And now we shall provide a brief summary of the next five years, because if William Shakespeare can get away with explaining an essential plot element with a two-line note at the end of As You Like It, you cannot object to my briefly informing you of the rest of the story, though I may be no Shakespeare.
The summary:
Pirates.
Mermaids.
Enormous wealth liberated from unscrupulous sailors.
More mermaids.
And finally, the only incident worth noting specifically. At the end of the five years, it so happened that the royal family was captured by the pirate ship Black Blood, belonging to the only crew of pirates both rich and dramatic enough to paint their whole boat black. The "mermaids" rescued them, and thus the Queen had to stop acting mad because it wouldn't look nice to hate the people who saved you from certain death.
In the process, Christopher was discovered to be in the company of the mermaids, and agreed to return home. Christopher and Ariel were happily married. The public was going crazy over the (entirely false) story of the little mermaid who made a trade with a sea witch to get legs and become human and marry a guy she just met (why anyone would actually do that is beyond me), so nobody really cared that he didn't marry Cassia.
So that covers some of the bases. Ariel's parents, who were now the wealthiest people in the kingdom, decided that they might as well settle down, buy a mansion, and adopt as many children as they could care for. Ariel's sisters wormed their way into her story by somehow convincing everyone that they had been cursed as well, to turn into humans by day and mermaids by night. They put on fabulous moonlight performances and little girls everywhere loved it.
Cassia also found her way into the story, for she said that, through the sea witch, she traded with Ariel, and became a mermaid in her place. She performed with Ariel's sisters for a number of years, before retiring at around forty and marrying her childhood sweetheart, a lovely man named Brunn. (Time has since forgotten poor Cassia, as well as all the many "curses" except one. So now everyone thinks the only trade was Ariel switching her voice for legs, which didn't happen, because none of it happened in the first place.)
And, without a doubt, everyone lived happily ever after.
Except the Queen.
But that's okay, because nobody liked the Queen.
The end.
YOU ARE READING
The Little Maid: Tail Not Included
FantasyThis is not the true story. Indeed, it's unlikely we will ever know the true story; it has been lost to time. But this is certainly closer than the stories you have heard before. The story I am going to tell is about a family of pirates, a boy of no...
