"School?! You're sending me to SCHOOL?!" I am aghast at my father's preposterous idea. "That's so... so... UNCOOL!"
"Amaria, this is for your own good. I'm doing this to keep you safe." Dad always keeps a calm, collected tone with me. Part of being a ruler of an ocean, I guess.
" Safe from what? All you ever do is keep me 'safe'! I don't get to go anywhere, do anything, I have a hard enough time making friends as it is!" I'm angry to the point of tears, not that you could see them underwater. "You never let me be free."
Dad sighs, and the wrinkles on his face seem even more prominent, deep lines etched into his skin like a sculpture. "It's what your mother would have wanted."
I can't believe he used this as his excuse. My mother died years ago, when I was maybe five. She was curious about the world too, so much that she would swim by the boats humans would take into the sea. But this curiosity was the death of her. One day, her tail got caught in a propeller. Once it was out, there was nothing we could do to save her. She was gone.
"Fine." I mumble. "For mom."
"Thank you," Dad says, his face becoming a little lighter. "Thank you so much, I won't--"
"Only for mom. Not you."
I can see the dismay on his face, the sadness that his little girl didn't care. And he was right. Dad was the one who kept me shut out from the world, and mom was the one who let me explore it. I didn't want to go, but mom was my slight motivation.
I swim off, leaving my father in his room with his thoughts, how he almost always is.
My room is huge. One of the biggest living areas in our ocean. I don't need it like that, though. I would much rather have a smaller space, one where I can curl up in a corner to read, draw, think, and just be with myself. Well, it might have to be a little bigger for the few cuttlefish I have as pets. They're adorable in a vaguely ugly way. Most of my stuff is in one part of the room, and the rest of the place is just there. I have a giant bookshelf of scrolls on lots of different subjects, and a lot of scrolls are stories, too. The walls are covered in my art, small gaps showing through where the papers didn't quite line up. The cuttlefish usually swim free around my room, but at night they have little cages that I round them up into, which can take anywhere from ten to thirty minutes. They're little devils, but I love them.
"I guess I should pack up for this school thing," I tell the fish. "Glubbing dad with his guilting me into going." I talk to my fish a lot, considering the fact that I can't exactly go anywhere too far outside the castle.
As I'm putting a trunk together, trying to decide what scrolls to put in there, a soft but powerful knock rattles my door. "Amaria," I hear my father say. "May I come in?"
"Sure," I say, with a moment's hesitation.
My door creaks open, dad's face pokking in. "I see you're packing already. That excited for school?"
"I just like to be prepared."
He smiles a bit. "I don't know how many times I've heard that, especially from your mother."
I say nothing back.
"It's a good thing you're doing this now, because you're leaving soon. The school year starts in a couple days, so we're leaving tommorrow."
