legend

chapter 1

I was born to be in the ocean. My name is Meredith Mares, and I love the ocean. I live in a city that is on the beach. I am an only child, and thankfully my parents are still together. My dad was the one who always had me in the water. Be it swimming, surfing, snorkeling; anything really anything that involved water, we were there. While my dad and I lived in the water, my mom stayed as far away as she could from it. I never understood why until I was told who I really was, and who she was, but by then I had lost both my parents. 

I use to go to public school, up until 8th grade. There was a boy(isn’t there always), anyway, I was in the school pool and I swam around teasing this boy, that I happened to really like. I kept telling him to join me, and teased him for not joining me. I didn’t know he couldn’t swim until he was in the water yelling for help. I wanted to help him, but I just watched as he began to sink down, and I never told anyone this but I had some weird thrill of watching him, I know it’s terrible. Then a P.E. teacher managed to get him out. After, when they asked him what happened, he said I made him go in. But I had witnesses and they said I didn’t force him to do anything. I knew I didn’t, but I couldn’t help feeling guilty. After that, my parents began to homeschool me. At first it bothered me, but after I realized I got to spend more time in the water, and my best friend Oceania Ozean aka Nia, she was home schooled with me. Anyway, we were pretty good at being home schooled, but whenever we went in the water, my dad stopped joining us. When he’d go out in the water, and we joined him he’d always come up with some excuse to leave, I tried not to pay attention to it, but now I know why. 

Anyway, I was happy nonetheless, until my parents along with Nia’s mom went out for a couple’s night out. Nia and I were in my house watching movies and gossiping about hot tourist guys, when they arrived. They being the cops. They knocked on the door, and I went over to open it. They asked for both of us, and it was the same thing for both of us. Our parents had been in a restaurant that had gone up in flames and there were no survivors. Nia and I only had each other. But apparently I had a very rich grandmother from my mother’s side that I’d never met. Not long after, Nia and I found ourselves being taken away from what we’d learned to call home, and we found ourselves in a little town, 8 hours away from our home. The only good thing being, that it was next to the ocean. Except here, the sun was hardly ever out and there was thick fog that only cleared at noon, then fogged up again in the middle of the afternoon.

For awhile, I felt like I was living in a fog, and I was just getting by. Nia and I were given a month to pack so we could officially move in with my grandmother. One day my grandmother had gone over to the house. And that was the day, our lives completely changed, in EVERY possible way. I no longer had parents, and I found out I was immortal. I was an orphaned mermaid. 

Yeah, that sounded crazy to me too. But then it all made sense. I hold my breath for a ridiculous amount of time under water, and if I wasn’t sleeping, I was out in the water. It ends up my mother was a mermaid, and my dad was an average surfer. My mother had lived for many MANY years. As in she was one of the girls sailors wrote about, the ones that dragged sailors to their doom. She was a kick ass mermaid, until she met my dad. My mother knew my dad was different, so she didn’t try any of her seducing techniques and actually dated him. Anyway, my mother has been the ONLY one to ever marry a human, so apparently there were manny people that wanted her gone. They thought she was a disgrace to the families. There are a couple of families that come from a LONG long time ago, and I guess they’ve never mixed their blood with a human. Apparently there are other creatures like me an Nia you see ALL mermaids are girls. However, there are other things out there that are stronger and have more power than we do. But to my point, my mother was shunned from the ‘clan’. Nia’s mom had grown up with my mom and saw her as a sister, so she went with my mom. When Nia’s mom found out my mother was pregnant, she did too. But, the thing is mermaid’s can’t be created, I mean a pure mermaid with no other DNA traces of something else cannot be made. ALL pureblood mermaids were made differently, and you can’t make more. So Nia has been around for awhile too, but she was ‘dormant’ as in not really needed and not really living in this world, but she was alive, she was just actually living under water, by choice. Every mermaid has another mermaid to be with, like sisters. And Nia’s had been killed so she was alone and that was why she chose to live in the ocean, so she was basically a mermaid, without the human form, yeah I know kinda weird. Anyway, the reason why we have ‘sisters’ is because a mermaid alone is an easy target to capture and kill. If there are two (or more) It’s pretty easy to get out of any sticky situation. My mom, along with Nia’s, knew that they weren’t going to be around for long, so they left a plan for us. They had actually planned it out with my grandmother, who had been secretly keeping in touch with my mother. That way, Nia and I, weren’t separated because we no longer had guardians.