.
The magisters felt the backlash instantly. The glyphs flickered, the Seal’s pull wavering.
"He’s resisting harder!"
"If he breaks the chain now—"
"He won’t," Veyrus said, though sweat ran freely down his face. "Because we’ll finish this before he can."
---
The Seal flared one last time.
The dome of light collapsed inward, folding the two titans together in a blinding flash. The sound was not thunder, not entirely — it was the ocean’s voice, roaring in a tongue no mortal could survive hearing.
The waves froze mid-surge, then fell limp as if the sea had suddenly grown tired.
When the light faded, the harbor was empty.
No Poseidon.
No trench-beast.
Only wreckage and silence.
---
Veyrus collapsed against the altar, his strength gone.
"Did it work?" Elnath asked.
Veyrus stared into the still water on the scrying pool. "They’re gone," he said. "For now."
But deep in the black below, where the Seal’s light had sunk, something shifted. Two shapes, vast and coiled together, waiting.
And though the chains were tight, the ocean’s will is never truly still.