Reincarnated As Poseidon

The ocean roared around Poseidon like an unending chorus of war drums. The sound was alive, swelling with rage and ancient authority. Every swell, every current, every foaming crest whispered his name—not the name he had worn in his mortal life, but the one forged in the depths, bound to a legacy older than the gods who sat upon their thrones.

The Rift was closing.

Above him, the jagged mouth of the dimensional tear flickered, its watery edges rolling like the lip of a storm cloud. Beyond it lay the mortal seas, but here… here was something deeper. The Abyss groaned with the pressure of its own darkness, and from its heart, an old presence stirred.

He could feel Thalorin.

Not in form, not yet—but as a pressure in his skull, a tidal weight pressing behind his thoughts, threatening to flood his mind until he drowned in it.

"You've kept me waiting," the voice rumbled, neither loud nor quiet, but carrying the weight of a thousand shipwrecks. It wasn't speech in the human sense—more like a resonance inside Poseidon's very bones. "I feared you had forgotten the call."

"I don't forget," Poseidon growled, standing firm on the black stone floor beneath the shifting water. His trident pulsed faintly, its runes shimmering with the heartbeat of the deep. "I came because the others would rather I never did."

A low chuckle rolled through the Rift, shaking silt from unseen cliffs. "The 'others.'" The word carried venom. "Those who chained me, who thought themselves my better. The ones who now fear you… because they smell me in your blood."

Poseidon's grip tightened. "I'm not your vessel," he said sharply. "I'm my own—"

But the water around him surged, cold enough to steal his breath.

A massive shape coiled in the darkness beyond sight, and for a heartbeat, a single glowing eye the size of a warship cracked open. The light from it burned through the abyss, illuminating scars carved into walls of black coral and bone.

"You are mine, little tide-breaker," Thalorin whispered, and the pressure in Poseidon's chest threatened to crush him. "When the war comes, you will strike as I command—or you will sink to the bottom of time itself."

Something shifted in the Rift's current, and the abyssal voice grew quieter, but no less heavy.

"You have felt them watching you," Thalorin continued. "The gods gather. They do not come to parley. They come to end you. This is the truth the mortal seas will never whisper—your life is the coin for their peace."

The words hit like a harpoon to the gut.

Poseidon had known, in a vague, unspoken way, that the Olympians did not trust him. But hearing it laid bare—no riddles, no courtly threats—was another matter.

"They'll regret that," he said, his voice low and steady. But even as the defiance burned in him, doubt twisted in the current.

"You're not ready." The voice was matter-of-fact, like a tide announcing it would rise whether the shore wished it or not. "If you faced them now, they would scatter your bones across the trenches. You are strong—yes—but raw, unsharpened. Your power is a tide that knows not its direction."

The glowing eye narrowed.

"I can change that."

The Abyss surged forward, a vast shadow rolling in the dark. Poseidon planted his trident into the stone, the point scraping with a sharp, ringing sound.

"You want to control me," he said. "You train me, I owe you. I let you in, I lose myself."

Thalorin's laughter was like cracking glaciers.

"Not control. Symbiosis. When you command the storm, does the storm think itself enslaved? No… it simply is. Let me make you what you were born to be."

The Rift shuddered. A spiral of currents closed in around Poseidon, each stream carrying whispers of long-forgotten wars—battles fought in trenches deeper than mortal maps, against foes no bard dared to name. His vision blurred. Salt burned his lungs, though he wasn't breathing.

Then the water stilled.

From the shadows, Thalorin extended a limb—not flesh, but something older, woven of living current and darkness. It hovered before him like a contract without words.

"Take it," the voice urged. "And you will never fear the gods again."

Poseidon's mind raced. Images of Aegirion's cold gaze flashed through his memory; of the other sea deities murmuring in gilded halls, their eyes sliding away whenever he entered. They would strike soon—Thalorin was right about that.

But the cost…

The cost would be letting this ancient thing inside him more than it already was.

He could almost hear his mortal heart beating somewhere deep inside, warning him that this was no alliance—it was surrender.

And yet…

His fingers twitched. He remembered his death. The hospital bed. The suffocating weakness in his lungs. The slow fade into nothing. Never again, he told himself. Never again would he be powerless.

With a slow, deliberate motion, Poseidon reached out.

The moment his hand touched the living darkness, it was like plunging into a hurricane. Power tore through him—not gentle, not patient, but overwhelming, furious. His bones screamed, his blood boiled, and behind his eyes, the Abyss opened wider.

For a heartbeat, he was no longer standing in the Rift.

He was everywhere. He could feel the pull of every tide on every shore, hear the death-cries of ships splintering miles above, sense the ancient migrations of leviathans in trenches where no light had ever swum. The ocean was not a place. It was a will. And it was his.

When he came back to himself, he was kneeling. The trident hummed in his grip, its runes no longer faint but blazing. His eyes—if he could have seen them—glowed with the same abyssal light as Thalorin's.

"Good," Thalorin murmured, satisfaction rumbling in the depths. "Now… let us see if the gods still wish to come for you."

The Rift trembled violently, currents spinning faster, pulling him toward the surface world. The portal above widened, light spilling through—but it wasn't the sunlight of the mortal seas. It was golden, searing, and filled with silhouettes.

Gods.

They were already here.

A dozen forms descended through the opening, their weapons gleaming like captured dawn. The weight of their presence pressed against him harder than the ocean ever had. He could name some by their auras—Aegirion at the front, trident of his own leveled in challenge, flanked by two minor tide-lords and a goddess with eyes like frozen rain.

"Poseidon," Aegirion's voice rang through the Rift. "You stand accused of harboring an enemy of the gods. Stand down, relinquish your bond, and your death will be swift."

Poseidon rose slowly, trident in hand, the abyssal glow in his eyes cutting through the dim water. His voice was calm, almost gentle.

"You came to kill me."

"Yes," Aegirion said, without hesitation.

The corner of Poseidon's mouth twitched—not a smile, not quite.

"Then you should have brought more."