A Merman's Tale

Seirra: Chapter Twenty-Three

     It was unbelievable.

     No. The idea that Margaret was the girl who would help me save Aquania was beyond unbelievable.

     My breath caught somewhere between my lungs and my mouth and for a moment, I was suspended, floating with no ability to move. And then I felt my heart begin to thump furiously as excitement slowly took form inside me.

     Margaret was my Fate.

     She was my princess.

     All this time, it was her.

     It was her. I couldn’t be happier.

     Doris knew and had she been alive right now, she would have told me about it. A bubble of mirth almost escaped from my lips when I remembered one important fact.

     The Fates had always been a royal and a Celari.

     How was this even possible?

     I whipped my head and saw that Marina’s face registered the same freezing confusion that I was feeling. Several seconds passed before I saw her blink twice and close her hanging mouth to swallow the shock that Doris's note gave us.

     “Care to explain this?” she exclaimed, being the first to find her voice.

     “Uh, I honestly wouldn't know how,” I replied, my voice almost a whisper. “I mean, the tradition had always been clear. The Celari leader finds his or her princess or prince and they get married.”

     “Perhaps the former Oracle was mistaken,” Erwann guessed as he reread the words written on the scroll. The notes were all about the veil and the Crystal Key of Saol.

     “Impossible. Doris was the best and the wisest. Granted, Oracles could never really point out facts but the clues they see with their powers are way past an inference. What they see are almost always true,” I countered. For one, Doris was indeed the best. Second, I wanted her words to be the truth that I could not possibly believe otherwise. “Besides, how else are we going to explain why the kiss didn’t work yesterday?”

     “There’s that,” Erwann considered. “But as you said, the Fates were never anybody else except a Celari and a royal. How can a human be involved?”

     “What if,” Marina’s brows were furrowed as she tried to analyze the situation, “Margaret isn’t exactly a human?” She raised her eyes and stared at Erwann and me, waiting for our reactions.

     “I haven’t met her so I can’t be sure. But that’s possible. Are you sure she’s not your sister, Princess?” Erwann replied as he rolled back the scrolls and returned them to their respective canisters.

     I answered on behalf of Marina. “Can’t be. For one, Marge is surely not Aquanian. Her eyes are blue, not green. And if she isn’t human, Grampa would have known. He’s a Huntre and he never once told me anything about it.”

     “Urgh! Why does Doris have to be dead? She could’ve answered all these questions so easily!” the princess complained, swimming over to lean on the cave’s wall as she crossed her arms in front of her.

     I had the same complaints but I decided to keep it to myself. Marina could do the complaining for both of us. My head started pounding with all the new information we had gathered and I raised one of my hands to try to ease the headache.

     “Doris’s death was planned,” Erwann began after a few seconds of silence. His voice had gone grave and serious. “And keeping Margaret away from Aquania could only be the enemy’s motive.”
      That, by far, was the most alarming idea we had come up with this morning. If the enemy did know that Margaret was the girl I needed to find, then there was a huge chance that the attacks we had while I was on land wasn’t necessarily to take the Key but also to kill Margaret. A shiver of dread rushed through my spine. We weren’t together as of the moment but if the enemy was desperate to keep the veil weak, then Margaret could be in danger. My hands balled into fists.