Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Looking back on it, Aaravi wasn’t sure why she thought the Merkingdom would be… fuller, maybe, than it actually was.

Honestly, she couldn’t say she was expecting any part of the two days she spent within that boat which was not a boat. But somehow it was the lack of nearly anything outside the windows that stuck with her the most, that impressed itself into her mind in a way she struggled to fully comprehend. When she thought back to it later, the full journey, it was the emptiness that came to mind first, that defined her time in the ferry boat, and nothing else fully compared.

She knew the Merkingdom was massive. Everyone knew that. Or they did, the second they thought about it a little, processed over what Miranda spoke about, extrapolated from there how much they must’ve had under their control, and realized just how much of the planet was covered in water and how deep that water ran. It made sense, in the way that she understood vast expanses of the land were empty still, that if she plopped down anywhere in the world, she wouldn’t be likely to land very near to civilization, or at least not very near to population centers.

But at the same time, there were just… so many merfolk. They imposed themselves into her mind, not just in their booming voices that Aaravi slowly found herself adjusting to, trying to learn how to handle the stream of information as it passed through her without drowning in it. They moved and spoke with the full intention of a swarm, referred back to miles upon miles of new names, new relations, people that they knew and they cared for and people further still behind those. Rows upon rows of piled up bodies, all invoked at once.

The population was massive, and the area they inhabited was massive. But somehow Aaravi still barely understood why, when she stared out through the translucent walls, veined through like inching spiderwebs, she mostly only ever saw dark water, stretching out so far in every direction that she lost all other sense of belonging.

The only landmarks she ever saw were one or two flashes of shapes in the distance. The lights that slid across what passed for a horizon line could’ve been civilization, merfolk, or they could’ve been other pelagic life, floating freely in the currents, clumped together as they chased plankton.

All would have been the same, in this place, in this way.

She knew they were getting deeper, right? They had to be. She had been told they would be getting deeper, but even that felt hard to comprehend. The world grew darker and darker still, dark blue fading away into black, into suffocating darkness, and the pressure mounted inside of Aaravi’s ears, thrummed through all of her body, exhausted her and hollowed her out just to try and swim through the rooms of the ship, but it was all so distant from her.

Was she being tricked? She couldn’t tell. The fact that she couldn’t tell, that the reality of this situation slipped further and further away into the surreal, was what made her think that in the first place. It all dwelled in her mind, kept her awake.

There was just so much that was different, and different in a way that piled up onto itself, compounded upon itself, made the rest of the reality of the situation harder and harder to comprehend. Aaravi had very little context for what was happening, very few ways she could describe the totality of the difference in the underlying logic.

She had crept closer to monsters than her contemporaries, seen how they lived, made her home like those of all great hunters next to her prey that she stalked, but there was a sense still to monster culture. It shared some undercurrent with humanity, held overlap with what Aaravi already knew. She could look at aspects of monster culture and immediately identify them as coming from the same places as human culture, could tell what they shared in society, in history. She knew what parts of human culture impacted off of them, fractured, splintered, sent the psychology of their society curdling inwards, staring at itself.

Monster culture tried very hard to convince Aaravi, to convince everyone who applied beneath the shadow of its name, that it was unique, separate, not a part of what it had arisen from and not a reaction to the conditions humanity shared with it; and maybe it worked on some of them. Aaravi could see it in them, a tension, a coiling up on themselves, all waiting for the impact. A sort of self-judgement, something born out of seeking some kind of unity together but without anything specific shared among themselves to draw that distinction around. They would say they were monsters, not monsters, and no one would speak on the hypocrisy, but it still sat there under their words anyways.

Aaravi didn’t buy any part of it. The entire gesture felt hopelessly insecure, a great and terrible fear of humanity and of associating with humanity that they forgot to make any other part of themselves to call their own, existing only as the pale shadow to humanity’s fullest history and pride.

It was part of what made accepting everything else easier. Aaravi could not and would not be one of these people, feckless and shrinking. She belonged somewhere, had a history to herself, a family. She had joys and prides yet that were her own, something she could come back to. She had an identity, and not just as something hollow and begging for acknowledgement.

To be a monster was to be something pitiable, making grand gestures in the dark, ranting to the empty wind about all the battles you assuredly could win, even if they hadn’t happened yet, wouldn’t happen yet, and to convince themselves this was the superior mode of existence. Aaravi wouldn’t be pushed back. She wouldn’t boast without knowing fully well what she was capable of, wouldn’t feel the need to brag about her great and evil plans, wouldn’t skulk around in the shadows like she didn’t belong there.

She didn’t belong there, and she knew that. Wouldn’t belong there. The people who went there, who called themselves monsters, who stuck together like clumps bobbing at the top of a pond, barely even belonged there. It was an awful, wretched mess, and Aaravi would shut the door, wouldn’t leave it open a crack, wouldn’t acknowledge that there was any crossover between one or the other.

This prior experience and how it had soured had prepared her already for every inch further she stepped into the Merkingdom, for every new fact that she learned about Miranda and her people. She was ready, she knew how this would go, she had already seen it before. Everything was exactly as it should be.

And, as it was, her water hadn’t been properly sealed, her tents had holes in them, her knives had never known a whetstone in their lives, and her provisions had grown weevils and maggots in all the time she thought that they would’ve been ready to go.

That was why it was taking her so off-guard, she thought. That had to be it. She had come in expecting Miranda to be the same, because she had to be, because she was a monster and Aaravi had always known her as a monster, and because she was clumped together with them, trapped as so obviously and blatantly inhuman that there was nowhere else to leave her. This was how it was, how it was supposed to be, how it had gone every other step of the way.

She supposed it was only fair.

She, and everyone else, had forgotten that Miranda didn’t describe herself as a monster, that she thought them just as alien to her as humans too. Miranda was shuffled into that description, came to walk among monsters for that same presumption, a different cause than what the effect usually implied.

If mistakes were made because of it, because of this improper categorization that everyone kept making the second their eyes lingered upon her scales, then even Aaravi had to suck it up eventually and admit that it wasn’t really Miranda’s doing.

Nowhere was this more telling than in the cultural difference. If monster society refused to admit it splintered off from humanity in any way, shunned away any acknowledgement of common descent to the point of obliviousness and their own stupidity, then merfolk, the Merkingdom, all that they were, sat there in everything monster society wanted to be, holding within it the sheer confidence of something that had always been.

They had no need to try and deny that humanity and them shared any common ancestry, had no impulse to confirm that they had nothing in common. Merfolk knew they were unique. They knew they had their own history, drowned in it, wore it upon their sleeves and painted it across the walls and sang it in their voices. They had something, something to call their own, a great many somethings all pressing in and on top of each other, cultures on top of cultures.

And they lived all of it, each of it, so wholly and so entirely that quickly Aaravi found herself on the other side. Abruptly, normality had switched, and the way Aaravi assumed the world worked and the way people worked no longer applied, and when she thought back to it without recognizing the difference, the uniqueness between the two, she was met with very strange stares from the merfolk involved.

Such as the bed. Miranda had decided to try and see if either of them wanted to go back to bed first, like she had promised, before breakfast and before trying to put anything back in Aaravi’s stomach. Aaravi assumed that was the impulse, at least. Miranda certainly seemed more jittery around Aaravi than before, uneasy in the way that large animals only ever got uneasy, as nothing but a faint shifting in the way they held themselves.

Already making her way into the ship was a problem. Aaravi didn’t get a good look at it on the brisk swim to Miranda’s room, but she was already having problems with navigation, because it was cylindrical.

The assessment that it looked like a cigar was correct, even moreso a hollowed one, but she hadn’t realized she was expecting different floors until she was already inside and everything below her just curved away on a transparent, featureless plane. Nowhere to rest her feet, nothing dividing the space into parts. There was the open funnel of the ocean in the middle, and there was the interior of the ship, and then there were rooms along the walls, and if she fell, she could keep falling, sliding off the floating middle-of-the-doughnut, falling until she hit the far end of the ship, at the bottom.

Well, except she knew she wouldn’t fall. On some level, at least. No one seemed to have told Aaravi’s instinctual mind, the parts of her underneath her rational thought that she couldn’t scrub out, that she would float here, or at least settle down towards the bottom in a more graceful manner.

No matter. Miranda had zipped through the middle commons of the ship and came along the side to another sphincter-door left as one of the few landmarks in the otherwise unremarkable walls. They didn’t linger, but they would have time to linger, and Aaravi had still been deep inside the shocks of having a full, true merfolk conversation flow through her grey matter, and it seemed for the best. Aaravi certainly appreciated the way the room instantly dulled the external noise and vocal clutter, giving her more time to try and haul saltwater into her lungs and choke it back out again.

Which brought her to the bed.

Aaravi knew why she was expecting a bed like what she was used to. That wasn’t a grand mystery, wasn’t something she had to ponder over. She was expecting something like what she had woken up inside of that morning, something that she had gone to bed with Miranda in multiple times now. Sure, maybe it was Aaravi being presumptuous, but she had seen Miranda sleep inside beds like that for the entire time she had the knowledge of what Miranda sleeping in a bed looked like. It made sense that she would expect that, that it would be normal.

Maybe if she thought a little more, she would have realized that water had different properties than air, and a primary concern was the thought of drifting away. The ocean kept moving even when the merfolk inside it stopped, after all. It would push and pull them to and fro, and unless they consciously adjusted their bodies and positions, those would slowly change, alter, meant that a merfolk falling asleep stood a risk of waking up in an entirely different place than when they had started.

Regardless, it took her a long, long time to realize what the tangle of strips of fabric, some wound into gentle ropes, were for, or why they were mounted against the wall. She had blinked her eyes, and stared, and tried to adjust to the dull light that only just caught the edges of Miranda’s body in shimmering teal, left floating next to it while Miranda parted the barest distance from her to mess with the fabric bindings.

Even the distance, even the feeling of free-floating there, bothered Aaravi. It flicked at something that made her blood-brain barrier itch, a creeping sensation under her skin and alit in her nerves like slow-burning embers inside a lightning struck tree. She could kick, swim, but the water was all around her. The water was all above her. She could be left floating there, useless, like a little kid, while Miranda moved around with an ease she had never exhibited inland. It made her eyes prickle, aching even more under the saltwater waves, even if the charm prevented the sting from ever coming.

“What,” Aaravi spoke again, trying her throat, her tongue, trying to figure out what to do in the silence, in the aching absence. A tumor had been removed from her body all at once, the great multiplicity reduced down to singularity, and Aaravi ached, hurt around it, where she had been abruptly forced to live with so many others inside her head. Even her stubbornness from before started to flare out, empty, alone, with only her ul’kiha here as judgement.

“Bed,” Miranda said, her eyes not looking up from her hands, busy in the act of pulling more spools of the fabric out of the wall, winding it slowly around her arms in great hoops, “We should go back to bed. It is… You did not get much rest last night, and I understand it is a lot, and you should rest.”

“No, I mean,” Aaravi’s mind uselessly spun its wheels, trying to put the prickle of frustration somewhere it was useful. “I mean…”

“You can rest, right? You do not feel too wound up from…”

“Miranda. Shut your fucking mouth for a second.”

Aaravi glimpsed a flicker of Miranda’s fins, a purse of the lines of her mouth, drawing together not quite like lips. Her eyes narrowed in that particular way that Miranda liked to do so when she was irritated, when someone was wasting her time, when she really, really wanted to just bite someone back.

Like how she had looked at Aaravi, back then. When it was early, when she hadn’t yet learned the patterns of Miranda’s frustration, when they chafed against each other. When both had anticipated blood, and claws, and a righteous blade singing in the air.

“It is fine, I just—”

“You need to just shut up and listen to me.”

Aaravi should’ve felt like she was making a mistake. She was floating in the middle of the water column, and not even the entirety of a meter away from her there was an apex predator, something that dwarfed her, something that was made in the same mold as darting shapes dancing through the long grass outside of the village, all the lights from the fires so far behind her back, their songs and their voices nothing but an echo to remind her how far from civilization she was already, how she was already within the clutches of the final silence. Miranda had the jaws to make it matter. She had the claws of a nightmare, and as scrawny as she was for a merfolk, the distance between any merfolk and Aaravi, a human, a monster, a failure, was far greater than even that lack could make up for.

She didn’t, though. Funny thing about being reminded that Miranda, for all her traits, for all she was, was still Miranda. It went both ways.

And it was hard not to just see the princess plying her usual tricks behind that veneer.

Miranda pulled her lips tight. She pushed them back, all the way towards the hinge of her jaw. She clenched her eyes shut, made faint ridges of bunched up tissue appear over her nose crest, exhaled hard out through her gills so that Aaravi saw all of the dark red frills nestled inside.

“Yes?” she said, like bracing for impact.

“What. The fuck. Was that?”

Aaravi would’ve liked to point her finger accusatorily at Miranda. Would’ve liked to jab it in her direction, mark her out, put the target on her. As it was, she was staring daggers into the side of Miranda’s stupid giant head, and clenching her arms tight around her own legs, pulled to her chest. It was decidedly less impressive. Hair kept floating around her head, getting into her mouth, her eyes, and the motion and force made her want to bob backwards.

The only thing keeping her in place was the charm, stopping her from floating up and up, or wanting to sink lower and lower.

“What was what?” Miranda returned, still not opening her eyes, still only having to faintly shift her tail to keep herself floating steadily in place. “What happened, Aaravi? I have to know that first, and that is not wholly clear here. You just…”

“What happened,” Aaravi clarified, trying to keep hold on her irritation, on not letting it slip away and let emptiness and exhaustion return in its place, “is that we got down here, and I, I…”

What could she say? How could she explain it, make it make sense in words? It was a sensation that could only exist as a sensation, as something beyond description, as a shape onto itself that would not fit into only one voice.

How could Aaravi describe the way everything flowed into her, became her, the way her awareness, her selfhood, pressed outwards instead of in?

“I get down here and suddenly I’m growing several new HEADS and it’s in… No, out… I’m not ME anymore! I’m there, and here, and… and…”

“And you know what is happening around you? Even though you do not see it?”

Aaravi made a low noise at the back of her throat. It ached even without the saltwater burn, ground the growl into dirt and rust, grown hoarse and miserable with disuse. Aaravi didn’t like to use it. She didn’t want to use it. She didn’t want to sound that way, didn’t want to make those sounds, they weren’t normal, couldn’t be normal.

Miranda had finally opened her eyes, turned back to look at Aaravi. This time, she couldn’t read Miranda. Not in an intentional way, or, at least Aaravi didn’t think so. It was just moreso like the frustration had left Miranda’s face, like Aaravi had said something interesting. In turn, it made Aaravi scrunch up her own eyes, bare her teeth open to the second canines, to the tips of her mandibles, made her stomach turn sickly.

“You didn’t warn me about… any of THAT.”

Anger was good. Anger was easy. Anger felt easier than crying, easier to acknowledge than the drop that was already here, the exhaustion that sunk down into her bones, made her feel long soaked through and waterlogged. Anger made her feel a little less pathetic about floating here in a miserable little ball, hoping she wasn’t tilting sideways and slowly turning upside down.

“Well, I did not…” Miranda paused, glancing back to the ribbons and fabric in her hand, pulling out another few notches. “That is… Interesting, I think. I didn’t realize you would…”

“Didn’t realize what?”

“I did not realize that you would experience it like that! It was… Your tokens. When the charm was put upon them, it was to translate the concepts and intents from the words, correct? To help bridge the gap. Not necessarily what any given word nor sentence might have truly meant nor even said, but enough to understand what was intended from it, meaning less in the literal sense but moreso in the rhetorical, yes?”

Aaravi blinked dumbly at Miranda. Her lips relaxed, her grimace falling back into a frown.

“Yes…? But what does that have to do with anything?”

“I thought… Well, I just thought you would experience it like how you would normally? As in… I know that landfolk tend to stumble when a lot of sounds are presented at once, so I thought it would be like that! That it might appear… I do not know. Like nonsense, maybe?”

“Like nonsense?” Aaravi kicked her leg out, finally trying to right herself, having drifted far enough back that she was losing sight on Miranda. She over-corrected, and the motion jolted her forward again, so she had to grab at the wall, at the shallower loops of fabric, while Miranda made a low whine. “Of course I don’t hear every damn conversation that happens around me, are you nuts??”

“No!” Miranda protested, then caught herself when she almost certainly noticed the way it made her face screw up pathetically. “It’s not… We do! Maybe that is the problem? I… I thought I had worked out all the specifics on how the charm would affect a non-merfolk, but… Magic is tricky, Ravi! You know this!”

“You just go around hearing that all the time and you didn’t once tell me?”

Now Aaravi jabbed her finger forward, hard, into Miranda’s upper arm. Aaravi knew it wouldn’t hurt Miranda. She felt those osteoderms herself, knew how thick they were, knew Miranda’s reduced sense of touch. If they were designed for claws and teeth then a fingertip wasn’t going to do much, but, again, Miranda made her whine, fins flicking backwards for a moment.

“No!! Aaravi, just- Why would I? I did not think it was relevant, and it did not come up, and there are not even enough merfolk inland for it to be a factor! It is just me and Bellanda, and Bellanda is only there part of the time! And me and her do not sing like that, because it is really not practical for us to do so, and…”

“But you COULD have! How hard would it have been for you to explain how merfolk talk before I volunteered to go out to sea with you, so that I don’t get… Get JUMPED or something!”

“They are not going to jump you, Aaravi!”

“AND! And, and oh god, they were listening to me, weren’t they? Could they… They could hear me in turn. Did you know they would be able to hear me in turn?”

“Aaravi.”

Miranda was back to looking frustrated. This time, it was more dramatic than what came before, a huff and a roll of her head and an opening of her mouth in a large, showy yawn, like Aaravi just kept missing the obvious and Miranda kept trying to show it to her.

“Aaravi, them being able to hear you is exactly what I told you was the purpose of the charm when I gave it to you! So you could talk to them! I just did not… I did not expect it to be that… Like that. I thought you might just cancel it out, or not parse it, or… I do not know. And you have to be careful what you say here regardless! I know this room is soundproofed, but not all of them shall be going forward! You have to presume people are listening, because they are going to be!”

“Right, right,” her voice was so cruel against the roof of Aaravi’s mouth, sharp as her mandibles as they clicked. She really didn’t want to be. She didn’t want it to come out this way, didn’t want it in the same way no other anger management case wanted it to rear its ugly head, despite the ball of wire wrapped around her heart, despite how good it felt, despite the sweetness of the aftertaste against her tongue. “Because the stupid fucking Merkingdom can’t just leave us damn well alone for a minute.”

“Aaravi.”

Miranda was trying to pacify Aaravi with that, trying to pull her back, trying to get her to relax again.

Of course, Aaravi responded in kind.

“Miranda.”

Which was, but obviously, exactly when the conversation turned, and something flickered in Miranda’s eyes to dull their flames, the burn, the intensity of Miranda’s gaze alone.

“I am… I’m sorry. I… We shouldn’t have done this, should we?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“We are going into the Merkingdom. Of course they are going to be paying us mind, because I am what they want, what we- I merely… Aaravi, this is going to hurt. I… It is going to hurt, and there is very little I can do about it.”

“Miranda, Miri, no, no, I know that—” Aaravi protested. It felt childish, stupid, walking back everything that she had just said already, wheeling back on herself to prove that everything that had just come out of her mouth was about as sturdy as a wet paper towel. She shook her head once, twice, trying to preserve some sense of her own ego, flicking her ears even though the water wouldn’t let them swish as nicely as they usually did, trying to hold onto the furniture made into the wall so that it didn’t let her drift away. “I know, I know it was going to be like this—”

Miranda paused in her winding, propping her back legs and her tail against the too-smooth wall, looking down at her hands. She didn’t cry. She didn’t even frown, which was so much worse, because Aaravi just watched her as Miranda went small and silent. All the bombastic appeal of her snuffed out in a moment, all her confidence and all her propriety, her crown just another trinket sitting on top of her head, just a more expensive party favor. Miranda, larger than her flesh would ever permit, went quiet, and Aaravi hated every second of it, staring back at Miranda as just someone else, some other person sitting there, not looking at her, not understanding everything that had been mounted on her.

Stupid, stupid, stupid—

“It is going to be bad. I… I cannot talk about it, I don’t… But we are going to have to talk about it, aren’t we? Because you are going to see it. Aaravi, the… Every year this happens, and it is all the same, and I thought…”

Her head turned for a moment, glancing away.

Only now did Aaravi begin to take in any aspects of the room around them, having missed the other side of the room, the curving wall of the ship looking out into the hangar as it swung open and spat them out into the waiting maw of the open ocean. Aaravi hadn’t even noticed they had started moving. She certainly hadn’t noticed the translucence of the wall, not a window but the whole of it something that she could see out of. The only way she could tell it apart from the rest of the water around them was that it was faintly milky white and strung through with spiderwebbed veins that throbbed along the walls sectioning off this room from the rest of the ship, from the adjacent rooms surely there as well.

“Maybe we both need sleep. We will need as much as we can get between everything else.”

“Miri,” Aaravi said again, trying to get Miranda to look back at her, unable to bear looking at even the side of her face again, unable to look with Miranda out at the swallowing blueness beyond. And then, trying to be less pathetic, “Come on, you’re right, we can’t just spend this entire time bickering with each other.”

“Yes, but… But that is not just it, is it? Aaravi, this is not going to be… This is not going to be you coming back to the Palace and meeting Daddy and my sisters and everything being fine and maybe arguing with them over dinner. This is not going to be like what everyone inland talks about when they talk about going home, or what they imagine when they say they would like to meet the rest of the Cees’rril’ta.

This is not going to be very fun. It is going to be very bad, actually, and it is what I’ve been afraid of all year, and I can feel it when it begins to come around again, and… It is going to hurt. I don’t… I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to do this. But we have to, do we not? I have to. I always have to, and I know this, and even though I do not like it I know the consequences of not listening.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that, princess,” Aaravi tried to capture her bearings again, but Miranda slipped back in after her, before she could finish her thought, before she could even come up with a proper thought on how to respond to that.

“It’s going to get worse. What happened, the… the being overwhelmed by the overlapping conversation, of everything happening all at once… It is not going to get better. It is probably going to get worse. That was just the crew of a ferry ship, and we are going to our capital city, and that was not even anyone trying to hurt you. That’s… That’s clear, right?”

“Yes, it’s clear—”

“—And if that is bad, if that hurt you in itself… I think we need to prepare for the worst. We won’t have as many private spaces to retreat to, won’t be able to hide or obscure it… We are going to be in public for most of this, Yg’lloze’aa is going to be paying attention to us every step of the way and expecting a very specific presentation from us, and if it does not get that… It is going to be bad. But it could be so much worse if I’m not… Not what they want. I’m sorry. I can’t… I cannot change that. This is not that kind of role for me to play. I am sorry for how much danger you are going to be in and how little anyone will be able to do about that.”

“Okay,” Aaravi stated, and she paused for a moment. She crossed one arm over her chest, not really able to fully commit to the gesture due to how the other was still holding on, and she had already tried propping her knee and her foot against the wall to steady herself, even if they both kept slipping and she wasn’t having much use.

There came a pause, as Aaravi waited to see if Miranda would let her talk again and, praise-fucking-be, Miranda would. “That’s a lot. That’s a lot that you just said right there. But I’m not stupid, Miri. I don’t… I don’t know what your family is doing to you, but I know all… all THAT. I know this is going to be bad. I know they’re going to hate me and I know they’re going to do… you know, to me, if I fuck up and… Shit, fuck, sorry, I guess. Sorry for…”

“I get it.” Miranda spoke softly. She exhaled, this time her breath coming out backwards, behind the knot of her jaw, so that Aaravi saw her gills flare and push the water out, bright red frills inside each of the three slits flowing gently in the current, soft and dark. Both of her hands pressed against the wall, her hands curling inwards so that her claws hooked the fabric, the rope, kept her steady as she leaned her head forward, and pressed her snout so gently to Aaravi’s chest.

Underwater, Miranda’s scales felt slick, covered in a thin layer of something thick and clinging to her body. Aaravi lifted up her arm and wrapped it around the back of Miranda’s neck, and it felt odd between her fingertips and Miranda’s bone-studded skin, like everything else about Miranda that Aaravi had slowly gotten used to.

“It’s okay,” Miri said, her voice alive in the water like a shared heartbeat. “We can get through this. We have to get through this. I’m sorry.”

Aaravi snorted, even if the saltwater stung in her nose. “Yeah, well,” she tried, rubbing her thumb over Miranda’s spine, “we can’t just both apologize to each other. If we’re both fuckups then we’re screwed.”

The first time Aaravi slept in that bed, which was not at all like a bed as Aaravi knew them, it was odd, disconcerting. Miranda had wrapped the two of them up together with minimal gestures of her body, flicking her tail and spinning herself around in place, hugging Aaravi to her chest to tie the two of them together, until they both were fastened together to the wall with no hope of drifting away.

It was a strangely open, revealing feeling, something that Aaravi didn’t know what to make of. Some part of her kept expecting blankets, kept wanting something between her and the rest of the room. There were no covers, nothing to cover up with, as the strips of fabric didn’t really hide her away. They were instruments of security, not of obscurity. At most there were only portions of the skin that was hidden, a stripe over Aaravi’s thigh, multiple wrapped over her back, but so much of her was just left out in the open still that she didn’t know how to parse it.

Miranda being next to her, curled up and around her and holding her tight, that Aaravi could understand. She could almost understand the way that Miranda drifted off again so easily once they were wrapped up, easier than she had ever managed to fall asleep in her normal bed that Aaravi had ever seen, but it was still something that she strained at. It wasn’t tight enough to make Aaravi’s limbs start falling asleep, and the water was oddly kind in the way it handled her body, not feeling the same unsteady urge to shift every five minutes to stop her hips and spine from aching.

But the temperature was all the same, remained the same, that it never got any warmer tucked up against Miranda and tightened against the wall than it was within the room around them.

That first time, Aaravi didn’t sleep much again. She spent most of that time staring out the translucent walls, looking around the room now that she could devote her attention to it, finding very little of interest either way. She found where her luggage was being secured, towards the bottom of the room, but even that kind of reeled in Aaravi’s mind. It wasn’t square or boxy like how every other room she had ever been in was, wasn’t even circular like some nicer sunrooms. The room was like a portion on the side of a slice of cake, a chunk of an exterior curve that had been hollowed out and partitioned off from the rest, the floor not a floor and most of the wallspace dedicated to whorls of carved animal-shapes and handlebars tracing over and over like ladders. Outside, the ocean was nothing but a vast expanse of blueness, without detail nor feature, depth conveyed only by a gentle slope of darkness down towards the bottom of her vision.

When Aaravi had managed to nap, that first time, she did it hardly thirty minutes before Miranda woke up again, and it was an uneasy nap, nothing at all like the deep restfulness of that morning beforehand.

The following two days were more of such events. Everything took on a strange, unfamiliar quality to Aaravi, even in actions as mundane as falling asleep.

There came the thin veil pasted over her vision that she was already familiar with, the usual one when she visited someplace else, someplace that was not her home, and her existence bent around the shape of all this newness that she couldn’t yet place herself into, couldn’t make herself fit in. Time had not broken in this place, made it familiar to her, would not make it someplace that faded into the easy mundanity of even the others who lived here already, and it rubbed against the sides of her mind in all the wrong ways and the sole would not keep her steady without biting back.

But even the recognizable discomfort of travel became something new and appalling given how much was really different. Everything that should have been steady, should have been universal, abruptly was absent and would not return. Aaravi couldn’t even stare up at the sky to find the same moon and sun she had always known, even as a child, not only for the darkness that soon swallowed her and the rest of the boat whole, but because she quickly began to forget that which was up and that which was down.

Merfolk didn’t seem to recognize gravity for what it was. The ship, being cylindrical, curved around upon itself, but orientation curved with it, and the merfolk Aaravi was traveling with found no issue with flipping themselves over to deal with the furniture that was now on the wrong side, nor did they seem to question when they discovered themselves facing the wrong way as everyone else in the same room.

It didn’t help that things didn’t fall in the same way as they should have, above-water. They would still meander downwards, Aaravi was sure, but they could be caught in currents and flip upwards or to the side abruptly and without warning, and even when they did proceed downwards, it was done so leisurely and patiently that Aaravi wanted to scream at them to get it over with already.

It was odd. Odd in the way that Aaravi couldn’t explain, odd in a way that she had never really experienced before. In truth, it was not at all like anything she could have experienced before, because it demanded a total restructuring of everything she thought she knew already.

There was a list of all the accepted facts of life, the sure and certain knowledge of how the world worked, that Aaravi hadn’t really known that she had known, but was there all the same, in her and in everyone else. It told her only that which was obvious, but was so obvious and so clear, that the fact that there might’ve ever been a need to consciously be aware of them, let alone that she might need to adjust them for exceptions, just never occurred to her. Most people went through their entire lives without questioning these assumptions, these base facts for how to move through the world, and died without even a passing glance back at the foundations upon which everything else was laid. Aaravi might’ve been one of them if she hadn’t come here, hadn’t lived aboard a ship which soared under the waves, powered on jets and edging slowly deeper and deeper, hadn’t ever considered how far down beneath the surface she was going to be.

It was a first, Aaravi thought with some bemusement. No other human, no other monster, had gone this deep. Humans would’ve long drowned, or otherwise have been broken by the waves of the open sea. Something stronger yet might’ve been able to take that initial plunge, but they would’ve been tied to the surface all the same. The undead needed no breath, but the water would make them pay their toll all the same, and the pressure would have taken away what else remained. Ghosts might not have had anything physical to lose, but what the water didn’t take, the inhabitants of the water would.

For all their talk of night and of darkness, none of them knew darkness like the way the ocean continued to fall away, deeper and deeper, Aaravi having never once seen the bottom since they left the castle. Vampires might wane poetic about the night, but they did still have a night.

Here, there was no sun. No moon and no stars. The world faded away into uninterrupted, unchallenged darkness, and the ocean spoke of a place that had not been touched by sunlight in thousands of years, where something might lay forgotten and unchanged while the world of light and of warmth burned itself out. Demons might speak of silence and of eternity, but the ocean did not have to speak upon such topics, because it simply was.

Everything made Aaravi feel smaller and smaller, even without having to compare herself against her hosts or the great and eternal deep that waited outside of the membranous walls of the ship.

An afterthought. A speck. One of many, a long line stretching back to the beginning of time itself, witnessed and cradled by the arms of the ocean, mothered until they could stand on their own in the muddy tidal flats where she finally let them teeter away.

Aaravi thought of fate, and what she was destined to be.

Aaravi thought of Miranda, and what waited for them both at the bottom of the sea.

Aaravi deigned to stop thinking about these things.

Food was another aspect of this. Aaravi wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, when Miranda brought her down to the lowermost section of the ship and slipped through into the lower viewing room, but she didn’t think what was served to her was it regardless.

The lower viewing room also had that strange transparent window, through which yawned the great eternity that Aaravi was increasingly more frightened of falling into, but this wasn’t on the side of the ship. It was on the underside of the cylinder, so that it might’ve been the floor on any other ship, one governed by landfolk sensibilities. It still was the ceiling, but it was the ceiling because Miranda flipped around the wrong way once they had come through a much more prominent sphincter-door, and Aaravi just had to hold on as the memory of dizziness buzzed angrily, encased away beyond the borders of her senses, the deep blue darkness of the open sea beneath her head.

Upon the ceiling, which was the floor, there were more of those handholds — Aaravi had been seeing them nonstop now that she was inside the Merkingdom, she supposed, and they always threw her through a loop. They weren’t quite like ladders, even though they sat in rungs, because they didn’t go anywhere, and they didn’t sit anywhere that merfolk weren’t already capable of swimming up to.

Instead, Aaravi saw repeatedly, that merfolk would swim over to them and hold onto them with their hands, with their large, curving talons, and with their feet, and they would stay there. Maybe it took less energy than floating in place, because Aaravi did see that as well, but when merfolk stopped and waited in the middle of the water column, they would have to adjust their position every so often, not fully flicking their tail, but shifting it, moving forwards or back as they were slowly rocked by the current. Maybe they were like a seat? Aaravi could only guess so, since merfolk switched between holding on and floating in place easily, without much distinction for either.

But, even so, in the lower viewing chamber, there were platforms that descended down from the ceiling, beneath (which was also above) the handles, coming in clumps of three or four subsequent flat sections, each beneath the other as though they had been folded. Each clump was attached by one central stalk that stretched upwards, to the ceiling, mostly in the middle of the uppermost platform but sometimes to the side to varying degrees. This too, she had seen a few merfolk come by and settle on, although they had no handles on them, except maybe on the very edge, where they tipped up or down into a very slight bowl shape.

The merfolk who settled there usually just laid down. The current would still push them and they would sway, sometimes even gently shifting in place, but they never seemed to go very far. This too, seemed like another type of seat, but one Aaravi was having trouble deciphering. Maybe it was like laying down, really? When they laid there, it was a full laying posture, tucking their arms and legs to their sides, resting against each other, dangling heads or tails over the sides of the platform so that they could be seen from beneath. But they did it casually, simply, and getting up didn’t seem any harder or worse than pushing off from the handholds…

Maybe Aaravi was looking at this all wrong. Maybe she was wrong in comparing one to sitting and the other to standing, because neither were really those actions, were they? The water was different to the air, held her and held Miranda differently, buoyed their bodies upwards and did not press down against them. It seemed quicker to hold onto something that could keep them steady, without drifting away, but still let them push off and flow back into the usual undulations of swimming without much production. Kicking off from the platforms was more straining, but they didn’t even have to hold onto anything. Maybe none of this was supposed to be one-to-one with a chair or a couch or a bed, but they were something else, something new, like the rest of the merfolk and where they lived.

The first time Miranda and Aaravi had entered through, in pursuit of the late breakfast Miranda had promised them, a breakfast which none of the other merfolk seemed concerned about, a significant chunk of the travel staff was waiting around in there, lounging on the platforms, chattering amongst themselves.

The conversation spiked through Aaravi’s thoughts, drilled them down into a backsplash against her own body, but something between the smaller number of them and getting over the initial shock didn’t make it quite as bad as before. Aaravi’s jaw clenched and her mandibles dug angrily into her gums, but she wasn’t going to speak on that, and she ate her fish as expected.

This was a theme that carried through the rest of the trip, at least in regards to the staff. There was always some small collection of them in here, a rotating cast that seemed to switch between those on duty and those off, with those off outnumbering those on.

It was a strange thing, just because at first Aaravi felt like something had to be off or odd about it. It didn’t seem right, compared to what else she knew of the Merkingdom, that the staff would just be found lounging around, waiting in the same presence as the Crown Princess they served. Did they have some break room, some staff area? It seemed like an oversight, at the time, and where no other detail was spared for the care of royalty.

And then Aaravi caught herself and realized, wait, no. They were on this boat as much as her, weren’t they? Where were they supposed to go, then, when they weren’t on duty? It was stupid to have a private section just to themselves, and on a moving object no less, where that space was precious and needed for cargo, and then Aaravi flushed hot and shameful over her own realization, her own thoughts that the staff shouldn’t have been a presence too.

That they should have been tucked away, out of sight, away from where they might bother the royalty they were transporting. That they were a strain against the rest of the ship, a visual marring where there should have been empty space.

Maybe Miranda was rubbing off on her.

Aaravi told herself that and felt a little better even being able to blame her wife for such a thing. Which did immediately boomerang back around into feeling bad about herself even moreso, one of Aaravi’s great talents, since who the hell was she to think something like that? And then Miranda herself hadn’t even done anything like that, this was her ship, the Merkingdom’s ferry ship, and she kept digging herself further and further into a spiral the more she thought about it.

And it was all thought, because she hadn’t even spoken or asked Miranda about the first thing, and it was much too late to explain now and probably be laughed at for her obvious, blatant mistakes too.

This was another one of Aaravi’s great talents, too. Even on a place like this, in a place like this, she could still find it in herself to spiral.

Though, that brought her back to the thing, as in, the food.

Aaravi knew that merfolk were carnivorous. She had guessed as much the first time she saw Miranda’s teeth, which really wasn’t very long into their first real talk to each other, because WOW did Miranda like to show off her teeth back then. Now Aaravi knew and could realize that that was Miranda being snarky, or pressing down onto the first soft spot she found on Aaravi to see what she would do in response, how she would kick and bite. But back then it had made a cold sweat break out against her skin, and a lot of other complicated feelings that Aaravi felt like she was only just getting used to knowing by name.

But Aaravi hadn’t really guessed how much meat she was about to be served, or the schedules that merfolk kept about their meals, because her first meal was passed to her in a small pouch made up of a fishnet, sat in a bowl with a thick lip on the bottom, where merfolk hands could more readily hold onto it. Aaravi nearly dropped it at first, not sure how to hold onto the thing or what to make sense of it, and only just figured out that she had to open the top of the bag before she was about to give up and ask Miranda how to eat it.

Her first meal there was some white, flaky fish meat cut into long strips, that had been soaked through in some kind of sauce? Aaravi didn’t know what, but it stuck to the meat, dramatically thicker and heavier than the saltwater around them, and had a sharp, tangy taste to it, something in the middle of sweet and spicy. It was good, actually, especially after Aaravi figured out she was supposed to spear it through the middle with a harpoon-looking stick of metal she had been given.

The issue, however, was that Aaravi then had to ask afterwards for subsequent meals, and all of those were meat as well. They were good, certainly, but although Miranda was happy to ask and thought nothing of it, the other merfolk did look at Aaravi oddly, especially by the time they were on the second day, and she had only just managed to have the rough equivalent of her usual meals. The servants would make tiny, confused comments about her still being hungry or that she needed more food already, and for that, she was glad Miranda was perfectly happy to deal with it for her.

It all made her feel terribly self-conscious, in a sick sort of way that she didn’t think the other merfolk even realized. At least Miranda looked at her with some measure of understanding, and said that it was just because they weren’t eating at all these two days, that it was strange for them to see Aaravi need more, being warmblooded and burning her calories away constantly. And if Aaravi still didn’t feel like that made up for the feeling, then Miranda would touch her head to her shoulder or chest, and silently offer her comfort.

She really should have been keeping track of what meals that she was going to have through the rest of the trip, though, at least so that she could ask Miranda about them afterwards. Wasn’t that what protagonists, heroes, were supposed to do? Keep a diary of all the recipes she had found, recorded so that she could utilize them later, remembering key ingredients that might’ve been important, or even better, used in other meals? That seemed like the kind of thing she should’ve been doing.

It bothered Aaravi that she couldn’t write about things here, that she didn’t know if her journal would be soaked through the instant she tried to remove it from her luggage, and that she didn’t know what to ask Miranda for to be able to write on. Something like the tacky, plasticky sort of paper Bellanda had used before seemed like it would be appropriate, and Miranda would know, but still, Aaravi just didn’t ask.

Bellanda was absent for long spans of time as well, the other princess’s presence, or lack thereof, something of note. Not like it bothered Aaravi all that much. She assumed at first that Bellanda had to go settle into her room as well, or talk to the crew, and she wouldn’t have joined her and Miranda in trying to catch up on that morning’s rest in Miranda’s bedroom. They were sisters, and not conjoined ones, so some distance was expected.

It only really began to feel odd after they had breakfast and Bellanda didn’t join them, and Miranda began showing Aaravi around the ship, for lack of much else better to do, that she noticed Bellanda hadn’t joined them.

Which was fine. Aaravi wasn’t too worried about Bellanda, she could take care of herself, she was Chief Warlord and all. Even on a single ship, in a contained environment, surely Bellanda had just found somewhere else to be, someplace else to go, something else to do.

Miranda took Aaravi around the central tunnel of the ship. It was made of the same see-through material as the outside, thick and solid and distressingly membranous, the veins encased within its walls throbbing faintly as Aaravi watched. She could see through to the other side from one, watch merfolk on the other edge of the ship go about their business and swim to and fro, because there wasn’t really anything in the tube, or, nothing of note, at the least.

Water, Aaravi would only realize much later. Water was flowing through it and at a great force. The thought perplexed her, mulling it over, thinking about the great stream of — bubbles, now, she realized — that rushed through the very middle of the vortex, conjuring images of mythic lances that called down lightning strikes.

It was a vacuum, then. Some kind of vacuum, or something to channel the water, force it through at such a speed that the boat could be propelled forwards. The mechanics of how this worked was beyond Aaravi, especially because she didn’t know how merfolk were making the rest of the boat work, since certainly electricity would’ve disagreed with them. But it would’ve disagreed with Aaravi too, above water, so maybe they had found something or discovered some alternative method, something Aaravi was just too stupid to figure out yet.

It had explained why the boat had that dimple in the front and hole in the back, and why they connected together into a tube piercing through the entire ship like they were inside a bagel (a very oddly shaped bagel), but then Aaravi thought about her phone and the promised replacement.

Later, when they would retire to Miranda’s room again, Aaravi would peek over the phone she had been offered, the phone that was supposed to be from one of Miranda’s standbys, from what Aaravi understood of the situation. It seemed fine. Sure, the external buttons and hardware looked the same as Miranda’s, but that was to be expected, and it would just mean a difference in power button location. When she turned it on, it looked just the same as she had left it. Not even a difference in UI or the system installed, all her pictures and apps and everything were there. It might’ve been a duplicate, the real thing back at the schooltime castle, but it was close enough that Aaravi could imagine it being just the same.

The only difference was how she was supposed to charge it. There were two holes on the bottom, places where she was supposed to plug them in, but with some lid over them, maybe with some kind of shutter system that opened automatically? No amount of prodding could get the dark mass inside to move, to reveal more typical electrical components.

At least she didn’t think she would have to charge it soon. That was one major upgrade she’d be thanking Miranda for, that when she checked the specs and what was available, it seemed much better than the old model she had gotten years ago and mostly was just hoping to use until it finally bit the dust for good.

She checked what Val had said. Nothing new since the last message Aaravi had sent, which felt ominous in its own right, telling. Aaravi remembered again what Miranda had said, underlined by the conversation before, given weight by the sheer fact of where she was. Aaravi decided not to follow it up with anything, and slipped her phone into her pocket.

Maybe she could take some pictures, here or there? That could be useful. If the Merkingdom was allowing her to come here, then surely pictures wouldn’t be all that much different in their eyes? If push came to shove, then maybe she could even use Miranda’s title, try and insist that this was something Miranda was entitled to, if not Aaravi herself.

It felt important, suddenly, to take pictures of the place. Aaravi might be here as the only human for miles, the only person ever to have seen these things without also being a merfolk, the only one who could get the word out. Just because she was alone, didn’t mean she had to be. These things had value, didn’t they? Val was always paying people for pictures, for someone to go around digging up dirt that had been hidden for far too long. Lots of people did, journalist types and such.

She didn’t really know what she was doing. She was unsure of who she was getting back at, why it felt so devious and dire and heart-stoppingly important to her that she have some way to make sure what she was seeing was real, was something other people could see. But she needed to, she knew that much, and the weight of her phone grew in the back of Aaravi’s mind, so as to make herself not forget it.

She was sure Miranda wouldn’t mind. Miranda knew Aaravi. She knew her intentions were good. Miranda would understand.

More time passed on the ship. That was one thing they had in spades, and the long stretches of nothing outside the windows meant that Aaravi felt time hang there, collecting suspended within the ship, all without a drop, a sudden stop, without something to do with herself. She knew, rationally, that it would be two days that they were travelling, but she just couldn’t tell.

The only things that changed were: which servants were out and about, either working to keep the ship running and the two princesses on it happy or resting in the viewing chambers, seemingly enjoying their time off; more meals that came for Aaravi, mostly more of the white, flaky fish meat soaked through with different sauces or brines or whatever they were, but a few of different chunks of meat served inside of sea snail shells; and the ever-darkening state of the world, that plunged them all into darkness and dyed Miranda’s scales a deep and sudden black that frightened Aaravi, for the difference from how she had known Miranda, when she walked along the surface.

The princesses, and Aaravi by extension, were left to fend for themselves when it came to keeping themselves entertained.

This varied, apparently. Miranda didn’t seem too pleased by the entire affair, and stated as much to Bellanda when the older of the two sisters decided to visit the ul’kiha’s room, catching up on what the two were getting up to.

“It happened again,” Miranda enunciated, opting for English, seeming for the dual purposes of including Aaravi and excluding the other merfolk employed on the ship. “I would think Laudanda would at least offer us something, at this time of the year at the least, wouldn’t you? Considering?”

“I’m not too surprised,” Bellanda stated, pressing her head against her sister’s neck, “stupidly petty is how she’s always done things. If we didn’t request it personally, then, well, she sees no complaints that can be made.”

Miranda had huffed, low and sad, and added, “But still, do you not think that it is a little inappropriate? I mean, with everything else going on… Do you think she’s doing it for a reason?”

“I think she’s doing it because everyone’s too busy to care about our in-transit entertainment and she knows she can get away with it.”

Aaravi had spotted Bellanda by then, and seen how the older merprincess was keeping herself amused.

Miranda seemed to know better than Aaravi where Bellanda was, because she had to pass by the pilots’ cabin for something or another, and there was Bellanda, sitting in there, talking to two of the pilots.

All while the other two pilots were locked into their seats, their heads encased in thickened tumors of scar tissue, looking for all the world like wads of bubblegum that had been allowed to harden for several years before being finally scraped away.

Which wouldn’t have been fine in any situation, but, somehow, the fact that they were doing it in a room bedecked in the pearlescent, delicate sheen of organ tissue made it immediately so much worse, so much more impossible to think about, that Aaravi thought back to the idea of them doing this in a nice and normal room with tiles and boring walls like it was reassuring.

It bunched around the edges, wrinkled inwards on itself where it had piled up out of the way, the only place in the ship without a way to look outwards, luminescent tubercle-organs strung like a vineyard that had turned to farming cancer. Under the darkness, under the dull blue light that was never fully enough for her eyes to quite adjust to, they shone with a faint transparency, membranes pulled over themselves in multiple layers, aquariums for the flesh and what swam there and filled with the thin fluid that swelled underneath a blister.

It would have been easier, an irrational part of Aaravi thought, if it was that alone, at least. If they were only moving and shifting with the faint current that ran through the ship and only that, that if they weren’t possessed of a heartbeat of their own, a faint shifting and pressing inwards on themselves like the hidden hands of all the slick organs that pooled inside Aaravi’s own body, that she wasn’t abruptly and too keenly aware of.

It would have been easier if there weren’t strands of intestine stretched across the room, tubes strung up with ligament, taut around the tops and bunched all along the bottom in bulbous and round garlands concealed in dull grey flesh, and if the tether between the two of them wasn’t shimmering, mucous connective tissue. It would have been easier if there weren’t longer strings, branching and forked like tree limbs and a gentle off-white, that led to and fro, if that wasn’t what connected to the tumorous masses that encased over the heads of the pilots, if this wasn’t happening, if Aaravi wasn’t here.

So many things that could’ve made this easier. So many things that wouldn’t have made Aaravi’s brain screech and flail, so many things that worried her more and more that her usual failsafe, that innate ability to know when an incursion into reality was being made, just wasn’t ringing like it should’ve been, like it OBVIOUSLY should’ve been. This wasn’t natural, this wasn’t normal, this wasn’t—

Miranda had startled a little at Aaravi’s reaction, Aaravi could feel it beneath her touch, where her body lay flat against Miranda’s own. Bellanda looked up, blinking her single eye, gone as dark and deep as Miranda’s scales under the absence of red light, and the two pilots she had been talking to flicked their fins.

The other two pilots, sitting there on thrones made of cartilaginous tissue, didn’t budge. They were still breathing, they had to still be breathing, right? But why weren’t they panicking, why weren’t they fighting, it had to hurt, it had to be wrong—

“[Slz’Exkii? Aaravi?]” Bellanda had asked, her hands wrapped around honeycombed bone right behind the sphincter-door, “[is everything alright?]”

The only way Aaravi knew that Bellanda had switched languages was because something in the translating charm told her so, as she knew so little of merfolk languages that she couldn’t have guessed whether the words that actually reached her ears were different or not.

What was different was the way none of them were reacting to the mass grown where there should’ve been a pilots’ cockpit, staring at Aaravi like she was doing something odd and unusual, staring at her like she was the weird one for not being alright with whatever lay inside of there, whatever was being done to the pilots there.

Later, Aaravi would see those same pilots, those who had just previously had their faces encrusted over with scar tissue, laying around in the upper viewing chamber, talking excitedly about something they were going to do once they got to the capital.

More and more, Aaravi wished that at the time she could’ve taken a picture of it, so that she wouldn’t be so convinced that the entire thing was just a bad dream, a bad bit of the bends that had managed to touch her mind, some rapture of the deep that clouded her judgement.

Unfortunately, she had the terrible sense that what she had seen was real, a thought that congealed terribly against her own lack of belief in it.

The rest of the time proceeded as before, with Miranda allowing Aaravi to pause and take breaks from riding her wife (phrasing…) or to help her to wherever in the ship she wanted to go.

Unsurprisingly, Aaravi didn’t really want to go anywhere, least of all because it still felt like she barely knew the layout of the place, and what was here didn’t interest her any more than Miranda herself. She avoided returning to the pilots’ cabin, and there was the crew quarters and the storage bay in of itself… But she didn’t feel like it would be appropriate to ask for either of those, not without a reason, anyways.

Her impression was already the same as Miranda’s. The sheer overwhelming difference was what occupied her attention, what kept Aaravi focused and out of her element, exposed to constant newness, but, at the same time, it was a monotonous sort of newness. It was the newness of traveling to a destination, all apprehension and no payoff, sitting around and stretching her legs and hoping the time passed quicker.

Miranda mostly brought Aaravi around the ship then, and that was when Miranda turned to seemingly the only source of entertainment she was entitled to: talking to her servants.

Aaravi couldn’t shake off the strange whiplash of it all. She was so used to the way Miranda treated her serfs: disposable, barely there, an afterthought from which she could shuffle around like furniture or throw away like the same, possessing the same emotions that someone else might be for a chair that also could move around. It was something that had gotten better, sure, but…

It wasn’t at all like this with the servants. The first thing Aaravi noted was the most obvious. All of them, every single one, was a merfolk like Miranda. Hell, she hadn’t even seen anything that might’ve looked like how she typically associated with the serfs, no hint or indication from any of the merfolk staff that they were absent or even there at all, nothing that suggested they were even keeping them in the storage area with the luggage.

Secondly, they moved around Miranda in a much different manner.

The pilots were one thing, offering much less conversation to Miranda once she was separated from her sister, but even they offered her comments, spoke with her, moved around her with some authority, gave her her distance and surrendered at the slightest prodding, but they did not part around her as though terrified to breathe in the same space as her, as if bumping into her once would’ve been the equivalent of knocking a bomb off a shelf.

But the travel staff! The travel staff were another thing entirely, and Aaravi struggled to reconcile the two, the vast difference between Miranda’s servants and her serfs.

The first was the way they greeted Miranda. Not with a bow nor with a stern acknowledgement, barely allowing for any space that might’ve been taken as insult, but the same thing Miranda had done to Auk before: rubbing their faces together. Sure, it might not be something Aaravi saw with every servant, but the first time she saw it, it threw Aaravi for such a loop that she nearly jerked off of Miranda’s back, drawing a worried chirrup from the staff.

However, that was nothing compared to the largest difference, the one that Aaravi just couldn’t reconcile: how they spoke to Miranda.

Very few of the serfs spoke. The ones that did always spoke English, which hadn’t bothered Aaravi until she was on the ferry ship and none of the other merfolk present could speak English, always having their own conversations in their own languages. Miranda, too, would speak to the serfs in English, issuing commands with short phrases, quick gestures of her hands, or seeming telepathy for how instantly they understood her. With her fellow merfolk, servants or not, she would always pick one of their languages, the merfolk languages, and what Aaravi would hear would be more measured, paced, less of the rough instruction given to a misbehaving dog.

The servants spoke to Miranda in their own languages, but even stranger, they would speak to her with a quiet sort of reverence, an amicability and reserved friendliness that almost suggested that they were even happy to see her and did not have to force the feeling. Nothing in their eyes flickered of pain, a dull and unending Hell which had been lashed around their necks, nothing in their movements indicated the same strain towards total perfection, nor a disassociation from the fact of them being a living being capable of pain and needs.

Some even were downright excited to see Miranda, which was the first time Aaravi had ever experienced something like that from Miranda’s attendants, serfs or servants alike.

Of particular note was the light grey merfolk with rounded fins that, upon Miranda spotting her, made the merprincess trill in a way only Aaravi had made her give before.

They were in the upper viewing chamber then, a strange reversal of its opposite on the lower side of the ship — a place where Miranda often took Aaravi, mostly because it strained her neck less to look upwards instead of down, and when she sat against Miranda’s side she could stretch her legs out and feel like she was nearly sitting down in a normal chair, which hadn’t been the case for seeming eons. That, and because seeing the faintest hint of blue against the darkness rising from beneath made Aaravi feel a little better, a little less claustrophobic. That blue was growing ever smaller, ever fainter, and in that aspect it might’ve been worse for her, but anything was better than nothing when Aaravi wasn’t sure she would ever see the sun again.

Aaravi couldn’t have named what made the servant special. They looked like the rest, which was to say, a merfolk, their features standing out more to Aaravi than her first brush with Miranda and with her sister, but all made of the same mold that Aaravi didn’t possess the same innate familiarity towards.

Their face was thinner, their nose longer, tapering off more like a dolphin, their crest peaking up sharply in the back. They were grey, in the pale and nearly shiny sort of way that made them look at once a dull blue when they turned just so in the light, and a deep and dark grey when they turned away from the scant lights along the walls.

They didn’t have stripes, which was vaguely interesting. Or, rather they did, but they were stripes that quickly dripped off into neat spots, slightly darker than the rest of the silvery blue scales, and the stripes themselves couldn’t run for very long up their back without being broken up again.

Their fins and the faint patches of their skin were a much darker slate grey, which were also the most notable part of their body. For every other merfolk Aaravi had seen so far, regardless of the broadness and width of the organs, their fins always tapered out to a point at the end. Some were shorter and more gently curved than others, some, like Miranda’s, were longer and teardrop-shaped, but this was the first merfolk Aaravi had seen so far to have fins that suddenly stopped with a curve.

They were shorter, too, than any other fins. They looked like a bear’s ears, maybe, if Aaravi had to strain at something to compare them to. It was such an abrupt curve as well, forming a sharp angle with where they connected at the top, and a gentler curve down towards the bottom, with the peak of the curve occurring about halfway down. When they fanned them in response to Miranda’s trill, turning their head back towards the princess, the three pairs formed a much larger circle around their face, two semicircles like half-full moons.

They didn’t waste any time swimming over to the two either. They said something unimportant to the other three merfolk they were with, bobbing their head once, but flicked their tail all the same and was settling in with large grey eyes next to Aaravi in no time.

Aaravi, for her part, made a pitiful little noise and pulled her legs up closer to her body, a little too late.

It was still so disconcerting to see how fast merfolk could move underwater, closing distance without even really having to try, without giving it much effort at all. She was too used to what Miranda was like, the subtle ways she wore down, panting after only a few rounds of sparring, pulling Aaravi in close and spending days in bed because she couldn’t even force herself to stand up. It was so different once she was in the water, the way Aaravi took her place, unable to swim for even a fraction of the same time without needing to rest.

“[Slz’Exkii!]” they chirruped, lilting their voice high to bounce off the walls, off the interior of Aaravi’s skull, a twittering of distilled delight, “[It is so good to see you again — I had to make sure I would be able to accompany you back home, but you wouldn’t believe how difficult management has gotten lately! I see you brought a friend!]”

Miranda moved somewhere behind Aaravi’s back, which made everything all the worse as she had to abruptly swing her arm backwards, feeling her ass and seat move and lift beneath her with the momentum of the water, and in turn being pulled back against Miranda’s hips, laying more awkwardly on her side.

Miranda, traitor that she was, had shifted where she was laying so that she could lean her head all the way forward to mutually rub the side of her face against the servant’s, trilling and chirruping all the while. She had flicked her fins back at Aaravi with the feeling of her ul’kiha being pushed up against the side of her legs, but it was a little too late as Aaravi had to slowly adjust again, still feeling weird and weightless while knowing there was so much pressure around her ears that something terrible would happen if she removed her earrings down here.

It wasn’t enough, either, to stop Miranda from happily singing out, “[Drru’anygu!!]” followed quickly by, “[Aaravi, this is Aft-ahyr Drru’anygu! They are one of my favorite entourage members; Drru’anygu, you accompanied me on my first trip inland, did you not?]”

“[And most since,]” they added, still pushing their head up against Miranda’s. The motion made a collection of silver charms dangling down from a matching set of lip piercings clink against each other, creating a faintly musical series of notes. “[I came with you last year too, didn’t I? In and out. I think it’s been fifteen years since I joined the Royal Travel Staff Guild, ten with you, right?]”

“[Something like that! Oh, yes, and this is Aaravi Mishra! Or, Mishra Aaravi, Mishra is her inheritance name, the landfolk do it differently — I trust you have already heard that she is my ul’kiha? I mean, you of all people—]”

“[Of course I’ve heard!]”

The servant, Drru-anygu, then did something which Aaravi didn’t think possible, not now nor ever. They opened their mouth and nipped at the side of Miranda’s face.

Worse yet, Miranda laughed.

She did not lash out in punishment, did not clamp her own jaws down hard over the servant’s face until they screamed, did not send them away, dragged by guards.

Miranda, Crown Princess, merciless and frightening to anyone who earned her ire, the undoubted source of so many sudden disappearances of her own classmates, trilled and chittered and giggled like a child. She flicked her fins and she shut her eyes, and Aaravi could only stare, mouth dropping open, not feeling the awful heave of water entering and exiting her chest.

There were no other words in the world to describe it. Nothing else to make it make any sense, nothing to put Aaravi back under a degree of absolute reality. Aaravi was seeing the impossible and this, all of this, was what finally confirmed that lapse to her, finally pushed her beyond the edge of no return.

What the fuck.

What the fuck?

What the fuck???

“[It was all anyone could talk about for a while, when the news came out. The other Low Royals didn’t seem all that happy about it, but I think you expected that, didn’t you?]”

Miranda, still chirruping and pleasant and not at all easing back into the calm and confident demeanor that Aaravi had learned preluded Miranda’s cruelty, also seemed to respond to this well. Beyond all the odds, all the chances, she seemed to even be enjoying herself. “[Well, that is not unusual, is it? Most of them were not even alive the last time we had an ul’kiha scandal, and we all know how that ended.]”

“[At least we got The Dance Cumulonimbus out of it?]”

Miri laughed again, short and punctuating. “[Cheater! You have never even done that one!]”

Finally, Drru-anygu pulled their head back, rounded fins held high around their face, and Aaravi realized the position they had laid themselves down into. They paralleled Miranda, laying themselves out flat with their arms beneath them where they could grip onto the platform, so that their heads were next to each other and their bodies loosely followed. The problem was that the distance between them and the faint curve of each of their bodies was just enough to accommodate Aaravi, sandwiched in between the merfolk.

Which, sure, there were worse places to be, but Aaravi certainly didn’t feel like that right now, drawing closer to Miranda’s back. She hooked one arm over Miranda’s side, dug her fingers into a fold of her clothes on the far side, where Drru-anygu couldn’t see, and used that grip to pull herself even closer, like she was trying to squirm over Miranda’s spine.

“[It’s not my fault the chance only came after I had already decided to leave! It was just fate.]”

“[Sure, sure. You only say that because you were able to see it to celebrate your retirement!]”

“Retirement?” Aaravi couldn’t help it. She spoke before she thought it through, picking up on the strange way the charms translated what came through, and thinking again of all that she had expected of this interaction, all that she presumed that this would’ve entailed. Retirement seemed too nice. Too easy.

“[I suppose that’s a word for it,]” Drru-anygu confirmed, but what they meant or heard in turn wasn’t followed up on, instead elaborating on something else. “[Before I joined the Royal Travel Staff Guild, I was one of the Bah-aht sha ha’ut Jsaggai’tuul, but I was getting too old for such a scene anymore, and who doesn’t want to retire gracefully? I had a few connections who could put in some good words for me with the Cees'rril'ta, and Slz’Exkii was coming into her own then, so it all worked out, didn’t it?]”

“[Drru-anygu,]” Miri chirruped, curling her fins up in a particularly amused way, “[she’s a landfolk, she does not know what the Bah-aht sha ha’ut Jsaggai’tuul is.]”

That, of all times, was when Drru-anygu finally looked at Aaravi, blinking their eyes. Aaravi liked to imagine that was shock in them, because she wasn’t sure what it would be otherwise and didn’t want to be left speculating. “[Oh! Wait- really? Like… Really?]”

“Yes really,” Aaravi said, in absence of anything else beyond flattening her ears back.

“[Okay, so… Do you have… Actors? Do you do theatre up there? I don’t know what you’d be used to, as a landfolk!]”

“Excuse you,” Aaravi added.

“[Sorry, sorry!]” They lifted their head up all at once, revealing for a moment the pale sliver of skin and thin scales underneath their jaw and on their neck. As they breathed, their gills, plain and visible for all to see with their head lifted towards the surface which had long vanished, flared open, sultry red along the inside, so deep and dark that they were pitch black. “[The Bah-aht sha ha’ut Jsaggai’tuul are an Actor’s Guild, or, well, that is the basics of it? But there is a little more to it, too—]”

“[What Drru-anygu means,]” Miranda stepped in, “[is that the Bah-aht sha ha’ut Jsaggai are a specific Actor’s Guild with a mystery cult attached, yes? You get initiated into them if you are promising enough, and they share their knowledge among those within. Full initiates have their fins clipped, when they are accepted in.]”

“[And,]” Drru-anygu added, although less offended than Aaravi thought they might have been, “[we are not allowed to share the secrets with those outside the Bah-aht sha ha’ut Jsaggai’tuul either. That is why they call it a mystery cult, Slz’Exkii!]”

Somehow, Miranda, undeterred by having her own fucking servant speak like that to her, holy shit, laughed again and flicked her fins, and Aaravi tried desperately to ignore that how giggly Miranda was being was making her cheeks flush hot and red and itching. “[Cruelty! But I am the Crown Princess! Certainly no one would mind if you told me a few things here and there, and you are retired anyhow! Whomever would even know?]”

“[No, no, you aren’t swaying me! Don’t let any current members hear you say that either, or else they’ll never perform at your holiday ever again!]”

“Your holiday?” Aaravi asked, opening her big stupid mouth without thinking, yet again. Her blood was running hot, and her legs were cramping still, and she wanted Miranda alone, wanted the servant gone, wanted to stop feeling so damn weird about this entire situation, wanted Miranda to stop laughing at all these dumb jokes.

Well, Aaravi guessed that was one way to do it.

Miranda tensed underneath her, the muscle all along the sides of her body and lining her core tightening into something solid and firm all at once, hard and abrupt against the otherwise soft press of her body. Aaravi could feel it all at once, the second the words came out of her mouth, the second the venom dripped into her voice. Miranda didn’t flick her fins, didn’t flatten them down, didn’t open her mouth to bare her teeth at Aaravi, but she could feel it. All the same, she could feel it, and that certainty was enough to make the cold seep into Aaravi’s veins and coil prickly legs around her heart.

Drru-anygu didn’t notice. Drru-anygu continued on as if Aaravi hadn’t said anything unusual, lifting up their fins and looking down at Aaravi with a mild interest.

“[Oh! She didn’t tell you?]”

“[She knows the broad strokes.]” Miranda interrupted, her voice schooled down into the same friendly, lackadaisy tone as before. Aaravi knew the difference. Even if there wasn’t anything to be counted, even if there was no other way for her to realistically be able to tell one apart from the other, she knew the difference. “[We have mostly been focusing on the broad strokes — there’s just so many differences between what it is like inland and what it is like here that most of our time has been dedicated to those.]”

“[Right, right.]” They still hadn’t caught on. Aaravi wasn’t sure whether or not she felt relief at that, whether it would’ve been easier if she didn’t have to sit here worrying about what was about to happen, what was at risk that this servant might not have been aware of.

Maybe it was nice to avoid the issue, to not have to confront it. But then Aaravi would have to sit here and know about it, and she wouldn’t even be offered any solidarity from the loneliness of that knowledge, that she would just have to be aware of it alone, unacknowledged, unaware of why no one else had seen what she had.

“[That does remind me, is Yg’lloze’aa treating you any kinder, Aaravi? I know there was a lot of talk when you had arrived, that it had gone roughly?]”

“Um,” Aaravi dug at the back of her mind for something to say, something that wouldn’t be just as awkward as before, pulling up dust instead of paydirt. “Yeah, uh. Yeah. I’m getting used to it. It’s still, you know, really new. It’s really different.”

Beyond all chances, all of Aaravi’s shoddy luck that had never yet panned out once in all of her pitiful life, that made Miranda relax again behind her. Aaravi felt her back sink back against Miranda’s side, felt the pillow-wrapped-in-crocodile-hide sensation return, felt the solid rock behind her melt. She didn’t know why, didn’t understand what about this triggered that, let alone what within it could soothe Miranda, but did Aaravi really have the space to question it?

Too much doubt. Too much uncertainty. She had to keep moving. If she stopped, if she focused too hard on stuff like this, she was going to drown and no ul’kiha charm would be able to save her.

***

Aaravi didn’t sleep well, that night she and Miranda were supposed to spend on the ship. Despite it all, she couldn’t get over how exposed she felt, the open current brushing over her bare arms and legs, the cold only staved off by the same charm that allowed her to breathe here at all.

***

The surefire way that Aaravi knew that they were finally approaching the capital city was that another one of Miranda’s travel servants (Aaravi also did not know this one’s name, but Miranda seemed fond of them) came by and loudly announced that they were doing so, and that everyone needed to prepare to depart soon. And by “loudly announced”, she meant that the word had ping-ponged through the ship, passed along through every room by the reverberation of everyone’s voices, and that servant was just the one to do it here, and now, knowledge passed along by chain.

Miranda had lifted her head up and said something like, “[Which way in?]” which came through less like a question proper, and more like a gentle probing to the wash of constant information that pushed through Aaravi’s brain like a riverbed.

Still fast, still wearing her away with time, with the speed at which it poured out towards the ocean, but slower now, more manageable. It had worn a groove within which to run, and it was that groove that gave it a place to be and to go within Aaravi, a place which didn’t mingle so intensely with all her other thoughts anymore.

It was still nearly too much to handle, too much to bear, but it had someplace to be now. Someplace to be was better than leaking out through her ears, which was acceptable enough. A headache, even one from trying to process as much information as this, was better than not functioning at all.

The question, the inquiry, bounced around again through the stream of spoken thought, before a reply came back that was something like, the main way in, or the usual way in, or the public way in.

Miranda rested her fins back with that, looking ponderously up at the sphincter-door, the servants beginning to stir into action and movement with the announcement, seemingly having some sort of last thoughts. Aaravi didn’t know what Miranda might’ve saved for last, but whatever they were, she did seem to be finally milling it over.

“Do we,” Aaravi tried, gesturing vaguely in the water to try and get Miranda’s attention, “need to do something, or…?”

“Yes- or, well, no? Both.” Miranda clarified, which really wasn’t much clarification at all. She didn’t look back at Aaravi, but she did flick her fin back at her, small and comforting. “We will have to wait to make entry for a moment, so that a cavalcade can form around us, before we breach the Vti’unkt-Tunh city limits. We are going along the main route, so that should take us through several large districts where everyone can see it happen.”

“We don’t need to get… I don’t know. Ready, or something? They won’t be able to see us?” Aaravi pulled her legs back, tighter to her chest. She had been dangling them over the side of one of the platforms — hardly the same as sitting anywhere in the open air. The water and the subtle movements of it kept wanting to push her off her seat, or push her back into it, making her sway and move faintly with the roll of the tides and the inlet current on board the ship, making sure no room would go stagnant. She couldn’t kick her legs as carefree as before, with the same movement requiring the same effort as kicking the water to swim, and it would make her move upwards if she moved them too fast.

There wasn’t anything physically keeping her spine in the place she left it either. The water was its own support, not only pressing down on her body but from all around her, cradling every inch in the grip of the ocean and away from the clutches of gravity. She could’ve leaned back, or laid down, and moving her back and torso were so startlingly easy that Aaravi was expending more energy just making sure she remained in place.

But she felt more secure like this, if she could grip the sides of the platform with her knees, and if she attempted to do something more familiar to her, something which wouldn’t feel quite so out of place.

Miranda tilted her head back to the side, a position which let Aaravi catch a glimpse of the back side of her crown, glittery and gold like the front, but with no fancy engravings or embossing to show off. Maybe an odd divot here or there, like someone had left a dent in it while shaping the curving spires, but nothing more. “No, no, they should not be able to look in. To see the ship, certainly, but we do not have to get ready for that. Between that and the cavalcade… It should be fine.”

“Okay,” Aaravi said, not feeling like that helped any. “What about when we… When we get to the palace? That?”

Miranda nodded, and Aaravi saw her fins make a small movement, shifting forward. The pressure that Aaravi felt all around her ears, that bore down on her, that even her charm would not let her forget, always at the back of her mind to remind her of exactly what would happen and how fast it would be over if Aaravi tried to remove them — well, it just didn’t seem to be bothering Miranda in the same way. It didn’t hold her down, didn’t turn her movements sluggish, slow, dragged through molasses.

It was the opposite, really. It, being here, the water suspending her body and the pressure around them, made Miranda’s movements more confident, more assured. The same force that reminded Aaravi of how much ocean there was above them seemed to trim the erratic movements from Miranda, leaving her with nothing but the certainty of how to navigate it, with only the weightless assurance of animals larger than life itself living in a place seemingly designed to cradle them.

It reminded Aaravi of the slow circling of vast birds in the sky, the true gravitas of something so in its element that they didn’t have to beat their wings. They slipped forward into the sky, and the wind carried them forward, into eternity.

The water gently spread the blade of Miranda’s fin, pulling it apart, or Miranda relaxing some internal structure that Aaravi didn’t have the nerve endings to understand. Although each fin looked like a whole structure on its own, it was more like the branches of a tree, or a bush, or the tines breaking off the quill of a feather. Like an anemone, maybe, if Aaravi wanted to be really apt about it. They normally sat together as one, a singular plane of soft cream skin, the color the same as the part of a daisy petal where it approached the center and white became a tender yellow. They zipped together, Aaravi was sure, or something, to make them stick together as one, work together as one.

But if Aaravi took her finger and pressed along that blade, pushed the tip of her nail into the parallel lines running from quill to edge, then she could pull them apart, into long and separate strands, hundreds of them. Aaravi didn’t do it often, which was mostly because it made Miranda squirm and get all hot in the face and make strange noises up at Aaravi, and only partially because Aaravi still kind of thought it was weird, and even if she wanted to, the entire thing made her brain run around in rat-maze spirals.

And yet, Aaravi couldn’t help but think of that now, seeing the edges of Miranda’s fins come undone, pulling away from each other. She didn’t, couldn’t, know what it was that Miranda was paying attention to, adjusting her fins so that they splayed outwards, their ends fuzzing like a breeze had tickled over them. But it had to be something. Something, assuredly, something important, something that Aaravi could guess at, even if she didn’t have the words.

When Miranda spoke again, her voice was quieter and she had to turn her head back, pull her mouth in close to Aaravi’s chest, private and small. It was strange, not being able to feel Miranda’s breath as she spoke, the warping of the English words distinct and created far apart from all that Aaravi and her had shared so far. All the same though, it made the hair on her arms stand straight up.

“A little bit, maybe. Our schedule has it so that once we get in, we go to sleep, yes? You and me and Bellanda, as we came in at the same time and must leave again at the same time, if that is approved, so we are all on the same cycle. That means we do not have to get particularly dressed up or ready, this should all be domestic…”

“But?” Aaravi asked. There was going to be a but. There was always a but.

“But,” Miranda confirmed, “we will have to meet with Laudanda first. To ensure that our arrival is properly documented and attested for, that it is all above board, and that your paperwork has been approved by the King and his court. And to be presented to her—…”

“Oh,” Aaravi said. “Right.”

Aaravi knew about the eldest two Vanderbilt sisters, who were really not Vanderbilts, not least of all because not a single merfolk she had met these past four days had actually used that name for the Royal Family. What she knew wasn’t really enough to be called impressive, though, and even less were they something that might be stated confidently in any manner to try and describe the shape Aaravi had glimpsed of them so far.

Laudanda had something to do with managerial roles, she knew. Laudanda was the one who they had been referred to already, as needing to approve or sign off on Aaravi’s passage through the borders of the Merkingdom, and that was in line with what Aaravi knew of the eldest of the four so far.

What that fully entailed, well… Aaravi didn’t know. She was a princess of bureaucracy, or something. Lots of things had to go through her to be approved if they involved disparate parties, like the Merkingdom and literally any land government, or different sections within the Merkingdom itself, but… This wasn’t exactly the most specific of guesses.

She was the eldest — Aaravi knew that too, for sure. It kind of confused her for a little bit, that the eldest was doing something like this, that Miranda was the inheritor, but, well. There were bigger questions.

Amanda was clearer, at least, in that Aaravi knew she was High Priestess of some religion or another that had been attached to the throne, although Miranda talked little of religion.

Which was not to say it wasn’t there, there were lots of little things there, like Miranda insisting on reciting something for one of Aaravi’s swords when it broke or the general way Miranda thought, the emphasis on plurality and multiplicity over singularity, of many being one and one’s responsibility to tend the many, all suggested that Miranda maybe wasn’t as secular as she might’ve seemed to herself. The way she had explained ul’kiha to Aaravi suggested as much, even without getting further into all of her little quirks.

But it was a subject that Miranda tended to clam up on, waving off or suggesting she didn’t know all that much, always with the wild look in her eyes of an animal being backed into a corner and needing a way out.

The same look was one she gave a lot, when the topic came around to Amanda, suggesting that she wasn’t merely leaving Aaravi lacking in this information due to not thinking much of it or it not being important, but because Miranda didn’t want to talk about it.

Which, really, Aaravi didn’t give a shit about religion. Religion was stupid, and the only use Aaravi had found in it was more ways to put monsters quicker back into the ground than letting them stay above it.

But it did bother her, in some private and unmentioned way. She wasn’t sure what she was imagining when she thought of a reason why, not sure where she would’ve begun on what the Merkingdom had to do within these two spheres of life and where they intersected, but it didn’t settle well.

Maybe it would’ve helped, if she knew more, that she could’ve braced herself to meet the other half of Miranda and Bellanda’s generation. Or maybe it wouldn’t have. Maybe it would’ve only made it worse. Who knew.

Certainly not Aaravi, because the more she got started thinking about that and travelling down that pathway of her thoughts, the more she started thinking about eventually having to meet Miranda’s dad, and everything, every single desperate fawning moment Miranda had ever given about him or every distant and curt mention Bellanda offered, had absolutely no chance of soothing over the effect of meeting her father-in-law in person for the first time.

The only real concession she had was the fact that she had met Bellanda and it all went fine there, but, like, that was Bellanda.

Bellanda, who Miranda couldn’t even briefly mention without wanting to talk her up, wanting to talk about how cool her big sister is, how sweet and good at fighting she was and how much she helped Miranda, and how much, really, Aaravi should meet her, but don’t be upset or anything if she’s hostile or standoffish, she’s really really nice once you get to know her! Bellanda, who Aaravi had her ass sorely kicked by the first time she met her and several successive times from that, Bellanda who, okay, yes, was kind of hard to get to know, and was, in fact, a major ass in multiple different manners.

Aaravi didn’t think Bellanda exactly counted as the same as the rest of their family, which was now at least partially Aaravi’s family, a fact that Aaravi really, really didn’t want to think about.

Aaravi lifted her hand, touched to the back of Miranda’s fin, rubbed along the back ridge of her jaw, where it hung hinged from her skull, where the scales thinned so that her head could be attached back to her neck. She could feel the flex of Miranda’s gill covers underneath her fingers, hard ribs of cartilage over gaps that flared open, pushed water out, pulled and shifted internally by the finer muscles of Miranda’s respiratory system. The edges of the inner gills, so much larger on Miranda in a way that Aaravi hadn’t really noticed before, that the other merfolk lacked, continually peeked just out of the safety of their cover, brushed against the tips of Aaravi’s fingers.

She used her other hand to hook over the top of Miranda’s head, being careful of her crown, and pulled her close. Miranda, always much closer to the environment than the furnace that burned inside Aaravi, was faintly warmer than the water around her. It made all the difference in the world.

“What is Laudanda expecting to see?” she asked, trying to brace for impact.

“Not much, I do not think,” Miranda kept her voice schooled down into a whisper, looking up at Aaravi with those impossible slit-pupiled eyes, “she knows this is not a proper meeting in the usual sense, expects us to be tired from the trip and ready to sleep… But she will be expecting us to be… You know. A proper Crown Princess, and Chief Warlord, and…”

“And whatever I am.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Miranda tried to comfort, pushing her nose into Aaravi’s chest, “I do not think anyone else would make her any happier either.”

Beyond the two of them, something started to come into view, for the first time since the ferry ship had left port at Miranda’s schooltime castle, and someone called from the central hallway that the cavalcade had formed and it was time to move out.

“Come on,” Miranda offered again, lifting up but not going far. Her head rested on Aaravi’s shoulder, her hand lifting to delicately intertwine her claws with Aaravi’s fingers, her nails thick and curved, the same lavender as her hair. “We can appreciate the view of Vti’unkt-Tunh, as we go in.”

“If you say so.” Aaravi would’ve liked to imagine that the words came out hot and sharp on her tongue, but she knew what Miranda heard was something kinder, something smaller. Something that was theirs, and theirs alone.

The ship began moving again. Aaravi wouldn’t have noticed it had stopped if it weren’t for the new crack of light that was slowly but steadily moving closer, creeping across the sea floor.

It was red.

Unlike the majority of the other lights that Aaravi had seen on this trip so far, blue and casting everything in the same underwater aura that she had expected of this place, of going underwater to some distant kingdom she had never heard of before meeting Miranda, this light was a bright, bleeding red, casting sharp and distinct lines up and against the walls of the oceanic mountains it was cradled in-between. They, new, unworn by rain or by erosion greater than the tectonic sea that had birthed them, carried the light in cut geometric shapes, triangles bristling around the valley, the crack spread through the middle, like an open wound, torn down into the mineralized flesh of the planet itself.

The crack, the valley, was long. Aaravi didn’t have a sense of scale, not when the rest of the world was all pitch black and dimly lit interior of the ship. Regardless, her every guess had to stretch larger and larger, yawning open further and further in this place detached from all other geography.

A mile long? Miles long? She couldn’t tell. She couldn’t even begin to tell. The mountains above loomed up and into the darkness, vanished, so that Aaravi couldn’t even tell whether or not they were snuffing out the sky, prison bars to keep her here.

Dark shapes darted in front of the light here and there, long and quick, and Aaravi thought they had to be close. If they were further away, if they were inside of the red light, then she didn’t think she would be able to see them at all, drowned out by the red wound torn in the bleeding earth.

The ship continued to turn, move. Aaravi realized now, only with something to compare it to, that it could move fast, closing the distance between it and the crevice in the sea floor as though an afterthought, a whim. It did slow as it approached, the dark shapes moving around to the front of the ship, and the back, and a spattering down beneath them, between them and the crevice.

From there — Miranda and Aaravi and the few servants filtering back in to watch — all of them began to sink lower and lower.

Aaravi hadn’t seen where the red light was coming from, where inside the undersea valley, but it was stronger than the measly blue lights that lined the ship. Not as strong as the sun, no, only maybe as strong as a lamp, but after having lived the past two days in a swallowing gorge of darkness, the light blinded her, washing over and into the ship. She thought something was trying to get in, or trying to get out, because she swore she could feel the hull rattling and shaking, swore that the vibrations that rang through it and into the water inside was malicious.

Aaravi glanced over to Miranda for guidance, for help, but while she had been dyed in deepest black in the blue light, now she was a bright and brilliant crimson, red the color of pooling blood, still hot, still steaming, her eyes dark and recessed inside her skull, her clothes the same color as blood clots, as long-dried scabs. The servants had reversed, their silvery bodies and light blue bellies suddenly dark and grey and indistinct.

Her hand clutched tight against Miranda’s, her legs pulled up and over from the edge, but as soon as it happened, the light began to fade.

The ship continued to drop, but as it did so, it dropped away from the rim of lights, away from the abrupt wash of total red, shadows now darting over them from above, cast by the cavalcade following the ship.

Still the walls shook, still the water rang through Aaravi like a gong struck, around her and within her and a part of her all the same.

Aaravi looked down. There were more red lights here, following down from the entrance, but they were dimmer now, less strong. Now, beneath them, more light rose up in beautiful and swallowing waves. None were as bright as what Aaravi was used to, none were even comparable to what she would’ve used to light her own dingy apartment, but that wasn’t what mattered.

What mattered was the sheer mass of them, the cascade of a thousand rainbow colors stretched out beneath them for ever and ever and ever, a maddening rave of neon and glimmer and glitz. Most might have been blue, but the blue wasn’t enough to clear away the wash of everything else, the captured prism sat here on the sea floor.

The capital city.

The city that Miranda had called Vti’unkt-Tunh.

“In… In an older version of Abyssal,” Miranda whispered into Aaravi’s ear, making it twitch, “its name is supposed to be something like ‘the heart-beat place’, or ‘the pulse place’, or ‘the place where you take the pulse’. Because in the old days, most of the lights were red, and our song, the song, is so loud and thudding.”

Around the upper edge, the inner lip to the crevice that marked the outer boundary of the city, there were holes and warrens carved down and into the dark stone, folded first into shelves that ran alongside the cliffside as it plunged further downwards at a sheer angle, but then pressed in deeper, into tunnels and rooms that lurked far out of view from Aaravi, only seen with more dim lights from inside.

 The majority of the dimmer red lights, not that bright wash around the lip, were clustered around here, around long strands of decorated fabric and brightly painted murals on the walls. Most of them depicted the same three-chambered heart, the clusters of tube worms sprouting from within, splashed liberally into every section, every area, sculpted with detail and love even from this far away.

There was nothing like a floor, nothing that Aaravi might conceivably suggest as a floor. The world simply continued to… drop away. There weren’t walkways like Aaravi would have imagined, weren’t railings that held the merfolk who waited there, here all in dark clusters and in organized rows that waited and watched them as they fell. The valley was narrower than it was long, surely an easy distance to make between one edge and the other, but it made up for it in depth, and the merfolk had seemed to make the full use of that depth.

It was… like a hive, in a word. A honeycombed mess of buildings stacked on top of buildings, not in boxes or rectangles nor the sharp edges Aaravi usually thought of for architecture, architecture that she might’ve been more used to on land, but distorted, warped into organic forms and shapes. They stretched out, bulged out into globules stuck onto the side of other buildings, so twisted and wrapped around each other that Aaravi couldn’t guess where one ended and another began.

They didn’t stick to the walls either — instead of walkways or roads, there was just open space between them, doors only sometimes opening onto patios and more often opening out into the water itself with no place to land, and the distinction between windows and doors more of a suggestion, really, which was all Aaravi could make of the decorative holes that had to be too small for the merfolk to enter through.

This, more than anything, seemed to be why the buildings stretched across and through what should have been the center of the valley, long support beams of whole buildings clustered around each other and branching off wildly.

What should have been, because Aaravi couldn’t even see the walls at a certain point. She could guess where they were supposed to be, sure, could look up and see the outline of the entrance snaking across the top of her vision, but the city, the buildings, the maddening architecture, it all just kept going, pressing further and further inwards.

The tunnels around that outer rim now looked like an afterthought, like a joke, because the tunnels down here pushed so far back into the mountains, so deep into them, that it all looked the same as the maddening alleyways and crevices and branching structures that filled up what should have otherwise been open space.

Worse yet, the buildings, the city blocks, weren’t constrained by gravity, weren’t limited by things as simple and trivial as being pulled down, down into the hive that just kept going and going and going, and so they swirled around each other, opening up at every angle, so that even though their walls and structure tended to be flush with their neighbors, some would open up down to the floor and some would open straight up into what should be the ceiling, towards the crevice.

It was the madness of a coral reef, of endless structures jointing together and merging to become one, seamless and perfect even when new textures and shapes cropped up with alarming frequency. It was the madness of looking down into the pneumatized inner core of a bone and seeing all the little struts connecting everything together, leaving bubbles and space in between each other.

It reminded Aaravi, with such a horrible and awful nostalgia that she had the urge to be sick, of books her mom used to read to her, when it was good and when she hadn’t yet held a sword or a knife in her hands, when they were chubby with childhood and grasping at her mom’s hands as they swept over the page because she didn’t know what the printed words said yet. When Salil was young, too young, but Aaravi was curious and needy and would wander around and get herself into trouble if her mom didn’t sit down and play with her.

The colorful, printed pictures. The linework, a little scratchy, with a lot of dark black shading, like so many other children’s storybooks, weaving together with words that rhymed and sounded silly in her mom’s mouth, so Aaravi repeated them alongside her, feeling the way her tongue moved against her teeth. The syllables would catch on her double canines, too large for her mouth, but her mom would slowly sound them out for Aaravi, until she could say them just like her.

The whorls were all there. The organic shapes, the endless detail, the nonsense architecture that couldn’t have worked inland, the way it just opened up to nowhere but the merfolk moved around and within it all the same.

Aaravi, unable to stop herself, missed her mom, and missed that she would never see this.

Wasn’t she too old for this? Wasn’t she supposed to have forgotten all that, been too young? Or was she supposed to remember this, remember it in its full and awful glory, so that she could be reminded of what the good days were like, that there used to be good days?

Were they even good days at all?

“Do you feel alright?”

Bellanda’s voice did make Aaravi jump then, her hair trying to puff out all at once, but the water already did that job for her, and so it all just got into her face and her mouth again, making the weight settle in further into Aaravi’s chest.

“I’m fine.” Aaravi said, far more harshly than she had to, too much teeth and anger and mandibles showing through. She would’ve felt bad, she told herself. She should feel bad.

Bellanda, for whatever blessed reason there was in her soul, accepted this, and laid down on the other side of Aaravi, close enough to Miranda that she could wrap her tail around the side of her little sister’s. That meant her bad side, the side with the scars tracing over her scales and the eyepatch as an attempted covering for those, was facing Aaravi, and she didn’t really know what to think about that, so she tried not to.

She tried equally as hard to ignore the way Bellanda tilted her head inwards, so that the end of her snout brushed over Aaravi’s cheek and ear, making the latter flick, and all her hair desperately attempt to puff up again.

God, and there were merfolk here too. Not just what Aaravi had seen so far, not just what she was expecting — the chaotic nature of the city, its seeming tangle of aesthetic sensibilities, all just matched with the sheer number of them all, crowded along the sides of the buildings, moving in the tunnels and pathways that the weave of a thousand different skyscraper struts with entire apartment complexes attached created, sliding along on currents and following along in a thousand different lives.

There were brown and black merfolk. Blue merfolk. Light tan merfolk. Silver merfolk and white merfolk. There were glimpses of purple and yellow merfolk, of tinted green merfolk, of orange merfolk, of merfolk of yet more colors.

They had bars and they had stripes, spots and flecks, slow gradients and harsher washes. They were dappled, they were dramatically stippled, lines of color streaked through their bodies down to their tails. Their fins moved and flicked and fluttered like endless rows of flowers embedded in countless moving bodies, their fins and tails flashed with splashes of patterning and bright colors as they clung onto the sides of each other.

They moved in clusters, all on top of the other around shops and restaurants, fled in and out of nodes of entertainment, placed things in bags that laid against their bodies. They swam in the current that swept through the city, pushed along, they played in the streets and along the edges, chased animals and fish that lived within and throughout their own lives. They clung on the sides of large whales and sharks and other fish, their species endlessly stranger and harder and harder for Aaravi to place, taxonomy a suggestion more than a rule, who followed along in these gaps without worry to all the merfolk hanging onto their sides, the merfolk directing where they swam. They herded schools of smaller merfolk, children, accompanied by their own teams of shepherding adults who tried to keep them out of the way of everything else, strands of rope and ribbon tied with bells either held or tied to them to stop them from getting lost.

They glanced up at the ship as it passed, at the dark shapes of other, much smaller ships and long-bodied fish with singular merfolk pressed to their backs, moved out of the way as it slowed for traffic, which consisted mostly of the animals they rode like elephants with elaborately decorated howdahs.

And, more than anything else, they sang.

Aaravi hadn’t understood why the shaking and trembling of the ship was getting louder, harder, why it was rattling the water inside the ship even more, why it crept deeper and deeper into her bones until her heart beat along with the rhythm too. She hadn’t understood until the barest glimpses of words began pouring through her charms, like hearing whispers in the long night, distant from her ears. She hadn’t understood until the broadest wash of celebration crested over her, until the servants in their own seats or hanging there in the middle of the water chirruped and laughed amongst themselves, until sentiments like “[You think everyone’s excited?]” echoed around the viewing room.

They were singing. The thought seemed absurd, looking outwards from inside, but they had to be, hadn’t they? What else would they be doing?

Aaravi had heard Miranda begin to sing before, which was less like song like she was normally used to, with words and dedicated patterns, a set tempo and a recipe for how to create it that had been solidified down into what the song was. The songs, songs in a way that Aaravi didn’t know how to distinguish in any better way, songs like the distilled meaning of the word music in itself, more than anything truer to form that she had ever heard Miranda still make and create, were their own breed entirely.

It was one of the moments when she felt the difference the sharpest between her and Miranda, hearing them and understanding their meaning, understanding what was being pulled out through her throat, but lacking in the true breadth of that meaning, lacking in the ability to make her own as much as the impulse to do so.

The songs, which were not music like anyone on land would claim, were more like the raw emotion itself. They had no words, no meaning that could be translated back in the same way as the spoken speech, as music with lyrics and notes to follow. They just… were.

They came from something instinctual, Aaravi was sure, because although there were themes in what one sounded like against the other, there were differences in it, differences that mattered in ways to merfolk that Aaravi just couldn’t parse. She didn’t think merfolk were ever taught them, did not have to sit there and practice what they sounded like. They were something each one just had, tucked away within them somewhere, as much as their chuffs and chirrups and trills. A grander extension of those, maybe.

They were a happiness greater than any happiness that could be contained within the body, a grief and sadness grander than anything that could be suffered alone, a war cry that demanded blood be paid for the outrage of creating it. That seemed the best way to describe them, really. Like it was hard for Miranda to feel anything on her own, like she had enough emotion tucked away in her chest sometimes for two people, and she could squirm and wiggle and chase herself in circles without ever getting it out.

So, she had to open her mouth, vent it out, make the world feel what she had been felt too.

They were something like whale song, Aaravi guessed, but if she was closer to the whales singing, if the sensation could cross that boundary of anatomy to wash all the way into her own lungs.

They were singing outside, in the city, all the merfolk stirred up into one grand song. Aaravi thought it was one of joy, of rapture, of energy that boiled over and out through their scales until they had to sing it, until they had to make sure the emotion, the feeling, ran through everyone else as well.

Maybe there was more nuance to it. There were enough details lost, enough missed beats and opened gaps, that she knew at most she was getting only what little she could skim off the top, that anything more would require stepping outside, letting it take her.

The thought frightened. If what had happened before, happened again, here, in the capital city…

Aaravi didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think about doing that again, about puking on herself and curling up into an angry little ball in front of the eldest of the Vanderbilt sisters, didn’t want to humor the thought.

If she just didn’t entertain it, didn’t press it further, then it would stay that way, as something beyond her, beyond anything she would ever have to worry about, beyond anything she would ever have to experience. Ignorance was bliss, and ignorance meant she got to stay safe, stay sane, stay away from all the things that would tear her away in the night.

She pressed back against Miranda’s side, trying not to make the movement clear to Bellanda.

Aaravi tried to look again, look at the great masses of merfolk in their glowing city, and turned her attention back to what they were doing as the ship continued to sink lower. The main route seemed to be an apt description, because what they were going through had to be the biggest of the tunnels wound through the dense knit of civilization, pressed in tight against each other and yet unimaginably vast.

Here, there were more merfolk, a slow and yet unmistakable ramping up in their great numbers, wound over and around themselves around stalls, around more temporary encampments, made of struts and hanging fabric and long strands that swayed in the current and with the movement of all of their bodies, bells and chimes and other things to add more music to it all, more sound. There was a shift here, unmistakable, impossible to miss, towards celebration.

Aaravi knew the look of a party when she saw one, even if she both was seldom invited and seldom came.

(There were other things in her life, she told herself, with far more importance, and anyways, the concept always felt like a rising disaster in the back of her throat, like a slow suffocation under the weight of her own skin.)

She knew the look of organizers, here in troops and rallying leagues, matching clothes with glowing material of specific markings woven into the fabric, not the most outrageous of those around, but certainly hard to miss.

She knew it in the people lingering on the edges, the dissipation outwards from the center of the masses, where dances and frenetic movement had taken over, surely singing the loudest, even behind the safety of the soundproofing of the ship. She knew it in the way they would rise up in waves, bodies flanking each other, flicking their fins and their tails and shaking their arms and legs so that the patterns on those paddles were impossible to miss, fabric trails and metal floaters following long after their movements. She saw it in the confidence burning behind their eyes and flickering across their faces, challenging other groups, other sections within this long conga line of tidal swells and inhaling bodies.

She saw it in the way other groups, broken off from these large displays, sat at different points in the cycle of handing out long flags of fabric to merfolk clad in shorts, of them fanning out and being set off with a sharp whistle, of them leading long chases through the winding mess of everything piled up on top of itself, weaving through agility courses set of historic landmarks, trying to grab the flags off of each other or pushing or shoving or directly ramming into each other, mock-fights that Aaravi was familiar with, even in another body, even in another life. She saw points being marked in glassy beads strung onto belts and necklaces, saw champions with long strings of them that began to compete with the flags themselves, saw others who had to sit out, having exhausted themselves in the chase.

Aaravi saw it in the merfolk hanging out of buildings, windows that became doors that became balconies, sitting together with their serpentine bodies all piled up on top of and around each other, holding onto plates and bowls and handheld nets with chunks of meat or whole fish inside of them, shouting and singing and whooping at the dances that passed them by, at the games as they dashed by.

She could see them clustered around more dedicated performers, clad in armor that did nothing to protect their vitals, wielding spears and hooks with brightly colored globs stuck onto the end, swinging their weapons and dancing around each other to a beat that was being sounded out by a drum, by the crowd, by the city itself as it sang.

She saw it in the street vendors, handing out charms and toys and sparklers that spilled glowing ink and clothes and jewelry and hanging decorations and musical instruments and meat skewers and more things, piled up and up and on top of each other, merfolk looking around and over their wares, children grabbing at anything they thought they could get away with. She saw statues that were slowly being bargained over, saw bones plated over with metal and glittering jewels, saw long lobster-traps full of live animals and sessile animals and stranger things yet. She could see the way they argued with each other, saw the way they would press something different into the palms of the sellers before taking something of their own, saw the way some of them would push strings of beads or bracelets or pins kept on their clothes against something the sellers held up for them, instructing them to use.

She saw it in the way they parted ahead of the ship, around it, calling out to it, saying something to it which Aaravi just couldn’t hear, something that passed through the crowds with such great energy that the ferry ship, the meager thing that it was, became a parade float all its own, something that they recognized without even trying.

This, more than anything, brought the terrible aftertaste of self-consciousness to Aaravi’s mouth, looking down and upon the crowds who looked back up at her in turn, not meeting her eyes but seeing her all the same.

What would they think? Nowhere, in all of this, had Aaravi glimpsed anything that wasn’t the form of an animal, strange as they were, or of a merfolk, of which the two had greater crossover than she would ever really want to admit. Nowhere had she even seen a painting or a picture of a human, of something that walked on two legs, inland, that moved and navigated through the world so unlike this, yet so similar to this.

They knew she was a human, right? They had to know. Everyone had to know.

The Merkingdom wouldn’t have let everyone just not know, would have broadcasted it far and wide, would have made such terrible pains to make it plainly obvious that Miranda couldn’t have just picked another merfolk, could she? She just had to make this complicated, had to pick the one person who wouldn’t even be able to breathe down here, who would die if she took off all of two earrings, doesn’t even have a title, doesn’t even have a name they would recognize. For shame, for shame, she couldn’t even get this right.

God, where was this coming from? Aaravi wanted to kick herself for going down that mental walk of shame, wanted to swear and growl and yell at herself that WHY COULDN’T THIS JUST BE SIMPLE?

She hadn’t felt like this before! She hadn’t been so self-conscious of what these losers, these fucking narcs, these stupid royal pains in the ass, thought of her before she had come down, before she had got into the ship, before, before, before. She hadn’t given a shit about them on land! She shouldn’t give a shit about them! Who cared if they hated her! They clearly didn’t have a sense of taste to begin with, let alone any actual morals to support a burden as heavy as that, so why did she care all of a sudden? Why was she so afraid of people who didn’t deserve her fear?

The first time she had properly, actually, sincerely spoken to Miranda, she tried to fight her, so where was that conviction now? Had she been broken down? Had Miranda done something to break her Slayer’s spirit, to wear her away, to make her meek and pliant and just how Miranda liked it? Christ, had she gone soft?

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid! Everything was so stupid, everything was so awful, and here Aaravi was, panicking as they drifted deep into the bowels of the city, into the full throng of the festivities, two princesses against either side of her body, and all she could think about was what was below them, what was heading straight for her like a bullet of fate carved specifically as a fuck YOU to all of Aaravi’s hopes and aspirations and destiny.

“I don’t,” Aaravi said, tongue thick in her mouth, nearly biting it on her stupid oversized teeth and her stupid mandibles. She didn’t know what she was going to say. She didn’t know what she had planned to follow that up with, where those awful words were leading. “I thought that you said— that we would get here late? This seems, uh… This seems like an awful lot of celebration for this late at night already?”

“We’re on a cycling schedule,” Bellanda elaborated, trying to be helpful in a way that only Bellanda would be satisfied by. “Not everyone sleeps at the same time. When we get in, that’s when we’re supposed to fulfill our portion of rest, but other people will be awake and doing things. We’ll have to run late sometimes to make sure everyone’s schedules line up for some events, but that should be fine.”

“Oh,” Aaravi said, trying to wrap her brain around the explanation, trying to make it make sense. “So, we don’t even get to sleep at night?”

“That doesn’t mean much down here,” Bellanda continued, not knowing what she was doing, what she was condemning Aaravi to. “I don’t know if it’s night up there or not.”

Not night. Not night. Aaravi was sure it would have been night, that it had to have been night, because she had gone to sleep with Miranda a similar amount of time ago as a full day, hadn’t it? She had left in the morning too, hadn’t she? Wouldn’t it have been night? Shouldn’t it have been night?

There was no way to confirm. No way to be sure. Aaravi wanted to ask, wanted to see a clock, look at the time, but then she asked herself, wouldn’t that be different too? If she looked at her phone, the phone that they had given her, would that lie to her as well? What if it changed? What if it didn’t change? What if it wasn’t interested in keeping time in a way that she would have been familiar with, could understand?

Awful. An endless and awful pitch downwards, pitch down into something that was so divorced from what lay above that Aaravi began to fear what she did know, what she thought she could rely on. If not the time of day, what then? What else might change, while her eyes were averted, looking away at something that was just as likely to kill her as to abandon her to this place forever?

Slowly the city fell away. Larger and larger buildings grew up around the very deepest recesses of this trench, this underwater valley in an underwater mountain range that had never once been touched by the sun, choking the winding paths and letting them die out, constrained out into tinier and tinier branches until only the largest remained.

Aaravi didn’t know how far they had fallen. She couldn’t guess as to the size of anything down here.

Even the merfolk began to thin out faster, replaced again by those in more official looking uniforms, manned around more official looking stations with that image of a heart and its tube worms beginning to reappear.

Eventually, there came a point where the buildings fell away entirely, leaving an open cavern there, beneath the city, a vast expanse of dark water lit only by what lay beyond, at the very bottom of the valley and worn into the skin of the Earth itself.

Lights.

More of them, like Aaravi expected, but these were not a thousand patterns overlaid on top of each other without reason, without rhyme, competing with each other to see who got the most of the precious space laid there between everything else.

These lights were spread further apart, more lenient with the space that they were given, laid out like the floor beneath Aaravi, like a reverse sky, staring down at stars trapped beneath the ocean floor. These too were arranged in patterns, though, not the carefree spray of celestial objects. They were not the patterns of specific forms, not of animals nor of plants nor of merfolk, but more abstract patterns.

They flowed into each other, trailed off with strings of errant and blinking lights, erupted into carefully controlled and specific bursts, their colors swirling together to match, leading one into the other like countless held hands. They formed whorls and wheels, spirals, waves and sprays, and Aaravi watched it all, because it moved.

Slowly, too slowly compared to her merfolk companions, Aaravi was sure, she realized they were moving in tune with the music. It would rise, and the lights would rise with it, responding and changing, moving as though they too had a dance in their soul, a spring in their step, that there was no other way to get it out.

Still the ship lowered.

The lights trailed up the sides of the canyon walls, and there Aaravi could see that they were made with corals. Not the corals of the reefs that she was familiar with through desktop screensavers and wallpapers, but something different. Most of them were pale in their coloration, even in the wash of differently colored lights that had to serve as lamps around here, lights which the corals themselves were producing, but some had more vibrant hues to them, patterns that followed along their branches.

Aaravi didn’t think corals branched like that. Not that they couldn’t, it looked natural enough that she could imagine that, somewhere, some coral looked and grew like that, and it was fine.

But she thought back to Miranda’s gardens at the castle where she spent her schooltime days, pruned and kept to be perfect for the landfolk eyes that would be set upon it, kept in such a heightened degree of beauty that the amount of nature in of itself felt like something that could not, would not, exist anywhere else.

These gardens, vast, teeming with deepwater fish and sea life that darted around all the great spires, small sharks and pale octopi and silvery schooling fish and slowly undulating eels and jellyfish that looked more like bags turned inside out, felt like an extrapolation of that, a final realization of what that meant, an apex of the design that had created Miranda’s gardens.

The Royal Gardens.

Oh, Aaravi thought. This is where she gets it from.

There, in the center, the source of the shadow that had been cast over Miranda’s schooltime castle to make it what it was, was the Royal Palace.

If Miranda’s castle was impressive beyond words, then the Palace stretched out into impossible, a source of shock and awe that would have made even the greats fall to their knees and beg for mercy from a god that had long since stopped believing in them.

The leviathan lurched up and out of the deep, so massive that Aaravi could not see the bottom of it, so massive that as the ship moved in closer like a horsefly nearing an irritated ear, that it filled the vision of the windows, snuffed out the visage of the gardens, greater and grander than any building, any monument, anything the land had to offer to it.

Its size would have made the architects weep, the mass of it so much like the whales, something that only could have existed with the water to support its own weight, or else suffocate inside its own lungs. Aaravi had no comparisons. A tower. A mountain. Something that loomed above the clouds and pierced the sun and dragged its corpse back down to earth where all the scavengers would descend upon it, black out the empty heavens with their bodies.

It curled up and into spines and spires, decorated with metal and patterns so small at this distance that they looked like the etchings of a child. What might have been merely suggestive with Miranda’s castle, the way it let the shoulder of belief that it was founded after some human style, some landfolk history, coyly slip off to reveal the slightest shock of bare skin beneath, was explicit with the Royal Palace.

It was organic. Not in the way of the pilots, in the way their bodies haunted the back of Aaravi’s mind, but in the curl of a sea shell, in the arched doorways of a jawbone. There was no way to make what it was by hand. There was no way to form what it was, no way to lay the brick and plaster it together, no way to nail the wood down into shape. It had grown into what it was, with such pure and clear evidence that Aaravi didn’t have a moment of doubt in her mind the second the thought arrived there, did not once question herself nor her willingness to jump to the idea nor the total conviction within it.

It flowed in beautiful Fibonacci spirals, cavernous halls that swallowed each other up, webs of interwoven arches that dipped down into sweetly carved lace. It stretched out on itself, let itself fully occupy all the space it had been given so that not a moment was wasted as it lounged out and across the bottom of the valley like a lion at rest. Smooth boughs of bone continued uninterrupted into thickened crests like a durophagous skull, ridges that pitted down and inwards on themselves in the patterns of chapel murals. The gardens could be seen, here and there, mounting up the great shape of it, tucked into corners where they complimented the organic make of it, the spines that thrust up towards the city above and forked and tasted the air for anything that fell down from above, and they all reminded Aaravi terribly of house plants, placed to compliment the furniture.

Aaravi could not have named what the material was. For as much as it looked like bone, like shell, it could not be. Even if they had somehow coaxed it into such a shape, it just couldn’t be that, it was all wrong.

Everything about it was so terribly wrong.

Strangely, there were more ships here. They were moving down, moving to the same place where their ferry ship was being herded, and more than that, there were other merfolk too, either loitering around entranceways that Aaravi nearly missed for both size and their understated nature both, or clinging onto the sides of animals, riding them back and forth.

There were more guards here too. They wore thicker armor, thick enough that Aaravi could not see their faces, and their weapons gave her a terrible feeling in her gut.

“Hey,” Bellanda offered, like a concession, “at least we won’t have to deal with Laudanda for long. It’s just to make sure the customs decree is all dealt with and everything. We can go to bed and you won’t have to talk to her too much until tomorrow.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay, okay, cool, that’s good,” Aaravi said. She didn’t believe a word of it, but it all fell out anyways, uncontrollable. She wasn’t fidgeting. She wasn’t fidgeting. She was ignoring how much her hand was squeezing onto Miranda’s and how much her other was starting to tap against her leg. “Are there any, like, shortcuts to how I should talk to her? Or ways I can make it, I don’t know, easier?”

“Oh, you know.” Bellanda flicked her fins as the servants began to leave the room again, a few coming down, closer to the three of them, ready to escort them out the moment they docked. “Just don’t talk to her in the first place. That’s how you have an easy conversation with her.”

There was no way to hide the way Aaravi’s voice changed for the high pitched.

“Yeah. Cool. Awesome.”

The ship angled lower yet, taking as much time to descend along the side of the Palace as it had taken to descend through the city. The scale boggled the mind, a single building greater than long chunks of the settlement above, the capital that wrapped around and on top of it like an outer layer of chocolate on a piece of candy. Aaravi thought about the core of the earth, and the rings of rock and material that encircled and enmeshed it, what little she lived on top of, the outermost skin to something massive.

Their ferry ship was on some different path than the others, even as they flitted around and made a great fuss of themselves like birds at a colony trying to land. Some merfolk were stuck in the middle of it all, wearing flags of fabric that glowed a bright blue against the darkness, singular and stark against the rise and fall pattern of the corals and the gardens beneath them, around them.

Someone still had to be singing, hadn’t they? Aaravi could feel the hull of the boat shivering and shaking still, so it would make sense, the other merfolk would have had to be more concerned if there was some damage being done. Miranda was placidly looking up now, glancing over to where Bellanda was looking at the servants, then to Bellanda, then down to Aaravi, then to the door. Bellanda was moving less than her sister, sitting up a little and patting her front and sides here and there to make sure everything seemed to be in order. They exchanged little snippets of conversation like “Need to pick up anything from the room?” and “I think we have everything on hand,” things which Aaravi wasn’t paying too much mind to.

The ship tilted, nosed down towards some larger hole near the bottom of the palace, where the garden rose up to meet it. A hole which had not been there before, not even in the form of the strange recursive hidden entrances and holes that Aaravi had seen across the rest of the Palace, which she knew because she had seen it open up, the otherwise solid material flexing and bending, creating a hole in itself without ripping and closing itself up again just as snugly.

The room and the dock within were smaller than the one they had left out from, which should have felt paradoxical. It did not. Even though the scale here, within this single room within the great Royal Palace, was smaller, it was in the coy sort of way of people with money, people who could demand private entrances.

Of course it would be smaller. Why wouldn’t it? There was only one ship when they left, and they only needed one ship to stay within the castle tucked against the rim of the ocean. The empty space, the great space that spanned from one wall to the other, that was all because it was built to service more, and to service them all together, but only having one ship, what was the difference between that and a private room, really, at that point? If you had an entire airport for yourself, what was the point in having a personal plane?

This was personal, though. It was large enough to have docked only maybe three ships at once, judging by how much was already needed for theirs, and nothing about it seemed intent on permanently keeping any of those ships here. It was more of a place to flow out into, a landing point from which more mundane things, things like the keeping of the ship and the transport of luggage and the subsummation of both of those into the body of the palace, could then be conducted in private, devouring these resources alive while those with any degree of importance among them walked freely.

Swam freely.

Aaravi was still getting used to changing her language for such a situation.

With the walls closed in behind them, finally the shaking stopped. The ferry ship was such a smooth ride that Aaravi startled at the shift at first, even more alarming to her than the briefest of tremors that came when the large docking-arms shot out of the sides of the wall and tethered the ship down, keeping it in place.

She expected that, expected the faint movement and adjustment that came to them settling down into place, but she just hadn’t expected how, in all of this journey, to have only just felt that movement and that movement alone from the ship around them, as a physical object.

It bothered her the more she thought of it. It had been such a luxury on its own, such an understated point of enjoyment, that she just… hadn’t noticed it. Worse, because she didn’t think she had actually been expecting to feel anything from the movements of the ship, not even sure what they would’ve felt like to begin with, which was why it had gone without mention, without thought.

It didn’t feel right. Wasn’t she supposed to notice these things? Wasn’t she supposed to keep it all in mind? Wasn’t she supposed to feel each and every difference so uncannily that she should have never gotten comfortable to any of them? Was it just because there was so many, that her mind couldn’t process it all, couldn’t handle it all, that there had to be some that simply slipped through the multitudinous cracks?

She shouldn’t have been stirring herself up like this. She was supposed to meet Miranda’s eldest sister here, she was supposed to be presentable and appropriate for the Crown Princess’s personal guest. Who knew what Miranda’s family would do to her if she freaked out now, what they would do to Miranda?

“Ready to go?” Miranda asked, because the three servants started shifting where they floated, ready to guide the three of them out. Because Miranda’s legs were already tucked up beneath her body, ready to push off, and there was only so much she could do, with time that already had all ran out.

More mistakes. More faults. An endless line of panic tracing all the way back to Aaravi’s birth.

“Yeah,” Aaravi said with her bravest face, “let’s do this.”

Bellanda swam up to the servants to wait through the few precious seconds it took for Aaravi to sidle back onto Miranda’s back, hooking her hand firmly around the handlebars where they sat and digging her heels in all the way back towards Miranda’s hips, where Aaravi could feel the divot between Miranda’s leg and her stomach, bent outwards with ridged rows of gastralia underneath scales and proper clothes both.

She had fallen into a pattern, at least, with two days already spent riding around on the back of her ul’kiha, so it was hardly as dramatic as how it had begun, nor as slow. Sure, Aaravi still hadn’t thought about speed when on Miranda’s back, their wanderings around the ship slower and with much less ground to cover than even their descent down before, but surely Miranda’s royal duties wouldn’t include any races or anything.

Miranda joined her sister, and the servants nodded once to the three of them, before continuing out, into the cavernous middle of the ship, and back out the same hatch that they had entered in through, out into the private dock of the Royal Palace.

It was just as unnervingly organic as its exterior, not in the way of pale flesh nor twitching muscle, but in the way the walls curved and bent, not even trying to approximate a rectangular shape, something that Aaravi would have been more familiar with. They just all continued on in curves and sheets, so that they felt undoubtedly like an outer eggshell, with the inner negative space of the room more evocative of the shape they were intending. It was more like staring outwards and guessing the shape of a stomach from inside its walls.

Calcified, if Aaravi had to put a singular word to it. Like abdominal cavity space, like she was lodged up inside of something, but it had aged and fossilized, the flesh and viscera so massive that they turned to stone instead of rotting, and a bunch of fish set up inside.

It was cozy, in whatever way a room built more like an intestinal chamber could be. Close, tight in. More than enough space was there for the merfolk to move, for them to have some space between each other as they swam out through the top of the ship, but they were pressed in together like the room was trying to force them to play nice with each other, to pressure them into contact and companionship.

As they swam out, Aaravi glanced up from Miranda’s scales, bending her head to the side and laying her cheek to Miranda’s spine, and saw a mural on what had to have been a ceiling. While the rest of the room had red lights, low and sultry, the mural was blue like the rest and depicted one merfolk in the middle of a swirl of others, handing something off or teaching something to the rest, with a dark vortex reaching out from behind them all.

There was a large plateau folded up and out of the wall where other servants waited, most of them dressed now in prim silver and red attire, cut close to the body, similar, in Aaravi’s untrained eye, to Bellanda’s clothes, and with large golden brooches pinned to the right shoulder. The floor seemed soft, or at least covered over in something like a rug, plush and dark deep blood red, even though only a few guards would rest down against it, not really taking a load off but rather using it as a vantage point.

Oh yes, and there were guards here.

They were the heavily plated ones like from outside the Palace, helmets stuck over their faces so that Aaravi couldn’t even see their fins, and each one was carved into the shape of some aquatic animal. A fish, a bird, a seal, a whale, and other things yet. These were plated over in gold and pressed with fine gems, and the ones that Aaravi had seen outside were dark and different, though she would have to look closer later.

They mostly sat close to the wall connected to the plateau, around only a single door leading off into the rest of the castle, encircled by something like anemones, waving dark red tendrils in the faint current that swept through.

Keeping the room oxygenated, maybe? Or maybe keeping the temperature in check, because it was faintly warmer in here than the rest of the journey, something which Aaravi noted that merfolk didn’t seem to alter much, not once they were actually in the water.

The first true impression Aaravi had of Laudanda was that she was awfully punctual, hanging there in the water and waiting for them already.

She sat in front of the door, several feet up, hardly moving at all. The way she swept her tail to adjust her position was so slow that it would have been easy to miss as any movement at all, and her limbs all hung down beneath her, claws and rows of golden bracelets burning low in the crimson light.

Miranda was large, even in her own deceptive way. Although inland, when she stood upright on two back legs poorly adjusted for such a thing, she was shorter than most; but she was also still larger than those same people, at the same time, because her body simply extended out horizontally, not vertically.

Bellanda was larger, filling out in ways that Miranda lacked, muscle and fat and layers of both piled up on top of each other until the svelte figure of Miranda became worthy of the title of apex predator, of something that could be visually understood, at even the slightest of glances, of being capable of braving the roughest of seas.

The other merfolk had continued in Bellanda’s manner. They were large, with long necks and long heads and long torsos and long tails and were built up with muscle and fat and scale, even if they were always lacking a certain essential element Bellanda had in her extent of such things.

Laudanda was a different matter entirely. Where the others varied in proportion to create different lengths, or had similar lengths to Miranda but entirely different proportions, Laudanda had the proportions of Bellanda but the sheer size to dwarf her sister, even if she too were lacking in the sheer amount piled up onto the frame of her younger sibling.

Laudanda didn’t have to. What she had accomplished in size alone made up for Bellanda’s own bodily expertise, filling the space in a manner more similar to the whales and sharks outside than any of the servants around her. Even the guards, stationed at the doors and flanking by her sides, looked more and more like an afterthought, like it was simply tradition to have them there, not need.

Laudanda, massive, dwarfing Miranda and rendering Aaravi down into a toy that had been carried into a place of honor and dignity, filled the space with a gravity and a weight that was more than just physical, but extended outwards to suffocate the mind, to smother thought in its sleep, to render any question of resistance into a moot point. Laudanda, crown on her head, radiated the cold, uncaring death of the universe, the point of judgement through with all would have to answer to eventually, and Laudanda, eldest of the Vanderbilt sisters, first-born of their King, carried nothing but contempt for what the two of her youngers had brought her as an offering.

“[Greetings, Cees'rril'ta Yhtun-Tswe, dei if’en Ms’ebh’k Slz'Exkii and Cees'rril'ta Fikire’Lske, dei if’en Ms’ebh’k Tag'yct'eh. I see you’ve found fit to join us.]”

“[Good evening, Cees'rril'ta Fikig’Erke, dei if’en Ms’ebh’k Mkorr’jrr. It is good to have made our return.]” Miranda’s voice took on a cadence that Aaravi had only heard scant few times before. Even and smooth, unruffled by emotion nor intent, she let her voice ring low and ring true.

What Aaravi knew of Miranda, even from before she got to know Miranda, even when Miranda was poking and prodding at her, trying to get her to snap, vanished in an instant, slipped down beneath the waves into something regal, something perfect. It was the kind of voice that forced an entire room to look at her, held the world captive without even having to utter a word of her own authority, for the sake of how clearly lived it was in every phrase.

As it was, it was a voice that gave Aaravi hives. It was the voice of a stranger to her.

“[Cees'rril'ta Mkorr’jrr,]” Bellanda offered, a concession. “[You are forgetting someone. Unless, of course, you have already forgotten why you were sent here to greet us? Surely you aren’t here of your own good will.]”

“[And you,]” Laudanda’s voice did not rise nor change, but shifted with the word, placing tension along it, pulling it taut in her mouth, “[ought to know better than to speak in such a manner already. At least save it for after the main event, won’t you?]”

“[I assure you I would never dream of such a thing.]”

Already the conversation was taking on a certain quality that left Aaravi uneasy. It normally would have been good to be forgotten, especially as things began to shift for the worse and her company began to pay more attention to each other than her. Even normally, it wouldn’t have been so bad to see certain families begin to tense and position at each other, nearing each other’s throats. There were opportunities in that, ways for her to use it to her advantage, make some great use of it all.

This was not that. This was the feeling of sitting silently in a room as two people got nearer and nearer to screaming at each other, and Aaravi was unable to excuse herself nor even pretend she wasn’t stuck there, right in the middle of them, the very item at issue.

“[Cees'rril'ta Fikire’Lske Tag'yct'eh does have a point,]” Miranda added again, hanging just as placidly within the water as Laudanda, who had not yet turned her eyes to Aaravi. “[I trust that the customs decree went through without issue? There is no point in wasting time on something that has already been confirmed, and I am certain you wish to get back to the rest of your duties.]”

“[I can confirm that it went through just fine.]” Laudanda paused like she wanted to test the other two, like she was waiting for one of them to make the fatal mistake of interrupting her, of presuming.

“[However, it has been made clear to me that before any of us are permitted to allow your guest to witness any of the proceedings, that she will first have to be cleared through an audience with one of the prophets. I am here to escort you to that audience, and to serve as witness for the Throne that it occurred and the results of that audience.]”

The word prophets tingled in Aaravi’s mind. Still the charm offered her that word, called to mind the usual set of definitions that Aaravi associated prophets with, but it just…

There was something more to it. It didn’t feel right, that although the literal definition of the word was all the same, that she was using it in that literal definition, there was just something else there. Like there was some kind of association that was being assumed or some intended image that was supposed to come to Aaravi’s mind, one that didn’t have enough tied in with the rest of the sentence to pull it forward.

It was a weird word to choose, not really in that Aaravi was doubting whatever the translation charm said that it was or was supposed to be, but just in that… It felt weird. There was no other way to say it; it felt weird to Aaravi and she didn’t know how she was supposed to think of it or what she was supposed to take away from it. Something was missing here, but she didn’t even have anywhere to look for what that absence was, so she just… tolerated it. Accepted it as it was, and moved on.

The two princesses she had arrived with were not accepting it though. Whatever that missing element was, it apparently was enough to offend both of them, because Aaravi felt Miranda tighten up all at once underneath her, heard the lilt in her voice that came when she was asking someone if they really wanted to do something, and the look that flared in Bellanda’s eye in that one instant alone…

“[What?]” Miranda asked. To someone else, someone in Monstropolis, someone an entire lifetime away, that tone alone would have given them terrible pause as a weight dropped into their stomach. Laudanda was less impressed. “[You know that is not standard procedure. I would have had to have authorized such a use of the prophets in the first place, authorization which does not correspond to your own range of specialties. That is overstepping your bounds, you know you have no claim to such acts.]”

As good as Miranda gave it, as good as Bellanda was, staring back at Laudanda as though… Aaravi didn’t know what — Laudanda could give as good as she took.

“[While I would loathe to cross into your territory, I can hardly call any part of this standard. Regardless, you can cease blaming me for such an indignity. This order was given by the Ts’yute, so if you have any complaints, perhaps you should levy them at him for a change. It was approved by his and my courts earlier, and if you question the legitimacy of this news, then I would be happy to wait while it is fetched for you.]”

“[No, no. That is not needed.]”

Miranda was still tense. Miranda had not gotten any less tense, even as minor inflections in her voice changed yet. Aaravi didn’t know what they were. She wasn’t good at voices, nor intentions, nor emotions, she couldn’t read them like Miranda could, she was just stuck here barging ahead while Miranda knew what the hell was going on.

She thought they sounded like defeat, but they couldn’t be, right? Why would Miranda be feeling defeated, over this, over any of this?

Bellanda tried to save them, to come to her sister’s rescue. “[That is still not proper. You are still overstepping your bounds, it should still be Cees'rril'ta Yhtun-Tswe Slz’Exkii for authorization. When was the last time you even managed one of the prophets?]”

That was the wrong thing to say.

Laudanda’s head bent low, the movement slow and precise, turning her gaze with a practiced sweep to Bellanda. There was just a few feet between them all, and even this minor adjustment cleared precious space between the two of them, space that Aaravi felt every inch slip away.

Her lips tensed back. It was, in no small part, the same sort of gesture that Miranda made when she smiled at Aaravi, using the same sort of muscles to produce a similar effect, even drawing the end of the mouth back towards her earfin.

This was not a smile though. It was not Miranda’s gesture, modified for a face she did not have and to appease people who shared little with her in terms of anatomy alone. This ticked something in the back of Aaravi’s brain, something that made her senses come back in sharp and hot clarity, time slowing down to seconds scattered uselessly in the sand. She grasped harder at the handle on Miranda’s neck, coiled the muscles in her arms and in her legs, tried to think back about what she could do, if there was anything she could do.

What use was it, being a slayer down here? What use was everything she had known on how to wield herself, how to point herself forward and against the world, cut it apart on the edge of her, drive down into its heart with nothing but a reckless scream to remember her by?

She had been trained in water, but that was pathetically shallow, nothing but puddles, compared to all of this. She had been brought up learning how to kill beasts that lived in the deep, but all of her training emphasized finding higher ground for leverage, and there was no land here, no shore she could crawl up onto.

Nothing she could do, not before she was already hopelessly outclassed by those who had lived here since the world was new and blinking in the light of its infant sun.

“[Are you going to continue these little games of yours? Or should I go back and tell the Ts’yute that you are serving as an obstacle in the way of enacting his will and the will of the courts?]”

“Um,” Aaravi finally said, no longer able to tolerate sitting here on Miranda’s back, watching what was happening and being unable to stop any part of it, to control it, to make it stop happening. She just had to do something, had to put this rising manic tide somewhere, and where she put it was in her big fat mouth. Her nerves were crackling, crisping, and if she didn’t move now she would die, they would die, they would all die. “Nice to meet you too, uh, Laudanda. Vanderbilt, right?”

“[Oh, good.]” Laudanda continued on, finally turning her eyes up to look at Aaravi. They were the same impossible blue as Miranda’s eyes, but turned cooler, brighter still like the nuclear blue of antifreeze, or of a stream running through the heart of a glacier. Aaravi would’ve thought something snide about it, but the sheer act of turning her own slit-pupiled eyes, strange and bright and brilliant and crystalline, made Aaravi’s heart leap up into her throat, and she could not think any more. “[She can talk. I see your skills with charmcrafting remain appropriate to your station, Cees'rril'ta Yhtun-Tswe Slz’Exkii.] Yes, I suppose you would call me that.”

It was only one last vestige of stubbornness that stopped Aaravi from flinching away from the use of English, away from the razor’s edge of it that was so immediately, plainly obvious.

“[It is still not appropriate,]” Miranda tried again, her body still stiff and tense under Aaravi. Her eyes were still focused on her elder sister, whose scales were dull silver to the far extreme, nearly an off-white, the color of permafrost. “[She is a landfolk, even if the court approved on such a thing it would be in violation of the other missives. She would not be approved to witness such a thing, even if an audience has been approved.]”

“[You would know all about that, wouldn’t you?]” Aaravi didn’t know what to do. A slackness arrived in Miranda’s face with Laudanda’s words like she had been slapped, scolded, told off like an animal, stinking and dragging something filthy in on the nice carpet. There had to be something, right? There had to be something that Aaravi could do. “[I suppose they saw the risk as fitting, if not already underway. After all, her Review of Transport and Border Permissions has been approved, has it not?]”

“[You’re wasting time,]” Bellanda came again, her own hatred brought down to a low simmer, the slight adjustments of her tail putting her in greater contact with Miranda’s. “[We don’t have all day to discuss this, and we are all going to be wanting for time during this part of the year, so get on with it. Did you have someone bring the prophet up?]”

“[Yes, in fact.]” Laudanda lifted her head, Aaravi thinking unhelpfully of just how easily it could clamp around her, use those teeth, those jaws. Her lips still did not relax. Still there was a faint gap between them, a sliver where Aaravi could see ivory. “[Cees'rril'ta Yhtun-Tswe Slz’Exkii’s people were quite compliant when I contacted them, and all were very willing to offer the prophet V’tyay’wo iet Mkau’maj for such a purpose. I have the room cleared and set already, and I can call them in once we are ready. Unlike some people, I am quite capable of planning ahead of time.]”

Bellanda’s return was desperate. Even Aaravi saw that, one last final turn to try and have the last word. She knew it well. “[Have you at least scheduled a chamber on one of the lower floors?]”

“[Why, if I knew you would ask that, Cees'rril'ta Fikire’Lske Tag'yct'eh, I would have scheduled it much further away.]”

***

The room, as it were, really wasn’t that far away.

It was on the same level as the private dock, sealed away behind another sphincter-door, but otherwise it was just a short passage down a hallway and to the right, hardly very long for Aaravi to remain clinging to Miranda’s back.

The way they were lined up, Laudanda in the front and Bellanda in the back, made Aaravi anxious that Laudanda would slap her in the head with her tail. She didn’t, but the thought was there as she felt the eldest sister’s slipstream, powerful even to her own lack of knowledge on things like this, the water pulling them forward as it tried to replace what had been displaced by Laudanda’s passing, and that was more than enough to make up for all the mass of Miranda and Aaravi combined.

It was odd, seeing the hallway. There were more decorations here, worn into the walls and set into the floor and ceiling, than the castle above ground, mostly in the form of statues of sitting merfolk, their eyes closed, their mouths shut, their fins splayed wide, gold scales patterned over pale stone like piebald markings. She could even see charms tied around their necks and wound around their snouts, bowls laid in front of them where small crabs of white and bright pinks and reds gathered. More servants sped through, most of them nodding and whistling something like good will or good wishes or even good luck to the three princesses as they passed.

Aaravi supposed that also would have included their guest too, as she earned more than a few startled glances from the staff as they continued on, going about some unfathomable business in the depths of the castle. Their song passed through her and into her, the stream of thought and information that was just as much a tapped vein as the flow of water through the calcified tunnel, and what it sang of was of something new, something unlike they had ever seen before, someone who was a very precious guest.

There were more merfolk too, at the further ends of the hallway. They didn’t look like staff nor servants, and milled around, speaking to each other in low voices, their clothes more elaborate and flowing in the water.

Laudanda paused to let them through into the room, and as they did so, Aaravi realized that they had been followed by guards all this time. It was strange to see; them settling in beside Laudanda at the door, taking new positions as Laudanda entered in. Aaravi was simply so focused on all the merfolk, all at once, that she hadn’t processed their presence, slipping away into something silent and unthinking, shadows trailing along in the low light.

The door closed. Miranda and Bellanda both took seats — this looked to be a sitting room of some variety, with a second door other than the entrance at the far end. It too followed along in the pattern of red light in this part of the Palace, but it was smaller yet, and had more paintings now on the walls, depicting a scene of some merfolk clad in only brief pieces of armor, tossing a net around the mouth of some massive sea creature, something like a whale with a ridged throat and a bowed head. Small shrimp scurried over these surfaces, picking at the tapestry.

The room, not rectangular and not flat-floored, simply extended down into a bowl, filled with white sand in the middle. Chairs were placed around that. They might not have been chairs like Aaravi had ever seen — angled more like an incline or a ramp, triangular with a high peak where Miranda settled her chest and arms, and slanted down towards the ground, where Miranda let the rest of her body lay, with her legs kicked out to the sides, the incline covered with a plush cushion — but she knew a chair when she saw one.

She also knew the hesitant look that passed between Bellanda and Miranda, in the scant seconds they could. Miranda was still tense, like lead tucked up against Aaravi’s stomach, and Aaravi thought again about what she was supposed to do here.

She didn’t realize she was supposed to move away from Miranda or off of her back, not until Laudanda swam over and grabbed the wrist that she was using to hold onto Miranda’s harness.

The first thing to hit Aaravi’s ears, even before the pain or the little puffs of red ink that spilled out and from the tips of Laudanda’s claws, which had scratched long ditches into the skin of Aaravi’s wrist, was the sharp, strangled hrnk! that came from beneath her, as the handle that Aaravi was still holding onto dug upwards, into Miranda’s throat. Aaravi felt her pitch forward a little, long before the impulse to let go ever entered Aaravi’s mind, and certainly before the split-second impulse to not let go, not ever, that did arrive in Aaravi’s brain.

Her mouth gaped, moving on its own to try and angle for words or a cry or something to say, some stupid instinct from a side of her she never wanted to let into the warmth of her life telling her to bare fang and mandible both for ultimate ineffectiveness. One hand got halfway to her thigh for a dagger that wasn’t there, before Laudanda yanked again, hard, tightening her grip even more over the skin of her wrist, and more little clouds of red rose up and into the water, deep and dark and black.

When Aaravi let go, not out of training nor understanding nor comprehension of what even was happening around her, Laudanda pulled her away without even a second thought, leaving Miranda making a few more strangled noises behind her.

Princess Laudanda Vanderbilt, eldest of the four sisters, deposited Aaravi wordlessly in the middle of the room, so that she hung there empty and alone.

(She wasn’t even pulling that hard. Aaravi knew she wasn’t grabbing that hard, that rough, that coarse on open skin instead of scales. She knew what those hands could do. She had seen what those hands could do. If Laudanda wanted, she could have gripped tighter, could have kept going until Aaravi’s wrist shattered and she screamed, could have pulled her claws down and cut straight to the bone.

Aaravi was just too used to the delicate touch Miranda used with her, the care she took in tracing over Aaravi’s body, the way she knew how delicate skin was, how easy it was to break.

Even now, her arm was already bruising, blotches of dark purple and blue rising up from beneath.)

“Aaravi Mishra,” Laudanda spoke, settling into her own chair now with the measured grace of something with her sheer bulk and all the time in the world, while Aaravi kicked her legs and tried to remain hovering in place like the merfolk had, effortless, thoughtless, “you have been called for an audience with one of our prophets. Do you know what such an endeavor entails?”

“I, I, f- I—” Aaravi tripped over her words, stumbled. It was only by survival instinct alone that she hadn’t started cussing out the eldest sister, that something in her animal brain still told her to be fearful, to be cautious. She made more hissing breaths between her teeth, more half-words that died there, before she could deliver her own killing blow.

Behind her, Miranda made a few more soft, pained sounds, and Bellanda did not move from her seat, did not look back over at Miranda again.

Aaravi’s hand touched her opposite wrist, trying to put pressure over the cuts. They were shallow. It could have been worse, it could have been so much worse, but this sentiment offered no comfort and not even a salve to soothe the stinging.

“No, no, I don’t… I don’t know.” Finally, she arrived at that conclusion. It was not what the three had exchanged earlier, not prim and proper and poised, but it was close enough, and it would have to do.

“Good.”

Laudanda seemed pleased by this, for whatever measure that counted for. Her lips had gone relaxed again, and her fins tilted pleasantly forward, a gentle sort of interest that implied politeness and manners, and the easy sort of confidence that people like her always exuded in excess.

“All you need to know, is that you are to enter the opposing room, upon my cue, and to wait in front of the prophet when they are brought in. You are to listen to what they have to say to you — you are entitled to a degree of privacy for such an endeavor, and we will not follow you inside. When it is done, you are to come back out here again, and I will confirm that I have acted as witness. Are these simple instructions enough for you?”

“No, no, of course fff— No. I need… I need more. I just… stand there?”

“Is that not easy for you to do? It sounds rather simple to myself, but I am quite talented in listening, I shall admit.”

“That’s not what I MEA— That’s not what I meant.”

“Then enlighten me on what you did, as you failed to do so correctly the first time.”

Bellanda was shifting, just out of the corner of Aaravi’s vision. Moving in her seat. Having a hard time watching this without wanting to step in, surely, to correct Aaravi, to take her out of the limelight so that they would not have to just silently witness her fumble there.

“I don’t… It’s, it’s too simple. That can’t just be… That can’t just be all, can it?”

“No, of course not,” Laudanda flicked her fins, evidently pleased with herself. “But that’s nothing you need to worry about, and something you will see for yourself soon enough. Is that all? Can we get on with it?”

Aaravi had to keep moving to stop herself from drifting, from being pulled down and into the water or lifted up, away from where Laudanda had left her, at some position where it felt mutually easy for the both of them to size the other up. It was pathetic to watch. Aaravi, human, or telling herself that she was, wanted to drift out of frame, to be pushed around by the water that would not simply flow around her body, and she could not simply adjust her arms or her legs or her tail to keep herself steady. She had to kick, and work, and exhaust herself so plainly in front of three merfolk who never even had to try. It was stupid, and childish, and made Aaravi burn hot where she was, subjected to the scrutinizing gaze upon her.

“I, I— yeah. Yeah, I think so. Let’s… Let’s get this over with.”

“Excellent. Agreeable people do make this much easier. I shall have the prophet called in.”

What Laudanda then spoke was a word which was not a word, or, Aaravi didn’t think it was. It wasn’t translated by her charm, and twisted subtly in the water in a way that she didn’t think sounds were supposed to do.

It moved. Not movement like the rumbling of the deep brassy tones of Miranda’s voice, the vibrations that danced up Aaravi’s arms and made goosebumps rise up all along her skin. Nor was it movement like the twisting weave of meaning of other merfolk sound, of their great and rising tide of information that was passed from each other to the other without care nor discrimination, a complex lock of interconnected meaning that rose and fell and rose again. Nor movement like the dancing in the ear of merfolk language itself, the shifting tunes like music lifted up so great and wonderfully that the act itself of creation motivated it to dance to its own beat.

No. This word moved like merfolk themselves. Like an animal, twitching there in the water, hitting Aaravi’s ears with something that did not seem to stop changing once it had left Laudanda’s lips and throat. It moved like the fine ripples of something darting through next to Aaravi’s ears and near her body, something alive and capable, possessing some internal will of its own that it was not supposed to have, that Aaravi should not have been able to feel.

Laudanda did not speak again after this word. She lifted her head up gracefully, craning her neck so that it swept back with a swan’s sleekness, and waited.

Aaravi kicked there in the middle, treaded water. Waited with her.

She didn’t know what they were waiting for, what cue she was supposed to be looking for in the Palace beyond. She couldn’t hear anything outside of the room, couldn’t tell what was happening out there, couldn’t tell even if she was supposed to be waiting for something coming from long outside the room or something within. The two merfolk behind her didn’t say anything, Miranda’s eyes dazed and distant, Bellanda’s eye focused on a point no one else could see.

Aaravi was afraid to ask for clarity, for something to hold onto. She was sure this breach of silence would be counted as another failure, another note from which a complaint could be lodged. She worried for Miranda, and for the burn in her arm, blood still clouding the water by tiny increments around her hand.

She felt the urge to itch and scratch at the cuts rise up, to try and remove some of the irritation by opening them up further, the pain an easier presence to tolerate than the mad hive of boredom, of waiting for another shoe to drop on something that Aaravi wasn’t even sure that she could see, on something being needed of her without understanding of what.

Neither Bellanda nor Miranda seemed to want her to go through it, whatever it was.

Did that really mean anything, though? Was it just another way for Laudanda to get under their skins, to leverage some power over the three of them?

But it seemed so serious, though. Aaravi, having never once spoken to her father in any terms that weren’t childish hope or the seething indignation of someone not yet having even arrived at their tenth birthday, whose main avenue for understanding courtly manners came through Miranda who decidedly elected not to torture Aaravi with such things, couldn’t help but hold onto the simple ignorance that everything that was said in such a manner seemed serious.

Sure, she might have not necessarily believed them to actually be serious, that royals were creatures of overreaction and scrutiny of details that no one else cared about and patently didn’t matter, but that didn’t mean the royals weren’t being terribly serious about it. If anything, it made more sense to Aaravi to make fun of them for it, taking such minor things so serious all the time, everything from the weather to what was being served a matter of life and death.

She just didn’t know. She was stuck here, kicking her legs in the middle of the room and hoping she didn’t stir up all the sand in the basin either, while three princesses stared at her without saying anything, waiting on something that Aaravi wasn’t sure how to look out for.

It was all profoundly humiliating, in the worst way possible.

And then, when Aaravi thought she wouldn’t be able to take it any longer, the sphincter-door opened. Not the one that they had come in through, but the one on the far wall, which had remained squinched shut with a decided and determined pressure, suddenly relaxing and curling into its own edges.

Aaravi didn’t get a full glimpse into the other room, but she did see the two merfolk that swam out.

They were not servants, which Aaravi could guess because their attire was nicer than any of the servants. They matched in stark and silent navy, cut close to their bodies with silver trim, not stretching over their back but plated over their chest, decorated with curtains of finer red fabric that hung over their shoulders, each weighted down with bells that rang faintly as they swam. Both were a familiar sort of slate grey with a lighter, dusky underbelly, zagged with stripes over their backs to match the shadows of water from above.

They also were not servants, because as they entered into the room, Miranda turned her head up to look at them, and what passed between the three was familiar and professional and the ache of a groove well worn. They tilted their heads upwards to her, giving her flashes of their throats, and when they spoke they addressed Miranda more than any of the rest of them. This must have been proper conduct too, because Laudanda did not offer any comment on such a thing, so they must have been Miranda’s, in some way that mattered to the Merkingdom.

“[The prophet V’tyay’wo iet Mkau’maj is ready for an audience, Cees'rril'ta. There were no issues in transporting them up. The space has been cleaned and cleared for usage and possible contamination has been overruled as a factor. They have been secured accordingly.]”

The name sounded odd. Of course, her charm wouldn’t translate it — it told her that it was a proper noun, a name, and names seldom were translated, because that really was all they were. It made things more complicated for Aaravi to return them, but she guessed it was just the easiest way, and any proxy would have been not nearly as easy as figuring out something else to call them, something that Aaravi could actually produce with her own vocal system.

But there was just a little more to that name. Something in the implication of it, really, that shone through in a brief glimmer. Something about willingness, she thought? Like intent, maybe, that something had been done knowing the consequences, or something had been sacrificed, or…

She really couldn’t tell. It was important that, whatever the name was referring to, it had been done with purpose, an intentional sort of act which could not be denied in its outcome.

She thought for a moment that the concept that was flowing through the charm was suicide, but that couldn’t be right.

“[Very well.]” Miranda’s voice sounded the same, proper, official, authoritative, beautiful. Why did it sound normal? Why did it sound the same? Something itched in the back of Aaravi’s mind, a memory half-remembered, an uncanny valley spreading out like the missing last step on the stairs. That was wrong. It was wrong. She shouldn’t be speaking like that. “[You are dismissed for our audience. Please wait in the hallway, we will get you when the prophet is ready to go back.]”

Miranda inhaled, and exhaled it back out behind her jaw, through her gills. Aaravi might not have seen their flare, the soft red hearts inside of their covers, but she knew they were there. She knew the action even without a need to see.

“[Aaravi Mishra, are you ready to begin?]”

Aaravi kicked her legs, spinning her body around so as to more directly face Miranda, to look back at her. It felt necessary. It should have been necessary. Aaravi was sure, just from what she had seen so far, that it would have been.

It was strange, to look back down at Miranda, her hands folded up beneath her chest, the golden grip and handle still gleaming low around her neck, where Aaravi had been the past few days. Her head tilted up at Aaravi, her chin held low and her fins fanned about her face, so that all focused down onto the awful gleam of her crown and the strangeness of her eyes, their slits widened out into dark atoll-drops to account for the lighting.

It had been a long time since Miranda had looked at her like this, and that Aaravi had looked down at her and saw the same. The sinews of their relationship were still so new, so raw, but it had been so long yet, hadn’t it? Did they only have to define the word as when it was first spoken aloud, and not when it had crept in as a lived thing, pushed this feeling out?

Aaravi had almost entirely forgotten what it looked like, how Miranda’s face wore such an expression when she looked at her. Even though it fit just the same as the first day they had met, tailored to Miranda’s features and set there like she was born to wear it, it couldn’t have been the same, could it? It had been hung up in the closet for a reason, forgotten about for a reason?

Miranda was a princess. She was, and always had been, a princess. And she wore it so plainly, made it so clear to everyone who knew it, wouldn’t let anyone forget. Not in words, not in actions, not in the wear of her frame.

The first time Miranda had looked at Aaravi like that, it was with the utter and unfailing confidence of something that Aaravi had learned to hate long before she had ever even been a slayer, of someone who thought they could own her.

There was no last time that Miranda had looked at Aaravi like that, because it had just vanished, like a ghost. Aaravi hadn’t even noticed that it had gone. All she had noticed was what had grown in its place, and the enticing thought of encouraging this strange new cultivar, and what might happen if she brought it inside.

“Yeah,” Aaravi said, granted the peace of not thinking about the rest of the room, for just a moment. “I think I’m ready, Slz’Exkii.”

“[Then go ahead.]” Laudanda’s voice was behind Aaravi now, a point that made her have to turn again. Her legs were cramping, between having to swim even this long on her own, after two days of nothing but remaining underwater, having to swim every small distance between Miranda and anything she wanted that was too close to justify being carried. “[We will be waiting for you outside.]”

Silence hung there then, as the two merfolk exited the room as they were told, leaving the royals and the landfolk remaining. It took several moments for Aaravi to realize none of the merfolk were getting up to swim to her, which meant that she was expected to swim to the door on her own.

The distance was so minor. So small, insignificant in the grand scheme of things, something that Aaravi wouldn’t even have blinked at on any other day.

But here and now, as she had to straighten her body out and push her arms forward, kicking her legs behind her, painfully aware of how slow she was compared to the merfolk, their eyes on her inefficient body, her meager form against their own, how much it took and how much drag her own body created, to swim all of that slim few meters to the door.

It slid open, and Aaravi slipped inside, before it closed solidly behind her.

***

The chamber was smaller than the sitting room before it. It was decorated in the same fashion, with dark red walls and red lighting, a sloped floor and walls that made it all feel more like a lodged growth in the side of the preceding room rather than an architectural unit, but there might have been only room in here for one Laudanda to take a seat. Said seat was in front of Aaravi when she entered, and with the way merfolk chairs were made, it angled upwards like a ramp, like Aaravi was expected to run up it, or use it to slide back down out of the entryway.

There were no paintings in here. That fact would have felt less ominous, if they weren’t replaced by the one table that Aaravi had seen so far, laid out from where the tip of the seat met it to divide the room in half, longer than it was wide, and with a lipped surface to leave the top as a flat basin.

The table was important because it was the only rational place Aaravi’s mind could go, as she did not, would not, could not, look at what was chained there on the other side of the room from her.

She had felt it the second she came in through the fleshed door, slamming into her brain with all the delicacy of a freight train.

She didn’t know why the door was a last barrier, what about it denied entry to the one surefire thing Aaravi had always been blessed with, that she could kiss to the skin of her inheritance as a slayer and know that it would have been hers even if things had gone an entire world differently.

Doors shouldn’t have been barriers, weren’t barriers before, weren’t enough to keep out the rot as it seeped through the cracks and festered in the air and spread its squalid infection through everything that stood in its way.

The clarion bells of reality rang bright and clear in Aaravi’s temples, thundering through her nerves and her veins and flooding her with the last vestiges of what she needed to survive, training and nature taking over as one to tell her that this was what she was made for. She knew it like the hound knows the fox, the predator-scent overwhelming to her senses. Her body knew it as danger down to the cellular level, down to the atomic, as something that rang through her and defined her as what she was, a mammal, an animal, a living thing, a thing of this world and this reality and these physics, as existential threat, as last chance.

Her eyes turned upwards, pinpricking down to slits, so much like her ul’kiha in the previous room, so little like the human she called herself. They gleamed with a dull, murky red right in the back of her pupils, tapetum lucidum reflecting back all that poured in from around her, the same color as an owl in the night, as a crocodile, as something that she liked to pretend she wasn’t.

The prophet twitched and thrashed where they had been left, spasming blindly in the space on the other side of the table.

They had been a merfolk, once.

Their face was all gone, lost somewhere in what was now a mass of scar tissue that flowed down from the tip of their nose to the first big hump of their spine, where their neck connected to their shoulders, the shape of what used to be there only mere illusion now.

Aaravi could see the pale outline of their skull, the four large holes in the back where jaw muscles sat on alive specimens, the bow of cheek that cut forward and curved downwards in an arch to meet the ridge of jaw bone, teeth bared for all to see. They didn’t have lips anymore, had nothing to cover them, and so Aaravi could see the crisscross of pointed, triangular teeth that fit together like a fish trap, each one wider and thicker, more in line with a whale than an alligator.

Their nose crest was all white and dull pink now, the remaining skin warped up into pantomimes of the scales that had once covered it, and they did not have nostrils anymore so much as two black holes at the top of their head, above eye sockets that were empty save for a ring of disjointed bone, and if Aaravi looked inside she could see the ridges of sinus covered in blown-out blood vessels.

They had no hands and no feet, but the cuts for these were smoother than the mat of scars that washed down and over their front, the scarring minimal as the skin, still present and covered in dusty brown scales freckled with yellow, pulled together over the stumps, revealing only a faint pink where they covered the end of the bone.

Even so, they had been restrained all the same, chains tethered up to solid looking restraints around their middle and neck, which led down and to the floor, where they had been fastened with large, imposing looking locks onto metal tethers, welded past the cushioning and into the not-bone of the building itself. Other large metal fixtures were set into the bones of their remaining limbs, again with surgical precision as the tide of scar tissue swelled up and tried its hardest to swallow them up, providing additional security for more chains, more bindings.

Each one was lined with tiny marks, symbols, engraved along and into each link, and although Aaravi could not see them in detail, they stunk of magic and of intent.

The instant that Aaravi was in the room, that the door had closed behind her and left her with this thing, this prophet, they had started to scream, flexing their jaws open in undulating patterns that rippled down their throat and to their chest.

Teeth bared out of countless lipless mouths, stacked one on top of the other. They couldn’t help it. They couldn’t help anything as they kicked their tail there, naked body fighting against their bonds, exposed and spurred into fear and terror by Aaravi’s presence, and screamed their great irritation at her visage, their great fit at being forced to bear witness to her.

It was a terrible spurning on by whatever lived inside them now, whatever had pushed their gill covers out through the front of their throat until they hung down as jaws with stringy muscle grown over them anew from the scar tissue, teeth shoved out through both ends in a corruption of their form. It was whatever that had opened them up inside, left the meat of their neck dangling around and behind their nearly cleaned skull like a botched attempt at decapitation, too many throats and not enough space for such a hollow to span inside of themselves.

Aaravi could see it flickering beneath their skin, see it in the exposed and badly healed muscle that had not really healed at all, the splatter near the far end like somehow, even underwater, they had been dunked or splashed with something, something that had burned its way in and twitched inside of them now, lived in them.

The pestilence, the rot, the place from beyond. It stung in the back of Aaravi’s palate, a too-sweet metal that crept up and into her nose and down into her throat and leaded in her stomach, stuck to her tongue and formed a rind against her teeth, made her mandibles jerk upwards and against her upper gums until they ached, unable to spread themselves out into a threat posture without first tearing up her cheeks. It whined in the back of her head, a pooling sensation back in the wash of her thoughts, and Aaravi knew she had to kill it.

She had to put it out of its misery, had to make it stop screaming, the sound so massive that it stuck inside her ears and cancelled out anything else that might’ve lived in there, drowned her thoughts, left her there in the certainty of purpose.

There are things beyond this world, Aaravi, things that are not of it. They are so great and so foul that their very touch corrupts, that they made the evil that lives here when they briefly brushed up against it once, and that infection, that rot, spread out from there, tainted life itself, chased it back into the far corners of fear where it could only hope to survive.

It’s your purpose to kill them. It’s your purpose to ensure they can’t hurt anyone else, can’t infect anything else, can’t devour home and hope and leave the people of the world orphaned without someplace to go back to. They don’t belong here, and they don’t belong anywhere. There is nothing they can do but kill, and kill in the worst way possible, the way that you can’t come back from.

You have to stop them. That’s what all of this is for, has been for. Someone has to find a way to stop them.

Aaravi was the scalpel that would cut the infection out, excise the parasite, confine the rot to where it could not hurt anyone else. Aaravi knew what she had to do. Aaravi had been left without a blade, but she would tear it apart with her hands, her nails, her teeth if she had to. It was the only way.

The thing, the prophet, screamed again, and only then did Aaravi realize that it was speaking to her.

“You, you, you, curse-child, you—”

It was not words. It was not language. It was something else, something that crept into Aaravi’s brain from beneath, reached down through the smoking gun of a billion years, seized something inside of her. Something that pulled it back out in turn, regurgitated back to Aaravi and into her hands, something that couldn’t stop the retching of its own body as it all came back up.

“No,” Aaravi said, because she had no words to offer, nothing to give.

The prophet seized forward on themselves again, rows of jaws clenching shut on themselves, grinding down so that their neck bulged outwards at a wrong angle, trying to tear themselves apart backwards.

“—out, out, get out, you, you’re going to— there is a line drawn around you that is a rope that is a wire that is growing tighter, drawing closer and closer and closer, a knot tied together until it blinks itself out, self-termination, self-annihilation—”

Aaravi glanced back at the door, back at the walls. There weren’t decorations in here. It wasn’t like the front room of Miranda’s castle, with its dust-covered weapons and tools of war sitting on full display to convince visitors of the history within them. No paintings. No real furniture that could be lifted. No sharp objects.

The thought of the phone in her pocket eclipsed under this need, dismissed as guttural understanding that it simply wouldn’t do the job. That was something that Aaravi would regret later.

The prophet raised their arms, smacked them helplessly against their neck, against the curtain of sheeted flesh that hung down from it, grew tired of that. It screamed again, low and gurgling and like the breaking open of the sky, like smashing the jaw of a hellmouth, like all the souls climbing up out of their graves and realizing the agony of being alive all over again, screaming it to the absence of an answer. It screamed enough that it should have shredded its vocal organ, should have turned it all to horrible mush inside its scarred frame, should have torn itself open from the stomach and everted all its viscera into the water around them, into Aaravi’s lungs, forced to do what they were not made for.

“I’ll make it quick,” Aaravi said again, to no one. No one was listening. No one could listen. Only this thing, only the prophet, which was being torn out of its own body, a body which was and was not its own anymore, something pretending to be alive and real.

Was the heart still beating? Had the infection wrapped around that, curled tight, seized it so wholly that if Aaravi pierced it, they would all tunnel out through the skin, into her?

“—there is not going to be another tomorrow, the sun has gone past the horizon and it blazes bright and burns those who stand there but it will not be there again, what will be left will be all that remains, soon names and time will take the rest, and the blood will thin into seawater that runs into the rivers and into the sky, turn this ball a seeking needy red, make it hungry—”

“You have to have something in here, right? You’re all stupid fucking royals, goddamn RICH PEOPLE SHIT, you have to have SOMETHING, poison, an assassination spoon, come on, come on, COME ON—”

Aaravi swam back towards the wall, keeping her kicks shallow in order to not put herself any closer to the awful thing. She didn’t stop until her palms felt along the solid surface behind her, smooth and slick, hard to hold onto, slippery like the surface of a pearl dunked underwater and not wholly washed of the leavings of the oyster that had gestated it.

“I know you have something in here, you HAVE to, you’re all fucking trap doors and hidden knives and shit, where is it, WHERE IS IT??”

“—heart-breaker, end-maker, hand that holds the knife that draws the blood, she is yours now and you are going to take it, take it, take it away and cut the line and spill the blood and it won’t come back, turn her inside out, you know what it looks like and have seen the end, seen where this goes and you won’t take anything else, won’t go anywhere else other than where your feet take you—”

“Shut the fuck UP!!”

Aaravi hit her fist hard against the wall, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make the joints of her hand complain. She gritted her teeth together all at once, pulled her lips back as far as they would go, showed the ends of her mandibles.

It didn’t crack the material. It didn’t part to reveal something underneath, didn’t open a trap door, didn’t show anything Aaravi hadn’t already seen other than how stupidly futile it was, to sit in here in the same room as the thing, babbling and seizing and slamming its head down on the table now, not even aware that it seemed to be trying to crack open its own skull. It would have just been too easy if it could do Aaravi’s job for her. Just too simple for her to have it end so nicely and neatly.

She couldn’t even listen to what it had to say at this point, what it had to vomit up into her brain and her heart and her soul, chewing her open just to rend her back to filth again. It didn’t matter what it was saying, what it was trying to make a point of, whatever was speaking inside of what counted for nerves inside it, nerves that were twitching against the skin, seizing little lines of ridges that lifted up and swam back down again, over and over and over. Nothing it would have to say would matter. Nothing it said changed anything.

Aaravi wouldn’t listen.

“—going to take her away and the second follows the first, the second crosses behind her back and waits in the wings and knows what is going to happen before it does, says she doesn’t, lies like it won’t hurt and says it’s for the better of someone who stopped living long before she issued the order, insists the blood is cut and the blood is pure and doesn’t ask why it doesn’t singe, takes it by the handful and wraps it in something new, but it’s alive in her all the same and it’s gotten out too, gotten free—”

“Can you SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS?”

There wasn’t anything in here to use. There wasn’t anything she could fit into her hand, nothing she could throw at it, nothing she could peel off the walls and make use of. Could she strangle a merfolk? Would her hands even fit around them? What if she ripped their rippling jaws off, tore them apart, would they exsanguinate? Aaravi had never killed a merfolk without a tool before, didn’t think she could.

“—it’s going to hurt, you aren’t going to save her, she’s already dead, she’s already dead, it’s already inside her, it’s already done, oh slayer, oh slayer, oh slayer, there’s nothing to be done, your mother says she loves you, your mother says she loved you—”

The door behind her opened and Aaravi, shoved up so tight against the wall to get as much distance between her and the prophet as possible, didn’t have the space to fight as the displacement of water sucked her back through, left her tumbling head over ass as she was deposited out into the antechamber, right before Laudanda.

“Well,” the eldest of the Merkingdom’s princesses stated, betraying the interest dancing over her features, “that was promising. I will have to check how much of a half-life they have remaining, but I think they like you.”