For most of his life, he’d tried to control men. And now he had to relinquish control. The dark irony of it did not escape him even as he submitted to the force growing within him, gathering momentum like a thunderstorm about to unleash its electrical payload over the shore of his being.

  I cannot contain it, he thought. Even though he knew the transformation was his only salvation, still he resisted, afraid. The force was not only physical but mental, as though a clawed hand gripped his mind, squeezing and squeezing until his thoughts were being crushed out of the runnels of his brain like wine. He tried to hold onto them, but it was impossible. He was overripe fruit and the time of harvest was near.

  He screamed—and that scream was his release.

  At once, the Daimon seized him. Throbbing power surged through his limbs as though the madness of the ocean itself had been allowed into him through some dark incision. He writhed, kicked, screamed. Water filled his lungs, but his lungs were themselves revolting against nature, swelling and contracting abnormally, his ribs cracking and flexing, the shattered bones moving of their own accord like worms through soil.

  In that moment, he wished he had chosen death.

  The explosion of energy at the core of his being travelled up from the groin through his chest and up into his head, finding a place of residence at the crown of his skull, where it blazed starlike. The ocean seemed illuminated by the light that came from him and he saw, in the flash of brilliance, a colossal form swimming beneath him in the pelagic deep. He shuddered, trembled. Not only did he now feel the currents stirred by the immense body passing, but he felt its mind. He felt the thoughts and emotions and intelligence of this being and was somehow connected to them.

  There were others, too. Farther out. Across the whole world. Scattered yet always one.

  My brothers! The Daimon cried. Cold horror seized the Warden. He thought he knew what pact he had made, but now he saw its true extent.

  The Daimons are returned, and they are… connected mentally. And now I… I am going to become one of them.

  Yes, the Daimon whispered, though its voice was swiftly becoming indistinguishable from the Warden’s own. You and we are one. One mind that may fight with perfect unity.

  The Warden opened his mouth to scream but all that emerged was vile spew of blood and ichor. He vibrated as he felt something tendril-like stirring within, pushing, trying to break free from the confines of his ravaged body.

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  Our enemy could not kill us, for they did not understand us. A Daimon is not flesh, nor bones, but mind—mind that exists in the blood!

  Parasites! The Warden thought.

  We give purpose to flesh that is wasted—like yours. There is not much to work with here, but we shall do what we can…

  Gashes opened in his neck. Water rushed into them and into the sticky channels that were the new matrix of his breathing. His shoulder blades opened, slicing through the flesh of his spine, and from the grisly wounds erupted two slimy tentacles. A groaning noise left his lips, part agonised cry, but on the edge of pleasure, for there was a release in these new forms emerging, a sense of satisfaction in their completion. New information flooded him. The tentacles were also antennae, and his senses and perceptions were widening and expanding with each soft stroke of the water.

  The black form in the deep below began to alter its course, swimming up. It was colossal—beyond comprehension. It resembled a whale one moment, a man-o-war the next. Octopean, reptilian, crustacean, sporting dozens of eyes and appendages. Its maw was a wormhole illuminated by white teeth.

  I… I am becoming monstrous, like them. I am becoming like the very theronts I hunted!

  Shame is a human emotion, the Daimon answered. And you are not human, anymore. Nor are you a mere theront, a bastard-child of the so-called gods. You are more than that, a higher being, one of the true rulers of Erethia. All your life you have demanded purity—and we are the only purity that exists!

  The Warden shuddered at how well it knew his thoughts, longings, and past, but he saw the dark truth of its logic. His eyes were no longer obscured by the gloom, and he saw the true extent of the Daimon, large enough to lay waste to a city, its labyrinthine limbs embracing him as one of their own.

  We are ready! he thought, and now he knew the merging of selves was complete, for he felt nothing but joy, joy and elation to see the Great Work done.

  No, his Daimon answered. Not yet. One thing stands in our way: The Nergal. Four thousand years it has taken for us to rebuild. We will not make the same mistake again.

  “Then the Nergal must be found, must be destroyed.” His voice sounded clear, even in this lightless deep, with miles of water above him. The limbs about him shivered, shimmered. The Daimon was ever-transforming, like a flower blooming, but at the apex of its bloom, rather than withering, it found a new flower to become.

  Yes, the host within his mind whispered as one, not separated by distance, though the loudest voice was the voice of the thing before him. Return to the surface. Destroy the Nergal. Our strength is your strength. You are chosen, you are blessed. The Daimoniac, we name you. Safeguard our return. And Ascend!

  He wasted no more time. With a kick of his powerful legs—restored and strengthened—and the fluttering of the strange tendrils sprouting from his back, he soared upwards from the deep, easily resisting the ocean’s currents, as though he had always been a creature of the water.

  Far from being directionless, his heightened senses told him where the filth of humanity had made their nest upon the shore, and with the urgency of one escaping prison, he hurtled toward the coast of Aurelia—doom following in his wake.