Mermaid.

chương 6

Seul
There’s a bizarre rustle near the wall on his side, interrupting Seul’s trouble and making him look up. He’s too deep into his thoughts to realize that there’s another person there, but the lady who carries Seul seems scared of that person. She urges the creature in front of her cart to move quicker forward, away from him.
Seul turns his head in time to catch a glimpse of the person’s back. His curiosity is piqued almost at once. The man landed on the sand from out of nowhere, making Seul wonder where he may have come from. He looks up, and the answer presents itself to him. There’s a very tall weed – no, a tree – with large branches and leaves, higher than the wall, reaching out to the direction of the sea.
That man must have climbed onto that tree to get over the wall. Seul never sees any merperson climbing over the wall, although, by logic, merpeople can do it in the blink of an eye, considering they’re surrounded by water. Wall climbing is perceived as uneducated, feral even. Walls are built to keep individuals in their places, the inner in, and the outer out. He assumes that humans share the same way of thinking.
That being said, by the same logic, anyone who climbs the wall should be seen as doing something out of the ordinary. He’s just been into the human world for less than an hour, and already crossed paths with someone abnormal. Of course, it triggers his curious nature.
Seul turns to the old lady, who’s moving faster now, trying to call for her. His voice is gone, so he tugs on the back of her dress. The old lady shrugs him off and gives him a quick shush, urging her creature to charge forward, moving even faster than before. Seul turns to look at the strange man again, only to see him dashing further, to the edge of the water, where the sea touches the sand.
He tugs on the old lady again and even tries to shake her shoulder. He receives another shush, this time topped with a stern look. Seul gulps. The old lady seems scared of the strange man, to the extent Seul understands that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. That makes him hesitate. He knows nothing about the world of humans, he isn’t familiar with their rules, norms, and traditions.
Why does the old lady fear that strange man? Is it because he was doing things out of the ordinary? Are humans always scared of abnormality? Or does wall climbing mean something more dangerous here? If someone’s feared by others, should Seul think about talking to them? Should he jump off the cart just to figure out what was going on with that strange man? What if he’s left alone with a terrible individual?
Seul shudders at the last thought and pulls himself together. He can sense a burning impulse running in his veins, urging him to jump off and go discover the strange man’s acts, but the logical part of his head tells him that it’s a bad idea. And this can be one of the very rare times when Seul agrees with it. Jumping off from a moving cart sounds painful and yields no significant result.
It’s not like Seul can’t protect himself. He’s a fierce fighter, and although he hasn’t familiarized himself with battling on foot yet, he’s confident in his sharpness and abilities to react in critical situations. Meaning he doesn’t fear being left alone with a dangerous being. He just doesn’t think that it’s worth it, however, to waste his time on an absurd squabble, while he only has a day to get his question answered, and preferably, find the one person that catalyzed all of his madness’ saunters.
With that in mind, Seul turns around and stares at the strange man again, who’s become a small shadow now. The man seems to be jumping through the rocks to reach the sea, his head bobbing up and down within the waves. Seul throws him the last glance, surprised to see a strand of longingness in it.
As if his subconscious mind is trying to tell him something, and, from how his heart suddenly clenches as his gaze is ripped off from the man’s shadow, it seems urgent. Still, his head is in the cloud, full of way too many thoughts, his heart is overwhelmed with new feelings, and his body is still trying to get used to the new environment. It’s normal if he can’t think straight, and it’s safer to stick to his logical admonition, rather than any wild idea that pops up out of no convincing reason.
Seul crouches in the cart, patiently waiting for the abrupt storm in him to die down. He looks at the gray sky. It resembles the light he gets back home, but he’s on Earth. He was expecting something better, brighter, warmer, but for now, Seul takes whatever is in his ability. Even on a cloudy day like this, the humans still have fainted sunlight, and that’s enough to gain envy from someone from under the sea.
He gives out a long sigh, longer than anything he ever glubbed. It’s strange to actually see that there’s no bubble around him when he breathes. It would be much better if Seul could speak. He could simply ask the old lady why she was so eager to get away from the strange man, he could voice a lot of questions about the Earth, and he could have his wonders answered. Now he has nothing but his personal feelings, and more mysteries to tickle his interrogative mind.
The cart suddenly stops, and Seul finally looks up, seeing the castle wall has ended for a while, and he’s now in front of a small house. A cottage, as he read from the title of one of the paintings he found in humans’ wrecks that sank with them under the sea. It looks dirtier and more dilapidated than what he saw, but Seul’s been familiar with the cold grasp of reality enough not to feel disappointed.

Shinichirou
A staring gaze makes the back of his head tickle, so Shinichirou turns his head in the direction to check. There’s no one else on the coast but him and the same old lady, and that passenger she has at the back of her cart. Shinichirou doesn’t know that man, but he doesn’t know a lot of people in the kingdom. It isn’t a prince’s job to memorize their faces, it’s their duty to introduce themselves to him.
It’s an interesting-looking man, however, capturing Shinichirou’s eyes for a full second, before his head reminds him that he still has more important things to do and roughly an hour to finish it. He still can't stop thinking of the man, still. The man is slender and seems almost naked, with nothing to cover his bright skin but a shabby piece of cloth, probably from a broken sail.
This isn’t something out of the ordinary, although it’s fascinating. People who live by the ocean don’t like to be tethered by their clothes – they get wrinkled and sticky easily by the salty air, and the itch of sand grains inside layers of fabric doesn’t sound like the most comfortable. But even the sleaziest have at least a pair of pants to cover their groin area. It’s like a basic social norm not to let others see your private part, and yet that man has nothing. That’s probably why he stays under a broken sail, and he wasn’t even covering himself properly.
It was almost as if he didn’t know anything, the rules of the world, the society’s function, or how his own body works in clothes. This is the fascinating part. How come such a grown-up, bright-looking person does not know any of those? Shinichirou should have – and he would have – stopped the cart and asked him about it, was it another normal day when he had all the time in the world.
Today isn’t. Today, Shinichirou’s under a magical pact, and he only has this very hour to find the person who saved him and gave his dying candle of the will to live a reason to burn again. There are a lot of mad people – inexplicably mad, peculiarly wild, downright out of common understanding – and that man may be one of them. That’s what Shinichirou was telling himself.
But he doesn’t look so, that’s another thing he can hear, as he reaches the water’s edge. He looks again, in the direction of the faraway cart, wondering what made his inner voice say so. Out of the blue, without a reason, he feels the crispy hand of regret over his throat. Shinichirou swallows. It doesn’t work as it did with the lump, and now it even seizes him harder.
There’s disappointment lurking within the grasp, followed by a thread of pain squeezing around his heart, making every beat throb. It feels like having something within reach, only to let it slip off and disappear for good. Shinichirou squints and forces himself to think, but then he opens his eyes wide right afterward. This is not the time to think nonsense or to feel what isn’t there.
For all his life, Shinichirou has felt it, the mixture of gloomy emotions, the agony of watching joy turn into ashes, the pinches of hope that merge into a larger amount of desperation, the sorrow of not knowing what he’s living for, and the fear of seeing his desires fade away, leaving but a pinch of bitter memory. Today is the day he shouldn’t let it take over. Today is the day he moves forward, even if it means flipping the world upside-down, for the man that gave him the reason to do it.
Shinichirou looks at the cart for the last time. It’s become a moving dot, arbitrarily hidden and shown again as he moves down to the cluster of rocks. The interesting man can wait, but his savior only has an hour to be found. Perhaps if luck is on Shinichirou’s side, he can find the merman in no time and go back to the man on the cart. Perhaps they can be friends if they talk to each other.
It’s possible, Shinichirou can hear his heart sing. He doesn’t know jackshit about the man on the cart, but he has a feeling that he’s one to open to new things. It’s only probable, considering how he simply said fuck to the social norms and the stupid dress codes, putting on a simple but revealing piece of sail over his body without the slightest grain of damn about how much of him it was able to hide.
Someone daring like that is interested in the existence of a merman.

Seul
He follows the old lady into her cottage. There, she gives him some clothes and helps him to put them on. The clothes are a little bit larger than Seul’s slender build, and he guesses they belong to the old lady’s son, considering that they’re different in shapes and color from her wearings. Beggars can’t be choosers, and Seul doesn’t need anything fancy.
What he needs now is to find out the hidden words on the contract. He knows that there’s no reverse – he’s signed it so he’ll bear the consequences – but he at least should know the damage to prepare a constant solution. There has to be a way for the words to be there, or else the magic never happened.
“There, young man,” the old lady smiles, “you look alright now.”
Seul nods to her, trying to show his gratitude through the eyes, and he’s glad she catches it. The old lady grins and pushes him in front of a mirror. He can’t help a smile as his gaze lands on his reflection. In a second, Seul allows himself to shut down the urge to deal with his tight situation, to adore his new look as a human.
He steps back a bit, to have a clearer view. His black hair, for the first time, is dried and is draping over his slim body like the embrace of the night. Seul’s urged to reach up and touch it, feeling the thick and tough strands of hair among his fingers. They’re rougher than he thought, not so fluffy as they were undersea, but he guesses it’s the effect of the Earth’s air.
His torso is covered for the first time, and although the fabric feels itchy against his skin, Seul has no reason to object. He never knew he’d look so amazing in this sand-colored-whatever piece of clothes. The pants underneath wrap around his leg neatly, a part of it is a bit longer, but the old lady rolled them up to fit Seul better. They’re both a shade of grayish black, darker than what the strange man on the beach was wearing and for some reason, Seul’s convinced that it’s his color.
“You look so much like him, poor thing,” the old lady mumbles as Seul admires himself. He turns to her with a puzzled look, wondering what she means by that. He knows, by instinct, that he reminds her of a long-lost beloved person, a son, perhaps. It’s just in such a situation if Seul still had his voice, he’d have asked and paved the way for her to talk about what’s been clenching around her heart, like a gesture of allowing him to ease his burdens with a conversation later.
Now even it seems like a privilege he never has. It’s ironic to see the contrary. Seul used to be the man of utmost privilege in the ocean, probably second after his father, and now even the simplest act of expressing himself is out of his reach.
He gives the old lady a sad nod and a smile full of pain, knowing she’d never get the complex of feelings trailing with it. He moves back a few more steps and hits the table behind him in the process, tearing his eyes off from his reflection, and looking around the cottage’s interior. It’s small and old, perhaps older than its owner. It’s also quiet and tedious, filled with an everlasting swirl of dejection. It’s covered in a thin layer of something Seul doesn’t know, like the sand, but much smaller, smoother, and sadder.
“Oh lord grief,” he hears the old woman exclaim again and suddenly feels something hot at his ankles. Seul turns around in time to see his pants burn – his eyes widen at the realization – he’s seeing a flame for the first time, even feeling it against his skin. He doesn’t like it very much, it’s too bright for his liking, it looks nothing like the pictures he collected, and the heat feels terrible.
“Be careful, poor dear,” the old lady says, running to him with a bucket of water, “you knocked down the candle!”
She splashes a bucket of water on his pants. To Seul’s surprise, the flame disappears with the first touch of water. He knows that fire and water don’t match, but it’s only been something like common knowledge, shared and taught and learned without further question or saying. He’s never seen it in real life, and it feels quite amusing to see how fast water can put away a small flame.
Seul’s eyes instantaneously flare. Of course, fire doesn’t exist in water. There’s no fire under the sea. Therefore, if one wants to hide something, they may want to make it only appear at the touch of fire.
The old lady’s put the candle back on the table and lit it up again. Seul can see his contract lying close to it, and he takes a deep breath. He reaches over, to the old lady’s questioning eyes, and snatches the paper. He knows for a fact that the fire turns the paper into ash, so he needs to be extra careful.
Seul moves the contract closer to the candle, hovering it above. Feeling it’s still too far away, he bites his lips and moves the paper lower. The heat from the candle grazes through his skin, making him almost slip, but Seul tightens the hold. He keeps it closer, and closer to the fire.
Then, with his heart skipping a beat, Seul sees the hidden letters showing up, one by one, at the touch of the fire.
My dear prince, if you’re reading it, I hope you enjoy our contract.