Wind Flowers (Book 2 of Flower Trilogy)

1.

The world was different under water. It was peaceful. The silence. The diffused sunlight. Halia was lulled by the coldness and the water's soft caress on her skin. The strange power of the tide that kept pulling her out to the sea. Further, always further from her past, from the people she left behind. She had hoped that the salted water would wash everything away. All the pain. The death of the friend she loved. She needed to forget.

She stayed there, letting her body sink into the darkness under her feet. There was darkness everywhere. Her lungs sent rafts of bubbles to the surface. Her heartbeat slowed.

I just need to rest, she told herself. I just need to sleep. Freeze my heart. Freeze my pain.

She heard the long and complex songs of humpback whale in the distance. It was so beautiful it made her smile. The animals were intrigued by her presence and, sensing her distress, called out for the Oceanides.

Halia swam with the gigantic mammals for a while. She could recognize the grace in their slow movements and powerful tails that divided the currents around her.

Soon after, the Oceanides, half-women half-fish creatures, came to meet them. They greeted the water nymph rather warmly, recognizing her as one of the little people crossing the sea from France to the New World on a Tan Noz ship.

Halia had forgotten how beautiful the ocean nymphs were with their long hair entwined with beads. Some of them were riding dolphins or sea horses, and carrying tridents or coral sticks in their hands. They were the protective spirits of the sea.

Following them, the nymph saw a world entirely differently from everything she had known. It was a world Grannie's stories never talked about, for most of her people were land creatures or none had ventured out to the open sea. The fish of different sizes flew in a crystal blue background. The sun had taken a greenish hue.

They went down to an underwater chain of mountains, created by the previous ice ages, where grew the most singular flowers and plants. The Oceanides lived there, in the depth of a silver cave. The walls of their dwelling reflected on their bluish skin, reinforcing its hue and giving it a glow.

She spent her first American winter there among them. The nights were longer. A layer of ice formed over the sea waters.

She lived under the ice, where the water, was barely over the freezing point. The cold numbed her pain. Sometimes, she even was able to convince herself the underwater was the only world that existed, the only world she knew.

She was feeling better, but as if life did not want her to forget her pain, her dreams began to be haunted. She returned to her wrecked ways.

She dreamed that she was on the Mound, to lay flowers on Phi's tomb. The sound of the others drums. She looked for the tomb could never find it. Her body was not resting there. Everything was pointing that the princess was still alive.

I told you our friendship would be forever, she'd say to her friend in her dreams. Even after death. We can be together until the end of times.

She would cling to this hope of keeping her friend alive in her dreams. But Phi would never answer. Her silence oppressed. She opened her eyes, and closed them, and never opened them again. She was dead once more, as if she was escaping her friendship, as if she preferred death to being with the nymph.

Winter and Spring passed by. One day, upon waking up, she felt something strange in her stomach. She recognized the feeling, although she had not felt it in a long time. It was the feeling some fairies have when they know something is about to change. Once again, she feared, her peaceful existence among the mermaids would change. Her past was near.