CHAPTER 159: WHY HESITATE?”

The silence after the flood was the loudest sound the world had ever heard.

Poseidon stood where the seawall had once divided land from ocean, his bare feet sinking into the mud that had swallowed the city. The drowned bell lay half-buried nearby, its bronze body cracked and twisted, its voice extinguished forever.

He inhaled. Salt, blood, oil, timber. The stench of mortality mixed with the breath of the ocean. With every draw, the water inside his veins answered back. He was no longer merely a vessel. He was the tide.

But in that moment, surrounded by the ruins he had wrought, Poseidon did not feel triumph.

He felt the weight.

The cries of mortals still clung to the air, carried faintly by gulls who circled above as if confused by the new coastline. He could feel the last bubbles of drowned lungs bursting beneath the surface. Each one, a heartbeat extinguished. Each one, a ripple in his blood.

It should have been intoxicating.

And yet it pressed against him like chains.

---

"Why hesitate?"

The voice slid from within. Not his own, but the other. The deep, endless growl of Thalorin. The abyss that had twined into his essence the day the Rift had cracked open.

"You have shown them a fraction of what we are. A city drowned is nothing. Stretch further. Break the spine of the continent."

Poseidon’s hand tightened. The sea surged forward in answer, foam rising as if eager to comply. For a heartbeat, he considered it. To unleash himself fully, to no longer hide behind restraint.

But then—his hand fell. The sea stilled.

"No," Poseidon whispered, his voice low, carved from stone and storm. "The sea does not rush. The sea claims in its own time."

Thalorin laughed. "The boy still lingers in you. The hesitation. The fear. You will learn that mercy is salt in a wound—useless, stinging, soon forgotten."

Poseidon’s gaze shifted upward, past the ruined city, toward the high sky. He felt Olympus. Their watchful eyes, burning judgment into him from afar. He did not need sight to know their council had spoken. The decree was already forged: he was to be hunted.

"They fear me," Poseidon murmured. "But they fear you more."

"And they should," Thalorin hissed, pleased. "Let them sharpen their spears. We will drown them with their own blood."

---

From the shallow lagoon behind him, a child’s cry pierced the silence.

Poseidon turned. A girl, no older than eight, clung to the shattered mast of a sunken ship. Her small fingers were white from gripping, her eyes wide, her lips blue with cold. Somehow, impossibly, she had survived when so many had not.

The tide lapped at her ankles, gentle as a lullaby.

Poseidon approached, water parting beneath his steps as though bowing. When he reached her, she shrank back, pressing her face into the wood.

"Don’t... please..." she whispered.

Her words, broken though they were, struck harder than Olympus’s decree.

Poseidon crouched before her, his vast frame folding like the weight of a storm-cloud pressed low. He reached out—not with power, not with wrath, but with the quiet touch of a man. His hand, calloused by eternity, brushed her hair back from her face.

"You are not mine to take," he said softly. "Not yet."

The girl blinked, trembling. "Are you... are you the sea?"

A pause.

"Yes," Poseidon admitted. "And no. I am what the sea remembers. What it cannot forget."

Her small chest heaved. She did not understand his words, not truly. But she understood the tone.

The tide, which had threatened to devour her, receded an inch.

---

Thalorin seethed inside him. "Weakness. You spare her, and she will grow to curse you. You could end her breath with but a thought, silence her fear, and strengthen yourself."

Poseidon rose slowly, the child still clinging to her mast. He did not look back.

"If the sea took everything, there would be nothing left to reflect it."

The ocean whispered agreement. Or perhaps it was only in his mind.

---

He turned toward the deeper water, striding back into the abyss where his throne waited unseen. As he walked, the drowned city behind him groaned like a wounded beast, timbers snapping, stones sliding into the rising lagoon. The mortals would rebuild, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

It no longer mattered.

The tide had chosen its god.

And Poseidon would answer.

---

Far above, Olympus trembled.

Zeus himself stood at the balcony of his storm-forged palace, lightning crawling along his arms like serpents of fire. Beside him, Athena’s eyes were narrow, calculating. Apollo’s hand tightened on his bow. Hera’s lips thinned with silent fury.

They had seen the drowned city. They had heard the bell.

Poseidon had returned.

And this time, he was not bound by their oaths nor their chains.

"This cannot be allowed," Zeus growled, thunder rumbling in his throat. "If he claims the seas, the balance collapses."

Athena’s reply was cold. "The balance has already collapsed. We only decide whether Olympus stands above the flood or beneath it."

---

Below, Poseidon paused waist-deep in the surf. He looked back once at the child, still trembling on her mast, then forward again into the endless black horizon.

He whispered to himself, a vow not to Thalorin, not to Olympus, but to the ocean itself.

"If they come for me, let them come. I will not be caged again. I am the tide. I rise, and I fall. But I do not break."

The sea answered with silence.

And in that silence, Poseidon stepped forward, disappearing into the abyss.

The drowned city, the terrified survivors, the tolling bell—all were left behind. But the memory of this night would linger, carved into mortal hearts as the first act of a god reborn.

The world had tilted toward the sea.

And it would never tilt back.

The city was gone.

Not destroyed by fire. Not razed by armies. Not toppled by famine.

No—its erasure came quietly, as if the sea had merely decided it was tired of leaving men their stone shelters.

Poseidon stood at the shoreline that no longer existed. The beach had shifted a mile inland, whole neighborhoods dragged beneath the brine. Lanterns still burned beneath the water, stubborn flames smothered by their inevitable drowning. Timber, bodies, the bronze carcass of the drowned bell—everything swayed in slow currents, as though the city had been turned into a graveyard of marionettes.

The mortal cries had gone silent hours ago. Only gulls circled now, their wings black shapes against a perfectly clear sky.