A Mermaid's Cry

Chapter 59-The Maid of Legend

🪸I can't believe how long it has taken to get this far in the story. I'm so thrilled to be on the verge of completing this book, and so utterly grateful to everyone who has either been here from the beginning or has just recently found this book.🖤

✨I do hope to continue this journey with all of you, no doubt this story will need far more exciting adventures before it is complete done.💋
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The rays of dawn fall upon my skin, the warmth failing to reach the cold expanse of my flesh. Even as I sit upon the terrace steps, the thin cotton of my nightdress fluttering against my bandaged knees. Hours have passed since the ball, a long expanse of time that I struggle to remember. The humans being ushered to their homes, and Madame Costa appearing as if by magic to take my friends, my brother, and I upstairs to be tended to.

After that, I know nothing but the cool touch of healing cream upon my skin and my tearful eyes closing to welcome dreams haunted by visions of blue eyes, frightened screams, and Ares shrouded in the pallor of death alongside Zola and Arcus.

The nightmares forced me awake, robbed me of the comforting lull of slumber. With nothing else to do, I left the bed and my brother whimpering in his sleep, to come out into the garden where I now watch as morning arrives, and with it a reminder of the male who should be here to share this beautiful sunrise with me.

The faint rays of gold encroach upon the garden, the riot of fragrant flowers, singing birds, and the rows of bushes to my right, that have been rendered to nothing but bare broken branches. The single reminder of my fury being unleashed, the damage my claws inflicted upon the delicate bark. For an hour they had let me utterly destroy the manicured foliage, leaving me to let out my rage and heartache without the fear of me injuring them.

But now that feeling of hunger, a bottomless desire to maim and kill, is gone. Buried deep within my heart, stoking the wheels of my mind to whirl and churn with the single goal of enacting my revenge. The coldness of my flesh, is what my heart has become. Unfeeling, icy numbness as vast as a glacier and utterly frozen as the Northern Seas.

The ones who kidnapped my cousin and friend, the Mer who dared lead me away from my mate, will pay dearly for the damage they have wrought. When I'm through with killing them one by one, their bodies will be fed to the ocean deep. Where no one will ever find them, and everything they own will be burned to ash. Burned in the flames of a reckoning that everyone will know across the entirety of the Southern Seas.

Then everyone, be they human, Mer, pirate, or hunter will fear the very mention of my name. So that no one will ever dare harm my friends, my family, my home, or my mate ever again. But to do that, I must find the ones responsible for my shattered heart.

"Rinthy, are you out here?" Lucas utters, snapping me out of my trance and ushering my head around to face him. "Uh, yes Lucas," I answer, just he steps out onto the terrace with a long white sheet wrapped around his thin shoulders.

"I woke up, and you weren't there," he says, his eyes clouded over with unshed tears. Dark circles more prominent than ever on his sun weathered skin, and a haunted veil of grief that seems to encapsulate his entire being. It is the exact same way he had looked, the way Mother and I had looked when Father had not returned to us.

"Oh Lucas," I croon, standing up on stiff legs and hurrying over to him, pulling his almost boneless body into my equally weightless arms. "I'm sorry my little warrior, I'm so sorry."

My brother's only response is to bury his face into my collarbone. Wrapping his gangly arms around my waist, and letting go the damn of tears that he had previously been holding back. I cradle him, rocking our joined forms side to side. My own tears, find their way down my cheeks and onto the crisp sheet of perfect white cotton.