Chapter Text
Before time, before sea, before land, there was Pontus, who lived alone on a world formed of fire and cloaked in water.
As eons passed, the fire at the center of the world boiled and bubbled, erupting into the water and solidifying into swells that became hills. Then the hills became mountains and then the mountains became land and so the water between the land became the seas and the oceans. And with the land came the birth of Gaia, a consort for Pontus, and together they spun a web of magic around the world and, as that magic touched those primordial waters, the first mortal life was sparked into existence. The seas filled with a myriad of tiny identical beings that floated through the Oceans like specks of sunlight.
And then Pontus took those spawnings and breathed a little of his magic into them. He sprinkled them with potential, the ability to transform themselves into a choice of a hundred thousand different species. The algae and the plankton, the molluscs and the shellfish, the urchins and the snails, the eels and the rays, the fish and the seals, the dolphins and the whales, the octopus and the squid, the skates and the sharks and, finally, he offered them the choice of becoming his most perfect work, the mansfish. A creature designed to be the caretaker of all. A position that carried such responsibility that he knew few would even strive to achieve it.
Into all creatures, from the tiniest to the leviathan, Gaia also breathed a little magic, just enough to give them the capacity to dream. Yet only the mansfish were gifted the ability to create songs of destiny because it was they who were charged with the care of all other creatures and the preservation of the environment in which they dwelled.
With the passing of millennia, the primordial spawnings gradually made their choices and evolved. The seas filled with hundreds of millions of marine creatures, and, reigning over them were the mansfish, who were responsible for weaving a song of harmony between all of the denizens of the sea.
But all too soon, Pontus discovered he had erred. In offering his children a choice, he had created a situation in which far too many of those who had strived to become mansfish had not been driven by the desire to protect after all. Most had simply grasped greedily for the power to subjugate the other species to their will. The songs they sang were discordant and bitter and selfish and harmful to all.
So Pontus collected the mansfish and divided them into two. On one side he set those few he found to be Mer: good, kind and righteous guardians of the sea. On the other he set the majority, those he found to be Hu: greedy and avaricious and selfish.
Pontus declared that the Hu were monsters and passed judgement that they should be destroyed. But Gaia pleaded with her mate to spare the lives of these most wicked of their children. She said they were just younglings still, that they might yet evolve into something better if allowed to live long enough to gain wisdom.
Merciful Pontus listened to her pleas and said that, if she was willing to take responsibility for the monsters, they could live. But they must be exiled from his own realm and become land monsters, Humans, and live in Gaia’s domain for ever after.
So that was how the Land Monsters, the Humans, were created. Pontus cast them out of the sea, onto the land, where their tails withered and were replaced by legs, and their gills rotted away until they could only breathe air, and though the seas call to them constantly, luring them with promises of home, Land Monsters can now only dream of the days they sang and danced under the waves.
In the depths of the Oceans, only the Mer remain and thrive as guardians of the deep and the beloved of Pontus; but their existence has been forgotten entirely by their exiled brethren. In the memories of the Hu, the Mer have become nothing more than creatures of myth and legend.