Chapter Text
Nanase was here again.
Rin bit down a groan when three purposeful knocks sounded at his front door, cutting through the silence. It wasn’t unusual for that disgustingly chipper young man to come to the cottage. He tried to most Sundays, the key word being tried. As long as the weather allowed it, he hauled himself to this secluded clifftop as if it were an ordinary trip to the square. Even then, there were weeks when rain had swept over the coastline and he’d still managed to drag himself through the downpour, turning up on Rin’s doorstep looking more like a soaked puppy than a human being.
Not that rain was a bother to a deep sea fisherman. In fact, that was probably how he managed to show up with such insistent regularity. Gales were commonplace on the ocean.
Rin stood from his plain, wooden dining table, a haunt large enough to sit four people, although no more than two seats had ever been occupied at the same time. Abandoning his half-finished breakfast — bread and smoked char — he tramped across the one-room space, a glower sinking into his features.
That damned, insistent dog, he mentally cursed as he reached for the door handle.
Just like every week, Nanase’s glowing features greeted him, framed in the warmth of the early summer sunshine. He was still dressed in his overalls from work, the ones that never lost the strong scent of salt. He’d probably come straight here from the docking bay. On clear dawns, if Rin awoke early enough, he’d sometimes catch a glimpse of the fishing trawler making its way back to port. If a catch was particularly bountiful, Nanase was sure to show up that day with a hamper under his arm and a glint of anticipation in his eyes.
This time, it appeared to be one of those weeks. He shifted his weight from his left to right foot, his black hair tousling in the strong, morning wind, and his smile was as confident as a seasoned gambler winning a bet. “Howdy!”
Rin grimaced at the sight. “Again?”
“We got twice the catch we usually do. Come on, I’ll cook the spares up for ya. I brought the ingredients for fish pie.”
“Do you have to keep doing this?”
“I’ll stop when ya actually come down to Locketon to socialise. When exactly was the last time ya even spoke to anyone?”
Rin’s mouth sealed in a tight line. He said nothing.
Nanase sighed. “It was with me. Last Sunday. When I came over.”
There was an innocent concern plastered into his features. What an eyesore. Why did he have to be so nice? And insistent about his niceness, no less.
“Make it quick,” Rin grumbled, stepping aside and letting the front door swing open. “And no-“
“No touchin’ the art supplies,” Nanase finished the end of that sentence like he’d heard it a thousand times. He probably had.
In fairness, it wasn’t him who needed reminding about this. That would’ve been Bachira, but these days the hyperactive bee boy tended to stay in town, helping to unload the weekly catch. At least he had the forethought to stay away from this place. It kept the cottage quiet and organised.
Speaking of keeping away…
“Any news?”
Nanase blinked. “About…”
“You know what I mean, idiot.”
A brief silence followed. “Nah. Nothin’ yet. Last I heard, the peace talks between prince Reo and duke Loki fell apart. Looks like the war’s still goin’ on for who knows how long.”
So, Sae and Isagi would remain gone for the foreseeable future… the bastards.
After that conversation fizzled out into nothingness, the morning became the same as every other Sunday. Nanase took over the kitchenette, mostly keeping his mouth shut but every so often relaying pieces of information about town life or the week’s voyage on the sea. Rin meanwhile cleared up his breakfast plate and set to work making paint in the back corner of the room, underneath an overhanging attic space where he kept his futon and clothes. From his few excursions into town every couple of months, he’d acquired a surplus of minerals and other materials, and Nanase often brought up pots of linseed oil for making oil paint. Perhaps there was some use to him showing up after all?
The rich scents of pastry and herbs filled the room as the fish pie baked in a wood-burner oven. Nanase let out a deep, satisfied sigh, and Rin heard him plonk himself down at the dining table while badly humming a sea shanty — an unfamiliar capstan song about a man and a mermaid who fell in love.
The song didn’t last long though, and eventually there were no more verses to cycle through. For a long time after that, there was finally silence…
Until Nanase piped up again. “D’ya believe in mermaids?”
The glass muller in Rin’s hand froze. Why did there always have to be some sort of conversation? “No. They’re just a fairytale. Quit it with the dumb questions.”
Clearly that last part was lost on Nananse, though. “Y’know, it can get pretty lonely out there on the open sea. Even with the other guys around, it’s just you and the waves, the wind and the sky. Sometimes at night when yer on watch, it almost feels like there’s somethin’ in the water just over the edge of the ship, watchin’ every move ya make. It’s even creepier on foggy nights.” He then chuckled. “But I guess yer right. None of it’s real. I’m just a massive scaredy cat.”
“You can say that again…”
Luckily, there was no further discussion after that.
When the pie was ready, Nanase placed it on the stovetop and covered it with a towel, then he took up his hamper and headed for the door. “I’ll be off. Good seeing ya again. Remember, yer always welcome to come see everyone in town whenever ya want.” When no reply came, he slumped his shoulders and pulled the door open. “I’ll be back on the sea tonight. We’re gonna be out all week. See ya next Sunday.” With that, he disappeared and closed the door behind him, leaving only the rich aromas of fish and herbs permeating through the house.
Why he bothered to come here was a mystery, one that Rin had no interest in learning the reason for. Instead, he continued to mull his paint, revelling in the occasional, bone-chilling scrapes of glass against his marble palette.
-—-
The deep sea was darker than a night sky on a new moon. Marine snow replaced the stars in an endless cascade of specks, drifting down from a world where sunlight still pierced the surface. Unlike the stars, this blizzard of particles only showed itself in the drops of light that gently glowed along Hiori’s scaled tail and torso, as well as from the dangling lure on his head. With each flick of his delicate, flowing tail fins, he pressed onwards across the abyssal plain, drifting above the mud flats where hagfish buried into the silt and tripod fish balanced in wait for their prey.
He’d come so far, and yet there was still such a long way to go.
“Wait up! Wait up!”
The echolocation hit him with surprising intensity. His trance broke. Had he really swum so far ahead? He slowed down as a warm, pinkish glow emerged behind him, and a head of dark, anemone hair soon met his eyes.
“Sorry, Kurona,” he smiled awkwardly.
The smaller merman didn’t seem to care. His shark-like tail, so different from Hiori’s own fish-like one, swished idly when he drew himself to a halt. “Just tired, tired,” he said.
Hiori nodded. “Let’s have a rest, then.”
“How much further to where we’re going?”
“I…. I’m not sure, but we’ll get there eventually. If ya wanna turn back, ya still can.”
Kurona shook his head, a neatly woven braid on his temple swishing in the water. “Too late for that. Never travel alone.”
That was the reason why he was here to begin with, not collecting luminous algae with the rest of his pod in the Haven. It was dangerous enough for merfolk to travel alone on the surface, where both predators and unsavoury humans might catch them, but down here in the depths, there were more than just sharks and hunters. The giants of the deep were forever starving in this wasteland. There were colossal squids, krakens, and even leviathans slumbering away in these barren waters. They would take any opportunity to snatch up a meal.
Hiori smiled softly, tightening one webbed hand around a bleached, coral spear tipped with shark’s teeth. He held his other hand to his chest, where the strap of a woven kelp bag rested. “Thanks for comin’ with me, really. Ya didn’t hafta.”
“It’s for the best, best,” Kurona nodded. “I miss the stars. You miss the humans. We can go back to the coast together.”
It had been so long since Hiori had last spoken to a human. Well, not just any human. Karasu’s face was still clear in his mind whenever he imagined what a human was ‘supposed’ to look like — that stupid, cocky smile, spiked hair stiff from sea salt, and an extraordinary waver to his voice that rang across the waves when he shouted from his rowing boat. They hadn’t seen each other since last year, when every major merfolk pod in the northern seas had migrated down into the deep. As long as the humans waged their bloody war on the surface above, this lightless world on the seafloor was where the merfolk intended to remain, dour as it was. Day and night meant nothing here, so it was difficult to say exactly how many days had even passed.
However long it had been, it had been too long.
Drifting down to a small, flat outcrop of rocks sticking out of the mud, Hiori expunged a deep sigh through the slitted gills on his neck, bubbles raising into the dark water above him. He rested his spear against the rock, pushing the tip into the mud with ease, and beckoned for Kurona to join him.
“Just a short break,” he said, “then we’ll keep goin’. We can rest again once we hit the continental shelf.”
He then pulled his bag off his torso and let it rest on the rocks, fishing out some prepared travelling rations of algae-stuffed tube worms. The two of them ate in silence, their shared light reaching no further than arm’s reach into the abyss. A deep sea predator could be lurking just out of reach, and without sending off long-distance echolocation signals into the water, they wouldn’t know. It was lonely out here. Isolating…
But anything was better than the Haven, the coalition of the pods, or Hiori’s mother and father.
A small ghost shark cut through the water close to the sea floor, almost entering the vicinity of the two young mermen. It was only in their periphery for a moment, then it disappeared back into the dark. Deep sea jellies bobbed past, unaware of where they were now or where they were going next. The currents were their masters, carrying them from ocean to ocean, from the highest lagoons to the lowest trenches.
Another fish swam past, this time a grenadier. Much like the ghost shark, it soon vanished… but then came another fish. And another. And spiny crabs scuttling across the mud as fast as their little legs could carry them…
Kurona poked his head up, his photophores flickering. “What’s that? What’s that?”
Hiori’s gills bristled. He pushed off the rock, swimming a little way over the flats. Even more creatures were stumbling through the mud… they were fleeing from something. All of them were coming from the same direction, and there were so many of them. Blobfish. Viperfish. Sea spiders. This shouldn’t happen, not out here where it was so barren that one could swim for hours without encountering anything but an empty, flat expanse.
What in the seven seas is going on—
That was when the mud cloud hit him.
It came out of nowhere. What little light the mermen emitted, the thick, choking billow swallowed every last speck of remaining luminance. It threatened to clog Hiori’s gills in seconds. He clamped both hands over his neck and spun around in a frantic panic.
“Kurona?!” his echolocation screamed through the blur, unaffected by the loss of vision. “I’m over here!”
Was it a leviathan? Or a kraken?
With a few more pulses of his sonar towards the seafloor, he was able to find his travel partner curled in a terrified ball on the rocks. In a hasty flurry, he lunged downwards, still too afraid to uncover his gills.
“We need to get out of here,” he stammered. “Hurry—“
Twisted, burning fibres slammed into his back. He jerked forwards, barrelling past Kurona, and his hands flung themselves from his neck, slamming into… rope. Thick, heavy rope, criss-crossed in a humungous checker pattern, one that was now pushing him along at a brutal speed, sucking him into a toxic cloud of debris, flailing fish, and globules of mud too big to pass through the holes in the structure.
This was a fishing net.
Fishing nets exist way down here?! Hiori hadn’t thought it possible. Did it break off a ship and sink down?
No. It was moving far too quickly, too uniform in the water. Somewhere, miles up, there was a ship dragging it along.
“Hiori?!”
Kurona’s clicks and whistles were more distant than they should’ve been. It was hard to tell if it was because he was far away, or if Hiori was just light-headed from having inhaled too much silt-riddled water.
He tried to push himself upwards but a sharp, stinging resistance clamped around his tail, holding him in place as if he were a lobster in a trap. The ropes had tangled around him, lodging him into the net. In a way, this was a trap. At the other end of this net, on the surface, there would be humans.
Selfish, barbaric humans, the ones who speared fish with tridents for fun, not to eat, and the ones who’d once hunted merfolk to the brink of extinction. They wouldn’t be kind, funny, exciting humans like Karasu. Not trustworthy humans.
A hand grasped onto his own. He spun around. There Kurona was… on the other side of the net! He was free. Safe. He was going to live!
Oh… Hiori realised in that moment. It was like a giant squid had plucked out his liver. I’m gonna die.
“I’ll get you out,” Kurona panicked. His grip was weak, fingers trembling. His face was still invisible in the mud cloud, but his terror was clear enough. “We need to cut the ropes. We have something for that, right?” His claws dug into Hiori’s skin. “Your spear! Your spear!”
If that spear had survived the trawl, it wasn’t here. No amount of mapping the space with sonar revealed even the shark-toothed tip. Not that it would have been much help. The point wasn’t made for slicing, even if it were here, and these were industrial ropes, as thick as a whale’s vertebrae and made to survive catching on the most jagged of boulders. It was no use. There was no way Hiori was getting out of this net.
He grasped Kurona’s hands in his own. “Go home,” he said, trying to hide a petrified stammer. “Tell mother and father I died. Say it was all my fault and you were trying to stop me. Save yourself before it’s too late.”
The light-headedness was stealing him away. No doubt it had overcome Kurona as well. The younger merman’s body wavered, sinking slightly, struggling to keep up with the trawling net’s pace.
Nevertheless, he still shook his head profusely. “No! I’m not leaving you. The humans will scrape off your scales and cut off your fins and head. And that’s if they don’t take you to mount on their wall! No! No!”
“They’ll kill you too if you stay with me. Please,” Hiori’s words came out as a choked sob, “leave me here." He paused, struggling to stay conscious. His gills felt like they’d been stuffed with mucus. “If you ever see the surface again, please find Karasu for me…” he slumped down against the net. His hands fell away from Kurona’s. “Now go! Go…”
Kurona’s grip slipped away too. If he were still conscious, he would’ve fought back by now. He’d already passed out. It was for the best. At least this way, he’d fall back to the seafloor, alive and safe. He’d survive.
This wasn’t the way Hiori had ever expected to die. Even with all his precarious trips to the surface, meeting humans and joining their excursions on the sea, the thought of ending up with the same fate as a bluefin tuna, reduced to a sought-after marvel, dead and sliced up, had remained far from his mind.
Had his parents loved him, perhaps he’d have never have tried to run away. Never come here. Never ended up like this.
This was all their fault.
With that final, exhausted thought, everything went black.
-—-
He wasn’t dead.
Calling himself ‘alive’ was perhaps an overstatement. When he came to, he was half-buried in mud, stones, and the corpses of several fish, his tail still tied up, the lower half now numb. But it was pain that had snapped him from unconsciousness, a deadly, burning pain that enflamed his insides and racked his head with nausea. His joints ached, skin tingled, and the fatigue running through him was almost enough to knock him out again.
But he could just about breathe. And more importantly, he could see.
The light level was still low outside the glow of his lure, the sun’s rays barely penetrating the twilight zone. Still, he couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few hours, yet he was already this far away from the ocean floor.
That was why he was in so much pain. Decompression sickness was setting in.
A part of him wanted to lie there, letting the drastic change in pressure kill him before he could reach the surface. The smaller fish, unaccustomed to the change, with bodies much weaker than his, had already succumbed to their insides expanding, their swim bladders exploding, and their organs stretching beyond repair. Merfolk were able to adapt their bodies to such changes, but it was a slow process, requiring days of gradual travel up or down. Not hours. Hours would, at best, cause irreversible damage. At worst, it was fatal.
If being dismembered, skinned, and mounted on a wall was the only fate awaiting him, it would be better to die here, before a single human could strike their blades against him. He was so, so tired. No one was coming to save him. Not even Kurona would be able to swim this high up without feeling the agony of the pressure change for himself.
Hiori laid his head back against the ropes, staring up through the faint light. This was going to be a slow, painful death.
“Ya really are an idiot, y’know? Comin’ here like this.”
He blinked. Why was Karasu’s voice coming to him? Those were some of the first words they’d exchanged, back when Karasu had caught Hiori stalking his rowing boat. A smile curled onto the corners of his lips. This was a nicer last thought, far better than the hatred he held for his parents or the terror of being mutilated. Karasu was the guardian spirit he'd never had, the best friend he could always rely on. Even now, the guy was being that figure, if just in spirit.
“When ya get back from yer trip downwards,” he remembered Karasu saying the day before they’d parted, “I hope ya’ve overcome that weakness of yers. I wanna see ya then, and we can talk again.”
Hiori wasn’t going to be able to fulfil that promise. He couldn’t. He still didn’t even know what Karasu had meant by ‘yer weakness’…
How pathetic of him.
He'd escaped the Haven for the sole purpose of finding his friend. He’d known the risks. The dangers. Had he come across a leviathan out there, he’d already be dead. But he wasn’t. He was still alive, somehow, and there was no excuse for rolling over and letting himself die just because some humans were going to treat him like a delicacy.
He could survive this. Chance wasn’t on his side, but chance could go fuck itself. He’d get to his friend again.
Right now, there was one thing he could do.
Curse the currents that he’d lost his bag. He kept all his equipment in there. His scallop shell mortar. His balms and poultices. Shell vials of medicine. Without them, this was going to be a painful process. Painful, yes, but not fatal.
Lifting his arms was a struggle, sending pangs through his entire body, making his head spin. But he managed to lower his fingers down to the exposed base of his tail. In the light of his lure, the cyan scales gleamed.
Either this, or I die now. The thought wasn’t meant to be reassuring, only realistic.
He dug his claws under the shining surface, and pulled.
The pain was instant and gruelling. There was no blood, but there was a wave of electric agony that ruptured from his tail, up his spine, and spread throughout his entire being. It would never match the delirium he was already experiencing though. And so, gritting his teeth and expelling a rush of bubbles from his half-clogged gills, he pulled and pulled, and ripped the scale clean off.
It was like how Karasu explained ripping off a scab. The burning sensation didn’t subside, not even when surrounded by such cold water. But Hiori had what he needed.
There was no time, nor tools, to grind the scale into a fine powder, and no way to make this spell more complex with additional ingredients. He was casting raw, in a way that would never be complete, but it was all he had left.
He brought the scale to his quivering lips, straining to stay conscious. “He… Heal me…” his words were barely a whisper in the water.
He swallowed the scale whole.
-—-
Nanase was used to the chill of the sea air at dawn. His shift started early, in tandem with the gulls flocking to the trawler’s decks, eager to catch the leftover fish that spilled from the edges of the net when the crew threw the day's catch into the galley. Today, however, wasn't the day for a feathered feast.
The crew weren’t fishing for tuna. This was an ocean floor trawl. The catch would mostly be mud and stones, and mixed in would hopefully be mountain of hagfish — a delicacy in the provinces, though sneered at in the capital. With the war raging to the south, imports were slim, and these fish were becoming a staple of the northern coast's diet.
The automatic winch was as old and rusted as the ship itself, and had been pulling up its largest trawling net since the previous sundown. At last, the humungous thing was almost out of the water, and the first signs of the day’s catch were coming to light over the edge of the deck. It was a usual result — boulders, a lot of unfortunate deep sea fish that been caught in the fray, the familiar, wriggling mass of hagfish coming out of a giant pile of mud, and…
A flash of cyan scales glistened in the first rays of sun that danced across the horizon.
For some reason, the conversation Nanase and Rin had exchanged a week ago flashed in the fisherman's mind, brief as it had been. “D’ya believe in mermaids?”
Eyes of blue ice stared into his own, teeth bared like a cornered mutt’s, claws digging into the rungs of the net. The mere sight of such a beautiful, perfect face was enough to send a shiver through Nanase's entire body. It was as if he were gazing upon a perfectly cut gemstone, shimmering, an iridescent pinnace against the surrounding swell of the waves, the creaking of the old ship, and the cries of the gulls.
The songs were true. Such creatures as mermaids did exist.
Rin was wrong.