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"I don't want to be sacrificed to the Great Mermonster though. Can't we sacrifice Harry Potter instead?"
Daphne Greengrass, one of the prettiest and most annoying mermaids, whilst being simultaneously one of the least atrocious Slytherins the House has ever produced, is not having a good day. It's the quadrennial Merminotaur Festival, where the merfolk who live at the bottom of a certain lake sacrifice a handful of fair youth and maidens to the titular Mermonster who lurks at the centre of the vast kelp maze everyone else lives around for some reason.
Not for some reason. When you're a mermaid, and you possess no legs, you can't just get up one day and move. One has to find a river and swim up or down it, and pray to God you find somewhere you can live free of nosy human parkers.
Daphne's fellow merfork, who float around her in a circle, their hair weaving about in the current, shift nervously. The mere touch of Harry Potter's name brings drama, and if he were to be sacrificed, the Mermonster would certainly escape the kelp maze and go on a rampage, and no one, not even the Slytherins, want that. Harry Potter wouldn't even be killed in the process, but would certainly live to cause drama another day.
"No one ever wants to be sacrificed to the Great Mermonster, Daphne, but it must happen if our community is to go on, and, sadly, the lot has fallen to you." Intones Lucius Malfoy, the leader of the Slytherin section of the Lake. His son, who Daphne's sister has a crush on and who Daphne herself regularly forgets the name of, smirks from beside his elbow. They both possess shimmering silver-white scales and hair, and luminescently pale skin. Very pretty. Meanwhile, Daphne has been blessed with the more normal hair and scale shade of corn yellow.
"Okay, but what do my parents say about this?" She asks, half innocent, half pointed.
Lucius Malfoy exchanges glances with his bitchy wife, Narcissa. He always needs approval and reassurance from her, and, of course, Daphne's parents have no say in the matter. No one's parents but Draco's have any any agency down under the sea. Daphne attempts a different tack, flicking her tail sharply so that Gregory Goyle (mud brown scales and hair) is punched in the face by a fist of water.
"But the Mermonster can't escape the maze, correct? Why don't we just let it starve to death?" She ponders.
A silence goes round the group, interrupted by the creepy moaning of water as it washes by. Marcus Flint twitches a lip at Daphne, flirting by exposing more of his predatory teeth. She blinks back at him, willing him to understand that she's going away now, and if he wanted to attend the Fisherman's Ball with her, than he should've asked, doofus.
Eventually Lucius divines a comeback from his wife's mind. "We aren't sure if it could or couldn't escape. It probably could, given enough time. But thanks to regular sacrifices it is keep content and most importantly, quiet. The last thing I need is a monster interrupting my chairing of the school board…that's my happy place."
"I suppose I can't bribe you to choose someone else? Like Marcus?"
Sighing, Lucius casts ropes around the sacrifices arms and tail, binding her so she can't swim. "No. We need an equal number of maidens and youths. The Mermonster enjoys the taste of both."
So, dully restrained, Daphne and seven other young people are made much of as they are carried on flowery litters towards the entrance of the gigantic kelp forest, which rises extremely ominously from the silt at the bottom of the lake. Songs are sung, as well as their praises, although all of them are too young to have done anything worthwhile or notable with their lives. Mostly they are praised for being young and pretty, and their parents are glorified for hatching such fine specimens of merkind and then giving them up to the State to be killed a handful of years later.
"…You know, I don't think my parents are even here." Daphne mutters to one of her fellow sacrificees, a Ravenclaw called Luna Lovegood, while the litter she's tied to bumps and grinds it's way towards the gates of the Forbidden Kelp Forest.
"Same. But my mum is dead and my dad says the Mermonster isn't real." Luna answers, airily.
The Mermonster may not be real, but it's lair most certainly is. The Kelp Forest, wide as the forest surface dwellers are regularly lost and killed in, stretches across the entirety of Daphne's vision, drowning out the idea of reaching the surface waters and relative freedom and light. The foremost fronds, thick as the columns of an ancient temple and so dark green they are almost black, approach, seeming to march up to the sacrificial victims rather than the other way around.
Floating up to a poorly put together podium, Lucius Malfoy holds a rusty microphone (dropped from a boat) to his lips and clears his throat, threatening to give a speech.
"Can I like, just go and die already?" asks Daphne.
Luna Lovegood nods her head, dreamily. "Mmm. I too would prefer to die right now."
Her statement causes her Slytherin comrade-in-sacrifice to gaze across the aisle between their litters. "Hey, I like you. When they let us go, let's hold hands and wander aesthetically through the maze until we're eaten. We'll look super beautiful and tragic, Slytherin and Ravenclaw be damned."
"I'd like that."
And that's just what they do. Ain't nobody got time for Malfoy waffling, so the victims are herded into the Forbidden Kelp Forest before Lucius has even got ten minutes into his speech.
🧜🏼♀️🧜🏻🧜🏼♀️
The forest is even worse inside than out. It's a legit kelp forest, so there aren't really defined corridors as in mazes on the surface world, only endless walls of undulating fronds of giant algae, black, brown, green, and white. And they crawl with bugs, and fat faced fish poke their heads from between them. Very thick are these fronds, and so densely pressed up against each other that even contemplating attempting to swim through them can bring on panic attacks. The chances of getting stuck within are about as high as getting lost within - as in, extremely, extremely high. As if to prove their instincts correct, the girls (holding hands as they agreed) more than once pass the skeletonised tail of a merperson sticking out from the mass of kelp.
"Sooo, does the Mermonster, Merminotaur, Merwhatever, live at the heart of the maze, or is it like, swimming around it searching for food? How can it survive for so long on a handful of bony mers?" asks Daphne, more of herself than anything else. With each second that passes her eyes pick more and more monstrous shapes out of the dim green world around her. A moray eel makes a sudden appearance out of a hole in a rock and her shriek can dimly be heard all the way to the surface.
"I don't know, because it's not real. We'll probably just starve to death peacefully, or else encounter a shark." says Luna, busy enjoying herself popping the bubbles deforming passing kelp fronds.
Time passes. It's difficult to know how much of it does, considering the girls are at the bottom of the lake, within a kelp forest, but it feels like a significant amount. The echoing booms and clicks and cries which fill the underwater world, quieten, better allowing them to hear the rumbling of their tummies.
"I'm hungry."
"Me too."
"I have a spare Dirigible Plum, if you'd like?"
"Thank you," crunch, crunch. "You're the coolest Ravenclaw I've ever met."
"And you're the kindest Slytherin I've ever met."
"Sweet."
Little do the girls know, but they have casually, accidentally, awesomely, wandered into the centre of the maze.
Snoring begins to grow loud, but the growls of their stomachs mask it, at least until they are temporarily quieted by a Dirigible Plum each.
"…Wait. Do you hear that?" The girls look around the now very dark environment. A column of open water rises above their heads, spiraling up to the surface, but only the barest hint of silver light is floating down from the surface. They cannot see anything but a vague reddish-pink blur on the far end of what is in fact a dead-end glade, and not another kelp tunnel.
"Sounds like my father when he's a had a little too much dingbat wine." Giggles Luna.
"…It's snoring. Male snoring," Daphne, her face a mask of horror, turns to her newfound friend. "Luna, we have to get out of here. There's a merman nearby!"
"But maybe he can help us escape the maze."
"Luna, I think he's the Mermonster!"
"Can't be. There's no such thing."
Since their only other choice is to return the way they came, the girls float on. May as well see what that red blur is.
Aaaah, of course it's a merman, his scales as shockingly red as his hair. He was asleep, and still snores, but now he also watches the girls approach, his heavy chin resting on a thick forearm, his bright green eyes half open. Lying on a lovely smooth rock like some manner of land cat, a field of bones extends around him to every side, forming the ossiferous floor of the glade. In fact, bones form the floor of the maze corridors too, and this prevent the kelp from overgrowing them.
Only when the sacrificial duo are very close do they realise he's awake, and creepy as all hell.
"AAAAAH!!!" They both scream, surging backwards.
Pebbles shift as the unknown merman takes hold of his rock and lifts himself off it slightly, into a position where the slightest flick of his muscular tail will be enough to propel him forward at great speed and allow him to capture the intruders in his home.
The sleepy merman blinks, asymmetrically. "…Why are you looking at me like that?" He drawls, in an accent that puts Lucius Malfoy's to shame.
Daphne screams and holds her hands before her face, whilst still peeking between her fingers. "Please don't eat me!! I have so much to live for!!"
Amazingly, miraculously, the big male settles back down on his rock, yawning as if he's about to unceremoniously return to merdreamland. "I am not going to eat you wenches."
"…" The 'wenches' exchange quizzical looks. "Aren't you the Merminotaur though? Isn't that what you do?"
"No." The merman finally closes his eyes. That in no way prevents the girls from feeling like he's watching them.
"So what's with all these bones? They look mermoid." Asks Daphne.
"The minotaur produced those. They became mine when I ate him and inherited his lair."
The poor lost souls exchange glances again, then Daphne dares another question.
"You ate the fabled Mermonster of Hogwarts?…When?"
"Several years ago."
"…So what's been happening to all the sacrifices?!"
The man's shark-like tail flicks, surging upwards before landing heavily on the lake floor again, crushing bones and sending a plume of white dust into the water. "I presume most became lost and found themselves eaten by one predator or another. A pity. Some were very pretty…" The merman opens one cold green eye and stares at the girls with it, instantly transforming back into the dreaded Mermonster.
"Aaaah…" in an effort to save herself and her friend from a situation that was looking bright, and is now looking incredibly dire once again, Daphne whips out a trump card she didn't know she was holding. "Lucius Malfoy called you gay, by the way. He said you like mermen as much as mermaids."
"Is Lucius Malfoy the peroxide blond fop?"
"The older one, yes."
The red scaled behemoth stares out of one eye a moment more, than opens both and pushes himself off his rock, snatching a gleaming silver sword held in the hand of a skeleton poking from the floor, and torpedoing straight through the dense mass of kelp, his swift passage something the girls can take advantage of because he snaps every frond in his way, the sound of crashing kelp trees quite atrocious.
"It's now or never, Luna! Let's be brave!"
"Of course."
The girls clasp hands again, and follow the monster's trail out of the maze.