a series of sbi oneshots

scales and more

"Don't go past the Reef," the Elders would always say, often interrupting playtime and storytime when the subject of the Open was brought up. "The sirens will get you. They'll cut off your fins. They'll chop your tail off and eat it up."

The little hatchling had never given much thought to the stories - beyond scaring the other hatchlings. His reef was safe, and his pod was filled with lots of huge, strong Hunters. The biggest mers of all, they even fought off the sharks that would try to catch them. A siren should be no trouble for them.

If sirens were even real. The Elders talked about them all the time, but whenever they did they were quickly shushed by the nursery guards, and reprimanded for telling such scary stories.

Not that he found them scary.

At least, he didn't find them scary back in the Reef.

But here, in the vast emptiness of the open, cold and bleak and utterly devoid of anything beyond endless blue and huge, hungry fish? Those stories seemed a little more frightening.

He doesn't even remember how he got here, just that there was a lot of screeching and yelling and orders to run! run! hide!

He'd been trying to get back to his cave, to curl up with the rest of the hatchlings and hide behind their guards. But somehow he got turned around, and there was blood and growling and the panicked feeling of keep swimming, keep swimming, run run run-

Then an impossibly strong force caught him, sending him head over tail in an uncontrollable tumble.

And when he woke up, laying next to a rock cliff so tall it went up to the surface, his reef was nowhere in sight.

He was hungry and scared. And his tail and side hurt really bad. But no matter how long he called for his pod, for someone to come and rescue him and hold him close and take him back to the Reef and make him feel better, no one came.

The only thing he'd ended up attracting was a huge silver fish with razor sharp teeth. It tried to eat him, and he'd barely escaped by hiding in a small crevice in the rock.

It was so big, big enough to swallow him in one bite.

Maybe the sirens were real after all.

The fish - siren - had stayed there forever, long enough for the light to dim and night to settle in. Then it left.

And been replaced with even bigger sirens. Bigger than anything the hatchling had ever seen before. Like a shark, but huge.

It'd looked into his little hole once. A dark, evil eye staring at him.

He'd stopped crying after that. Finding himself frozen on the rough floor of the cave - so different from the soft nests of the reef - and forced to listen to the terrifying growls and haunting calls of the monsters outside - nothing like the gentle croons of the pod and the playful chirps of the other hatchlings.

He'd stayed like that until the light came up, pressed against the back of his hole with his heart fluttering like a thousand tiny fins.

Until his stomach became too much to ignore, and he had to find food.

He'd never done it on his own before, but that was okay. He'd watched the Hunters teach the older hatchlings plenty of times, he could handle himself.

It was that thought - combined with his own hunger - that drove him from his little hole and out along the rocks.

His search took longer than it probably should. Every few moments he'd hear something strange and duck into a hold or crevice, waiting for the inevitable flash of scales and teeth as another siren would try to get him.