Seabound

Chapter 1

Seabound - Chapter 1

My school-mother always told me to be careful of the two-legger-travel-things. Boats, she called them. She told me that they used things called "nets" to catch fish as food. She said that we often got caught in them. Many of us had died, caught up in two-legger-fish-catchers. Died, or never returned home. That's what she told me when I first came home. She told me things before that too, but they were not important pieces of advice. But the most important advice was about the two-legger-fish-catchers. And it was the only piece of advice that I had ignored.

I ignored it because I was upset by what she wanted me to do. I was supposed to do whatever the elders of my school wanted me to do, but I could not do it this time. They wanted me to shed my tail and walk among two-leggers. It meant that I could not return to the sea for a full moon cycle. I would have to walk on land for that long, wearing clothes and shoes, on feat that I hadn't walked on for ten years. So I left my school, swimming away as fast as I could, listening to my school sisters crying my name, Aura, then my school-mother telling them to let me go, that I would come back when I was ready. I swam until I couldn't hear their voices anymore.

It was moon-time. The silver-blue light was glinting off my pale bronze scales. I had slowed down, so now my fins were only moving with the gentle current. The moon light was reflected in the shiny, sparkly things that I had woven into my hair. We all had some shiny things that we kept on out person, mostly things stolen from ship-wrecks or found scattered around the sea floor. Things like pieces of gold, sea-glass, two-legger-trinkets that were lost at sea and crystals that we picked up from the rocks near where we lived. Only the school-elders had the most precious things. Two-legger-chains, taken from their land-caves by the few youngsters who were daring enough to walk with them. That is what they wanted me to do for them. Go into one of the two-legger-land-caves and take their most special land-jewels. I could not have done it. Only my older school-sisters had returned, injured from walking and not nearly as beautiful as they were when they had left us. Their skin was burnt and dried out, their hair tangled and oily and dull. They could not see under the water anymore, the big-hot-light-ball had damaged their eyes such. They were never the same after they went onto land, and I was determined to never go onto land after I had seen them. The school-elders thought nothing of their injuries, only thinking of the riches my school-sisters had brought back with them. My school-sisters had got nothing in return for their land-torture, only a small "well done" from the kindest of school-elders.

I found myself in the in the middle of no-where, floating just under the barrier that separated us and the two-leggers. My school-mother called it the surface. She said that we all grew up above the barrier, but that we didn't truly belong there when we were that age. She said that after we had lived twenty years with the two-leggers, with our other parent, we were able to come home, to join the school. She claimed that we forgot all that happened in our life before we came home. Our home is the sea. It is where we live with the rest of our school, with our school-sisters and school-elders, led by our school-mother. There were no males; apparently we were born from the joining of a two-legger male and a mermaid female. Apparently we could only be born female. That was what my school-mother told us anyway. There were some days that I did not believe her.

I am a mermaid. My whole school is. My school-mother is that leader of the school. The school-elders help her run the school. They make laws and rules for us, to keep us safe. The rest of us live by those laws. My school-mother has told us that the two-leggers hate us. She said that they think we eat two-legger-males. She says that we used to because they were destroying our home, killing our food, our fish and our gardens, but we stopped when one of our school-ancestors made a pact with the ancient two-leggers. They had stopped destroying our ocean and we had stopped killing them. But the new two-leggers had started killing us in revenge for their ancestor's deaths. Killing us or capturing us for no reason. We had kept our side of the bargain and they had too, in a way. But they were still killing us. My school-mother would eventually tell us that we were allowed to pull them out of their boats and drown them. Then she would go to the main human that led the attacks to kill us and they would make another pact of peace. In another hundred years the pact would be broken again. The whole process would continue until all of us are wiped out, extinct.