These Gilded Seas

Chapter Twenty-Six: Scars of War

I spend the rest of the day holding the mythos in one hand and a dusting rag in the other. While using my thumb and forefinger to hold the book open, I turn the pages with an elbow or, if I'm desperate, my tongue. I'd never do that with the books in my grotto, of course. Unsurprisingly, these pages don't taste or smell like cave walls and salt water.

As I work through my chores, I devour the stories within the tome's pages. Most of them are familiar—ancient merfolk legends, anecdotes about the Divine, a well-researched record of Papa's lineage, and a timeline of the Great War. Some of the entries were bound in the original creation, but others have been added in later. Their pages are easy to tell apart because they're modern paper, smoother where the original canvas was feathery and tough.

The book is nothing I haven't already studied.

But what makes it intriguing are the notes written in the margins.

Crammed between the edges of the pages and the scribe's bland lettering are personalized notes. Some were penned in now-faded black ink and are sometimes unreadable because of how messy they are. Another is fanciful and neat. Other annotations are in a tall, light font and slant slightly. It's obvious that the three owners of the book—Eero, his mother, and his grandfather—all marked the stories equally, sometimes commenting on the previous person's questions or notes.

It's like reading three people's streams of thought as they merge and separate over and over. They crash on occasion, disagree with the previous scribble, but little check marks show their approval on the next page. Following the trail of water is engaging and better than the stories themselves.

The first time I see an annotation, I nearly spill the bucket of water I'm carrying from the kitchen. The messy letters are written in the empty space at the bottom of the page, right after the legend of the First Queen.

The story states that Rána was actually a goddess. She and her sister Jorda had been fighting over who would mold the next planet in the cycle of creation. They finally decided that they would each craft what fit their personality best, and the two would then go live and rule over their respective creations—the sea and the land. The sisters would never truly meet again, thus bringing to life the divide that exists between the two partitions.

Queen Rána was the first mermaid, and from her own being, she created a generation of ancients to rule. Together, they built the kingdom of Vandya and the glistening city of Hygge.

The legend states that when she tired of existence, the queen simply burst into golden light, and now, the goddess queen lives on as the Divine, watching over her people and blessing us with Her own golden magic.

The scribbled scrawl on the page notes, "Hygge—capital of the merfolk. Can it be discovered?"

And then, in a slightly different shade of ink, but the same hand, is a reply: "Yes. If one knows where to look, the peaks of the castle can be seen shimmering in the light of day."

It's a personalized research project, a culmination of three generations of study. Forget the fact that Eero might know who I am; he definitely knows more about merfolk than I could have ever imagined.

With each new story, there's more writing in the margins. I now know what he meant by "all of it." There's something hidden here he wants me to find, and it won't be in the original text.

It's extremely unfortunate that this book is thicker than any I've held before. It's going to take me forever to get through it.

Lunch rolls around, followed quickly by dinner, and I've only made it a quarter into the mythos. I've jotted down a few of the notes on my own paper so I won't forget them.