Chapter 127: The Harbor 6
The bell’s toll still echoed in his bones.
It hadn’t been struck by mortal hands—Dominic knew that much. No priest, no sailor, no cathedral could ever summon such a sound. This was the voice of the sea itself, resounding through every current and tide. It was a verdict disguised as a knell.
He rose from where he had collapsed upon the broken steps of the temple. His skin still trembled from the resonance, salt bleeding from the pores as though his body no longer knew where flesh ended and water began. His chest heaved. He looked down at his hands, and in the dim light, they glistened as if scales lurked beneath the skin, waiting for the right moment to tear through.
"Poseidon," the ocean whispered. Not a voice from beyond, but within him—familiar yet alien, fatherly yet cruel. "Do not flinch from what you are."
Dominic pressed his palms against his ears, but sound carried differently now. He could silence the world of men, but not the voice in the water. Not the god that dwelled within his marrow.
I am Dominic. I was Dominic. His mind clung to the thought like driftwood after shipwreck. But the drowned bell had scattered even that. The gods had named him. The seas had confirmed it. No denial could unmake what he had become.
And worse—he had felt them.
Zeus. Hera. Athena. The judgment in their silence was sharper than any sword. They had seen him. They had marked him. He could feel their gaze like stormclouds gathering beyond the horizon.
He staggered to the shoreline, feet dragging across wet stone until they met sand and surf. The tide rushed forward to greet him, not as water upon shore, but as a servant to master. Waves bent, parted around his ankles, curling upward like beasts waiting to be unleashed.
A single thought—sink—and the sea obeyed. The water swirled into a pit around him, deepening until the seabed showed, gasping fish writhing in sudden air. Dominic stumbled back, horrified at the ease of it, the raw obedience of the tide.
He clenched his fists. "No..." His voice cracked. "No, I won’t be your weapon."
But the sea laughed. A low, hungry rumble that shook the hollowed pit he had carved. The water did not listen—it anticipated. It craved.
Memories not his own surged like tides through a broken dam: temples raised in his name, sailors drowned in his fury, cities brought to ruin when men dared to forget who ruled the deeps. The taste of blood mingled with saltwater. He felt the weight of a trident in his hand, though he held nothing. He felt crowns bowing, kings kneeling, storms answering.
This was not memory.
This was inheritance.
And with it came a truth Dominic had tried to ignore since his rebirth: Poseidon had never died. He had been sleeping. Waiting. Choosing a vessel. Dominic had not replaced him. He had become him.
"Then who am I?" he whispered.
The waves whispered back: Both. Vessel and god. Mortal and eternal. The boy who died, and the tide that cannot.
He fell to his knees, water rising again to cradle him. Tears burned his eyes, indistinguishable from the salt spray around him. He wanted to scream, to tear his skin apart and find where Dominic ended and Poseidon began, but there was no seam. No dividing line.
Only one truth: the gods above would never allow him to live.
The drowned bell was not only his awakening—it was their alarm. He could almost hear their council now, thrones heavy with malice, divine weapons being polished in anticipation. Olympus did not forgive rivals.
"Let them come," another voice spoke inside him—darker, deeper, one that reeked not of the Olympian sea but of abyssal trenches where no light dwelled. Thalorin. The ancient hunger, the one who had stirred first within him.
Dominic’s breath caught.
"You... still linger."
The shadow laughed. Did you think the gods would gift you such power without consequence? I was always here, Dominic. Even Poseidon is only the mask you wear to make sense of me.
"No," Dominic growled. "You are corruption. You are the abyss. You would consume everything—"
And what do you think gods are? Thalorin whispered. Consumption wrapped in worship. Devouring made sacred. At least I do not lie about my hunger.
The sea around him swelled higher, tides restless, feeding on his conflict. Dominic’s reflection on the water’s surface was no longer his own. It shifted—first Dominic’s pale, haunted face, then Poseidon’s regal, wrathful visage crowned with coral and shadow, and beneath it all, something vaster, a silhouette with teeth the size of ships, eyes that swallowed suns.
He staggered back from his own reflection, but the tide followed. The water clung to him, curled around his wrists like shackles, urging, demanding, waiting for command.
He remembered Zeus’s gaze in the drowned vision. Cold. Absolute. If the gods struck now, could he even resist?
"Dominic," the waves crooned, "your enemies are not mortals. Not anymore. Only gods can kill what you have become. And they will try."
His heart pounded. Every beat a drum of war.
Every breath the roar of surf.
He did not want this. He had wanted life, just life—after dying young, after wasting away in a hospital bed, he had begged only for time. But fate had given him oceans instead, and with them, an executioner’s crown.
He remembered Elias’s face. His mother’s voice. The fragments of the boy he had once been. If he surrendered to Poseidon, to Thalorin, to the endless tide—would Dominic still exist at all?
Yet if he clung to Dominic, refused the tide—would anything survive the wrath of Olympus?
The sea’s laughter turned sharper. Around him, the ocean shifted, pulling back as though bowing to a king. On the horizon, storm clouds coiled like serpents, lightning webbing their bellies. It was as if the world itself braced for what came next.
Dominic rose slowly to his feet, every movement heavier, older, less human. His hands shook, but when he extended them, the sea extended with him. He could feel its power like a heartbeat tethered to his own.
He was Poseidon.
He was Dominic.
He was the abyss Thalorin had seeded.
And soon, he would have to decide which part of him the world would face.
But one truth cut sharper than all others:
The gods would not wait.
And neither could he.