Catelyn Winona
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"You're not under the sea anymore, Princess."
🕑 Added 2020-10-16 20:21:08 +0000 UTCWriting Sprints are back as I desperately want to up my productivity! I'm doing video writing sprints and below is my first! This version is unedited and done in about an hour. The longer version I've been working on will be up tomorrow and will have more scenes as well as a happy ending :)
Thanks for reading!
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Dialogue prompt: “You’re not under the sea anymore, Princess.”
The coast at night is another world. She stands on the rocky cliffs above the raging waters and looks out towards the horizon. Even with her eyesight, she only sees black.
Hazel wraps her arms around herself. It’s not cold out, not to her at least, but there’s a deeper chill settling into her bones. They’d agreed to meet just after sunset. Just after, not hours after when the moon looms high in the sky and threatens to start its slow descent.
She can’t accept that she’s been stood up. Mariana isn’t like that. If she didn’t mean it, she would have sent a…a note, or something. A message. Sorry, I made a mistake. I can’t elope. I can’t run away. I hope you understand. Something along those lines.
A car zooms along the highway behind Hazel, piercing headlights illuminating the low, scraggly brush between the rail and the cliff she’s standing on. There’s no one on the crumbling path she’d used to climb down here, no hint of glowing golden hair or a wide, sharp-toothed smile.
Hazel swallows hard and turns back to look at where she knows the horizon lies. Her ears are good enough to hear anyone walking towards her and her mind isn’t kind enough to conjure the sound of small footsteps on shattered shale. The night is silent but for the crashing of the waves far below and the dull roar of the occasional midnight car racing by.
I should go. Her feet are rooted to the spot, thin flats doing very little to protect her soles from the sharp rock. It’s obvious Mariana isn’t coming. Something’s happened, something outside of her control. That’s the only reason Hazel can accept for being left standing here, alone.
Hazel stands there until the sky begins to lighten, the oppressive dark easing into soft purples and deep, deep blues.
Only when tide is at its lowest point does she hear footsteps behind her.
-----------------------------------.
Hazel knows better than to fall in love with a mermaid. The sea is in her blood, in her heart, but she doesn’t belong underneath the water. Her lungs crave the roaring winds of the surface, the rain and the thunder, the sweet scent of summer. It is only her heart that craves the ocean and her heart has never done a very good job of protecting her.
“Your brother’s engaged,” her mother tells her on the day she meets Mariana. Her mother is a stern woman, the hard life of a sailor engraved into the corners of her mouth, into the back of her hands. She’s missing all of her fingers on the left one. Rope accident. It sent her home long enough to marry Papa and have two children. “The wedding’s today.”
Hazel’s fingers freeze on the laces of her boots. She’s fresh off their family’s fishing boat and her ears are ringing from the crashing of the cages. Two newbies who didn’t have the gentle hand of her papa, but enough promise to be kept on. Hazel’s not supposed to be the one managing the boats of their family’s empire, but her brother hadn’t been showing up to the docks. Now she knows why. “Short engagement.”
Her mother snorts. “He’s caught himself a selkie. He’s not one to waste time with an opportunity like that.”
Hazel bites back what she wants to say. She wants to say that tricking a selkie is a cruel thing to do, that no one in their family needs another opportunity, that her brother is as cruel and evil as the sea if he thinks himself better for choosing to marry an enslaved woman. But they’re Fisherman and Fisherman don’t think it cruel to bind a daughter of the sea to them. They think of it as a right and, for the most part, everyone agrees with them.
“Do I need to wear a dress?” Hazel asks.
“Yes and so do I,” her mother says. She stands, scraping the wooden chair across the floor noisily and goes to the liquor cabinet. She takes out the whiskey and drinks without searching for a glass. When she’s finished, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and says, “But I won’t.”
Hazel knows that her mother isn’t a daughter of the sea. She was happy with Papa, she was, but she was also trapped. By her body, by her children, by the ring on a chain around her neck. Her mother, like her, is more sympathetic to the selkie than she can say.
----------------------.
Hazel bites her lip as the footsteps approach, slipping and tripping on seemingly every loose stone. She knows this tread, but wishes she wasn’t hearing it here. Wishes she wasn’t hearing it now.
“Selene said you’d be here,” her brother says. He’s out of breath. Unlike her, he never found himself drawn out onto the boats for months at a time, never choked on the need to do the hard work of fighting the sea. “Lucky she knew. I might not have found you before noon.”
“You got a letter?” Hazel stares out at the water. With the light, she can see the boat anchored a mile offshore. It was supposed to be their getaway.
“Selene did,” her brother says.
Hazel nods quickly and blinks the tears out of her eyes. Mariana and Selene were close, of course she’d give the letter to Selene. There’s a sick sense of relief that it wasn’t what Hazel initially thought, wasn’t that Mariana wanted to, but couldn’t come. She didn’t come out of her own will if she was giving handwritten letters to Selene. “You open it?”
“I tried to read it,” her brother admits. There’s displeasure in his voice. “It’s in their language.”
Finally, she turns and accepts the single piece of paper her brother is holding out to her. She opens it without emotion, eyes scanning the single line over and over again.
I can’t abandon my people. I’m sorry.
It’s a bitter consolation that Hazel guessed the words before she ever had to see them.
----------------------------.
Mermaids are, without exception, off limits to the Fisherman empire. The peace treaty her papa brokered with their king is a fragile thing, easily broken, and both sides have too much to lose to risk it.
With the treaty, the Fisherman are able to fish and trade across the ocean. With the treaty, the mermaids have access to crucial goods and protection from those on the mainland who would harm them.
Without the treaty…There have been enough wars fought between them to know the outcome.
It is not a surprise for Hazel to see mermaids at the wedding. The selkies are kin to them, though not close enough that the treaty applies. That’s why her brother is sitting at the head table, a smug grin on his face, and his dark-haired bride is sitting next to him with narrowed, black eyes.
The mermaids are seated to the left of the head table, pearls and glittering shells making them seem otherworldly under the candlelight. They’re built differently than humans, long-limbed with pastel colored hair. Their eyes are completely black, like the selkie’s, but hidden under iridescent second eyelids. They’re all wearing legs tonight instead of their tails, a sign of respect to her brother.
As per tradition, it’s the husband’s family who greets the new couple first. Her mother rises from her seat next to Hazel, all frowns and carefully coiffed hair. She’s followed through on her threat to wear pants and the soft leather makes nary a sound as she glides up the aisle towards the head table. Her sailor’s outfit is ancestral to them and, therefore, not an insult.
“Good fortune to my son,” her mother announces. She offers him a bottle of whiskey and then turns to the bride. “As an honorary Fisherman, you will need the tools of our trade.” And she hands the selkie the oldest tool indeed; a knife.
Her brother goes pale when his new bride takes the weapon with something close to reverence. She looks up at Hazel’s mother and speaks in the underwater language. “I am Selene.”
Hazel’s eyes widen and she has to work to keep her mouth shut. Her mother giving the woman a knife—that’s enough to make the rest of their family hiss with displeasure. But the selkie giving her name to her mother freely?
When her mother walks back to their table, head held high, the family watch with narrowed eyes. But the mermaids? Hazel watches contemplation flash across their face.
The matriarch may not be as archaic as the heir has always been.
Hazel stands next as the sister to the groom. She’s not the elegant, poised picture her mother painted. She’s weathered, her clothes ill-fitting and her boots too thick-soled to manage a silent glide to the head table. Everyone in her family knows her and dislikes the strength of the ocean in her blood.
Dislikes or envies, she thinks as one of her weaker cousins flinches back from her when she strides past. Her aura is turbulent. Violent. Not for the faint-hearted of her kin.
Her brother’s recovered from their mother’s blessing with ill grace. His lips purse as he’s forced to look up at her. “Little sister?”
It’s meant to be mocking. She’s not in a position to inherit their family’s empire and he takes pleasure in reminding her. But now, after their mother’s stunt, she’s in too good of a mood to let it bother her.
She smiles with all her teeth for him and hopes he knows it for the threat it is. “You married up, dear brother.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“Wasn’t a compliment.” She turns her back on him. It’s not required to gift him with anything but her presence. She hides her smile from Selene and instead softens her eyes. “For my new sister, my gift is a secret.”
And she leans down to whisper that the knife of a Fisherman is sharp enough to cut their flesh if the holder wishes it. Whispers that, once gifted, it can not be taken. It always returns to the owner eventually.
“Oh,” Selene says in response and smiles at her new husband with far too many teeth.
-----------------------------------.
Hazel doesn’t follow her brother back to his car, nor does he ask her to come with him. Selene probably threatened him until he agreed to deliver the letter. She wouldn’t have been able to come this close to the water. Not for another five years yet.
It’s another hour before Hazel can convince her feet to move. She knew this was a possibility. Mariana never made it a secret where Hazel ranked compared to her father’s kingdom.
But, god, Hazel had hoped she’d be enough to steal Mariana away for a few years at least. At least until the mermaid realized that Hazel had the worst parts of the sea in her blood, the violence of a tempest, and none of the kindness Mariana claimed to see.
She steps up to the cliff’s edge. There are no rocks hiding under the water here. Only two hundred feet of air and then another hundred of clear ocean. She’d chosen this spot because a human wouldn’t be able to follow them down into the crashing waves. Only a True Fisherman and a mermaid would stand a chance.
Hazel steps off the edge and lets her mind go blissfully blank as she falls.
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“I was told Fisherman would kill to have a selkie,” a woman says from behind Hazel. The reception is nearly over, none of her kin bothering to stay after the hard alcohol dries up. “But you look as if you’d kill your brother for what he’s done.”
Hazel grimaces and sets her cup down. She’s had too much if whoever is behind her can see that in her eyes. “It’s an old custom. I don’t agree with it.”
The woman sits down next to Hazel and the sight of her illuminated by candlelight is enough to take her breath away. A cloud of pastel green hair floats around an oval face. Small pearls dot the thin arch of black eyebrows. Piercing green eyes meet hers. The mermaid hums. “Princess Mariana, Poseidon’s fifth daughter.”
Hazel doesn’t know how she’s able to find her tongue, but she does. “Hazel Fisherman. I work on, uh, the boats.”
“I know,” Princess Mariana says. She props her chin in one hand and studies Hazel. “You’re not at all like I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
“They say you’ve never lost a fight against a storm,” Mariana says. Her eyes drift down over Hazel’s vest and to her where her strong hands are white-knuckled on the edge of the table. “So I thought you might be like the shark-tamers back home. Or maybe like the fighters who lounge about my father’s court, waiting for another war.”
Hazel’s too enraptured by the delicate way Mariana speaks to realize the threat at first. Then she frowns. “Are you waiting for another war?”
Mariana smiles, seemingly pleased. “Under the sea anything can happen.”
“Well,” Hazel says slowly, “you’re not under the sea now, Princess.”
Mariana’s eyes begin to smile. “Indeed, I’m not.” She stands and her legs are longer than Hazel thought. When Hazel stands, they’re the same height. “Care to join me for a drink?”
“We’ll have to go somewhere,” Hazel says. She knows it’s a bad idea—she’s not in a position to be involved with a mermaid. But there’s something in Marian’s eyes that draws her like a moth to flame. “They’re out of booze here.”
“I know,” Mariana says and holds out a hand.
---------------.
Hazel breaks the surface with a gasp. The fall stung the bottom of her feet, but that’s the worst of it. She sets out for her boat, strong arms making quick work of the distance.
She knew better than to fall in love with a mermaid. She did anyway.
This was always a possible consequence.
The boat is set up for two. She’d been hopeful when she packed the supplies, taking care to bring along Mariana’s favorite dried snacks and enough wine to toast their successful escape. It’s enough to last them a half a year.
With just her, she can least a year at least.
She won’t stay here. She’s had too much sea in her for the Fisherman empire since the day she was born. She’d hoped it was enough for Mariana to make an exception, but it hadn’t been.
Hazel hauls up the anchor with practiced motions. Maybe Mariana will change her mind again. This isn’t the first time she’s stood on that cliff, waiting for day to break. She’s been there twice before, waiting and waiting for her Princess to climb down from her tower.
Hazel can’t wait any more. If she can’t have Mariana, then she will have the sea.
Maybe, maybe, it will be enough.
