CHAPTER 190: WAITING FOR HIS COMMAND.

The sea had grown too quiet.

After the drowned city, after the bell’s death knell, the waters did not rage or roar. They did not strike. They simply... waited.

Poseidon stood on the jagged cliffs above what had once been a thriving harbor. His gaze lingered over the black, moonlit waters where the city had been devoured. Wooden beams floated aimlessly. Lanterns bobbed like drifting stars. A child’s doll bumped against the rock below him, waterlogged eyes staring skyward.

The silence pressed against him like a hand. Mortals whispered that storms announced the wrath of gods. But Poseidon knew the deeper truth. The ocean’s greatest terror was not its fury, but its stillness.

For still water hid everything.

And tonight, the ocean was hiding him.

---

The Watching Tide

He knelt, pressing his palm against the wet stone. Instantly, a rush of voices entered his mind—the drowning prayers, the cries of mothers, the sputtering gasps of men with lungs filling with salt. Every sound still lingered in the current. Every death, preserved like sediment.

Their fear fed him.

But alongside it, something else stirred.

A flicker. A warmth. Not Thalorin’s hunger. Not his oceanic dominion. But Dominic—the boy he had been. The one who once wept in quiet corners, wishing the sickness would spare him another day.

For the briefest breath, Poseidon felt guilt.

And then the tide within him swallowed it whole.

"Regret belongs to mortals," he murmured. "I am the tide. The sea does not regret what it takes."

His words echoed strangely. The water itself repeated them back in whispers, each wavelet carrying his voice as though the ocean had chosen to affirm him.

---

The Stirring in Olympus

He could feel them watching.

The gods.

Not with mortal eyes, but with the tethered weight of their decree. Somewhere above the stars, Olympus whispered of war. He could taste it in the brine—iron in the water, sharp like blood.

"Cowards," Poseidon said softly, eyes narrowing at the sky. "They send whispers while I stand in the open."

A gull wheeled overhead. Then another. Then a hundred. Black wings turned the moonlight to ash as the birds circled above him in unnatural patterns. Poseidon frowned. He had not summoned them.

The gulls were eyes.

Not his. Theirs.

The feathers shimmered faintly with divine essence. Aegirion’s touch. Perhaps Nymera’s shadows interlaced too. They were watching him through mortal creatures, their fear clothed in wings.

"Let them watch." Poseidon’s hand curled into a fist. The gulls screeched. One by one, they burst into saltwater mist, dissolving before they touched the sea again. "Soon, they will see more than they wish."

---

The Mortal Witness

Behind him, a cough.

Poseidon did not turn. He already knew the sound. The heartbeat. The trembling.

The Watcher of Tides had survived.

The gaunt old priest staggered from the broken stairway, robes soaked, eyes wide as if he had walked out of the underworld itself. His lips trembled when he spoke.

"You... you are not a man."

Poseidon finally turned. The moonlight caught his face, his eyes still aglow with abyssal tides.

"No." His voice was calm. "I am the sea that remembers."

The Watcher fell to his knees, bowing his head so hard it struck the stone. "We... we were told you were gone. Banished. That the gods above chained you in the Rift forever."

Poseidon’s lips curved in something not quite a smile. "Chains rust. The ocean does not."

The old man lifted his head, salt tears mixing with salt spray. "Then... will you spare us? The survivors? Will you rebuild what you have drowned?"

Poseidon looked past him, down at the ruins swallowed beneath the tide. His silence stretched, heavy as pressure in the deep.

Finally, he answered:

"No city is ever spared. Only remembered."

The Watcher shuddered as though struck. His body shook, but Poseidon reached out—not with cruelty, but with something gentler. A brush of power. The old man gasped as the tide seeped into his veins. Not enough to drown him. Enough to change him.

"Rise," Poseidon commanded.

The priest stood, trembling, his eyes glazed blue.

"You will carry my truth," Poseidon said. "Tell them the tide has no master. Tell them Poseidon walks again."

The Watcher’s voice rang with an unnatural resonance as he bowed. "Yes, Lord of the Deep."

---

The Deepening Current

When the priest left, Poseidon lingered alone. The cliff beneath him cracked as if unable to bear his presence. The tide swelled against the rocks without wind.

He inhaled deeply. With each breath, he drew not just water, but memory. Mortal history was written in harbors, in drowned sailors, in ships that never returned. Their secrets entered him, layering upon his soul.

He saw a fleet once burned by Zeus’s lightning, its charred wood resting still upon the ocean floor. He saw Nymera’s shadows binding drowned children’s souls, hiding them away. He saw Seraphin’s fire scorched across reefs, scars that never healed.

And through it all, he saw the truth:

The gods had always stolen from the sea.

And now, the sea had come to collect.

---

A Whisper Beneath

But not all within him was ocean.

A whisper slid through his mind, colder, darker.

Thalorin.

More. Take more. One city is not enough. Drown the coasts, devour their ships, swallow their shrines.

Poseidon stiffened. The abyss within him stirred, always hungry. Always pressing. He clenched his jaw, forcing it back into silence.

"No."

You deny yourself.

"I am not your hunger," Poseidon growled. "I am not your abyss."

Then you are still Dominic.

The name struck him like a harpoon. Dominic—the boy with dying lungs. The weak shell. The forgotten.

Poseidon’s hand trembled. For a heartbeat, the sea around him stilled in confusion.

Then he exhaled, and the tremor passed.

"I am Poseidon," he said firmly. "No more. No less."

The whisper receded, but he knew it was not gone. The abyss never left. It only waited.

---

The Horizon Tilts

As dawn approached, the horizon itself seemed wrong. Ships far out at sea leaned unnaturally, as though the very surface had tilted beneath them.

Poseidon smiled faintly. Not storm. Not wave.

Foundation.

Every heartbeat drew him closer to the point where the sea itself would bend only to him. Where Olympus’s chains, decrees, and votes would mean nothing.

But Olympus was not idle. He could feel their stirrings. Somewhere above, their council had shifted from whispers to weapons.

"Come, then," Poseidon whispered, rising to his full height. His aura spread, making the cliff weep streams of seawater. "Let the thunderer descend. Let the flame goddess burn. Let the shadows coil."

His voice grew, rolling across the black sea.

"The ocean does not kneel. And when the tide rises, all thrones sink."

The waves answered, not in roar, but in perfect silence.

Still water.

Watching water.

Waiting for his command.