The Speechless Sea

Chapter 4

Merlin glared down at his tail, waving in gently back and forth as he bobbed against the tirde.

"How could any son of mine, of the ocean be so UNRESONPIBLE AND CHILRDISH? Did you think about your sisters- the entire KINGDOM- for even ONE second?!" screamed his father: the king. He pounded his fist against the arm of his chair, ornatley decorated with shells from the sea and feats of the ocean.

"Father, I-" Merlin tried to say calmly even though he felt anger bubbling in him like a underwater volcano, blowing out boiling water into the oceans adn covered in blind worms and yeti crabs.

"No! Did you even think for a second what could have happened to you if you'd have beenn caught? Have not I told you so many time about Uther? Do you know what humans do to fish? What they'd do to merpeople. Son, if Gwen hadn't let me know that you were rushing head first into danger....I could have lost you and I can't lose you, not after I lost your mother" King Balinor finished gently, burying his head in his hands. Merlin felt an arrow of guilt go through his chest but squashed it down with an angred snort.

"I was carful!! You always told me to look after people - that the sea is our responsibilities. I was trying to help!" Merlin mollied in raging ire. He scowlingly stepped closer to his father his long shimmering arms waving as he spoke and his eyes burned with fury.

"I meant you look after you own!! The human world is a mess!! I can't believe my son could be so irresponsible and pig head." Balnior ranted, pulling himself up in a warm current to hang above his son, his rugged black hair fanned out like a halo of a dark angel, his tail waving gently too and fro.

"Oh well we all know where I get that from!!" Merlin shouted back, turning on his tail and abruptly swimming out with trails of bubbles coming out of him in a turrent, as he muttered dark curses about his over protective and controlling idiot of a father under his breath.

"I heard that, young man!! You're ground!!" screamed Balinor in response; Gwen; who was still there, looking awkwardly down at her fins, wishing the seabed would swallow herup. Merlin rolled his aqua blue eyes of starlight in frustiantion.

"Dad, I'm 26!! You can't ground me! I'm leaving!!" he answered, his gently muscled face full of increduality, before swimming through the open doorway and away from the king's palace. As he swum he was angry, like a moray eel.

He darted out of the palace and over the garden, that was a reef made of colourful coral organised like a rainbow and decorated with shalls and beautiful sea flowers. The reef was alive witha a chocolate box of life. With fish hiding in the anenomes and gliding about in schools. But he didn't notice. Merlin loved the reef but he had to get away from his father before he. Merlin swam over the reef and towards to the squirmy greenery of the kelp forest still fuming with rage: his favourite place to go was in there.

The tell kelp trees seperated before him, sensing he wanted a path through their thickly dense shrubbery as he angrily swan, going east toward the sun that he could see sometimes through the looming branches, until he reached a small clearing, litteredwith what loked like a jagged pool of dark grey rocks. But they weren't rocks. IF you looked closely they were things taken from shipwrecks - a spice rack, a large engraved bowel, a broken lantern, a canon ball, a statue of a mans head, an intricately carved wooden instrument like a violin inlaid with a cedar plaque but wiith no strings.

Merlin ignored all this stuff as he threw himself on the sand on his back and watched the distance glittering surface of the shoppy sea glimmer far in front of him as the sun bouched catheningly from the tips of the waves as the sea ungulated in the tide and wind.

"Ugh! He's impossible!" he muttered to himself, anger creeping around his heart like a crab scuttling into his new shell after he had outgrown the old shell, it spread it's claws out and made itself at home in Merlin's chest as a shell. He looked back the way he had come, through the wildness of the kelp forest, and banned the traitours thought of returning to his home from his mind.