Aazuria was rendered speechless. She remembered the lively young man she had spoken to only a few days ago. He had been full of vibrant energy and blunt, unsophisticated honesty. He had been a slightly more primitive and mediocre version of his big brother. But it did not seem possible that…
“I should have married him. I should have married him,” Brynne was moaning. “This is all my fault.”
“What do you mean?” Aazuria asked numbly. She had grown confused again.
Brynne tried to control her sniffles enough to speak coherently. “We dated for a while. A few years ago. You know how it is: close quarters on the ship, working together every day… he always made me laugh.” The brunette smiled through her tears. “But I thought… I thought he was beneath me—he had a lot of bad habits. Maybe if I had accepted one of his many proposals things would be different. Sometimes men change when they get married, don’t they?”
“I do not believe it works that way, dear,” Aazuria answered softly.
“He killed himself,” Brynne whispered. “At least I think he did. He was acting crazy. He said he saw a woman in the water…”
“What?” Aazuria sat up to attention. She looked at the other woman grimly and infused her tone with hardness. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Brynne nodded, wiping her nose on her sleeve and trying to calm her gasping breaths. “I… I was cooking. He took me aside. He asked me if I would reconsider marrying him if he was the permanent captain of the Magician. I laughed—I laughed at him and said that Trevain would sooner appoint me to that position than a lazy ass like Callder. Then he got angry and said something weird… he said that if I didn’t want him, he was going to go with the woman in the water…”
“What did she look like?” Aazuria demanded.
“What? What does that matter? He was just saying nonsense…”
“Any detail you remember matters!” Aazuria responded firmly.
“I think he said that she was blonde,” she said, sniffling. “She was wearing a black dress with some strange necklaces…”
“Necklaces?” Aazuria gripped Brynne’s shoulders. “This is not a joke. What kind of necklaces?”
“He mentioned shark’s teeth… lots of shark’s teeth. Callder’s always had a thing for them. He said that she had beckoned him to go away with her—and that he would go if I didn’t stop him. I just laughed and told him it was his lamest pick-up line yet, and I went back to cooking. He left, and skipped dinner, but I thought it was because he was mad at me. He usually gets moody like that after I reject him. Except no one has seen him since then.” Silent tears began to fall over Brynne’s cheeks again. “God, it’s all my fault.”
“It is not your fault, Brynne.” Aazuria closed her eyes. A black dress and shark’s teeth. This cannot be what I believe it is. My people wear green, and whoever lured Callder was definitely not one of us. The only sea-dwellers who wear shark’s teeth are… but it cannot be them. We defeated them ages ago in Japan! It cannot be the clan I am thinking of—but who else would dress like that? It seems that Trevain and I share a common enemy—whether he is aware of their existence or not.
“What does it all mean?” Brynne whispered.
“It is not good news,” Aazuria told her honestly. “Listen to me, Brynne. Do not go out on the water anymore. Do you hear me?” When the woman nodded, Aazuria sighed. “Thank you for the information.”
“Trevain was right. He’s always right.” Brynne hugged her legs against her chest. “We shouldn’t have been so greedy. I should have listened to him. He’s going to be so broken-hearted when he finds out. Callder was all he had.”
“He has us. We need to be there for him.” Aazuria squeezed the other woman’s shoulder gently. “I should check on him.” She left Brynne and began to climb the stairs to the second floor, already feeling the heaviness of Trevain’s grief. When she reached the corridor, she was stopped by a small hand on her arm.
“Is death usually this frequent for these land-dwellers?” Corallyn asked in a whisper.
“I do not believe so,” Aazuria answered. “Go down and sit with Brynne. Try to cheer her up a little.”
Corallyn nodded and darted off. Aazuria noticed that Elandria was standing in a cracked doorway. The two girls looked at each other knowingly for a moment.
“It is them, is it not?” Elandria asked. Her hands were shaking with fright as she signed the words. “The Clan of Zalcan. It is happening all over again. They are going to massacre us. The same way they wiped out the Bimini Empire. The same way they razed Yonaguni. Soon Adlivun will join these fallen kingdoms…”
“Not if I can help it,” Aazuria signed back. “Yonaguni might have been destroyed, and Queen Amabie might have had to perform an emergency evacuation, but she defended her people. We helped her fight them off in the fifties with minimal losses—and if Zalcan did have the audacity to reorganize, we will just disorganize and dispose of his men again. We will send dispatch messengers to ask the Ningyo for help.”
Elandria responded hesitantly. “Sister, we need to take definitive and immediate action. Perhaps we should also evacuate everyone and move to a different location… it is too dangerous to remain here.”
Aazuria stared at Elandria’s hands, unable to respond. She did not know where they would go. Many of her people had never been on land, and were rightly terrified of land-dwelling society. They could not run north, for with the approaching winter, the Arctic would be too cold for even the northern mermaids to survive.
“Aazuria?”
Nodding, the princess tried to display strength on her face. “Do not worry, Elan. We will figure this out shortly. I am going to check on Trevain.” Excusing herself from her frightened sister, she walked down the corridor towards Trevain’s room. She knocked once, lightly. Upon hearing no response she opened the door a tiny bit.
Trevain was sitting on his bed and staring at the wall.
“Trevain,” she spoke softly.
He slowly turned to look at her, and lifted his eyes piteously. “Zuri,” he mumbled. He had overheard her sisters calling her by the nickname over the few days that they had spent together, but this was the first time that he had used it himself. He shook his head wretchedly. “Please don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
She could see that he knew the truth of what had happened, even though he had not heard it himself. How could he be sure if he had not listened to Brynne’s story? Maybe he felt that if he did not hear the words, he would not have to accept them. “Are you sure…” she began.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he said, turning away. His voice cracked as he spoke. “I know Brynne. The wrath of that girl! She gets angry; she rages and rampages. She rips everything apart—but the only thing that could possibly make her cry… is if something happened to Callder. She loved him, even though she wouldn’t let go of her pride and admit it if you held a gun to her head. I can’t face this right now. He’s my little brother. He wasn’t perfect… isn’t! He isn’t perfect… God!”
Trevain buried his head in his hands. Aazuria went to his side. She could feel despair emanating from his body almost like a physical thing as she seated herself next to him. She put her arms around him, and rested her head on his shoulder. She hoped that her touch was comforting and motherly, but she didn’t feel very strong. Elandria’s words were floating through her mind. She thought of Bimini.
For thousands of years, the ruins now known as the Bimini Wall had been home to a thriving and prosperous undersea settlement in the Caribbean. That was until about a hundred years ago. An army of anarchist sea-dwellers from various clans and kingdoms all over the world had banded together under a revolutionary leader to form the Clan of Zalcan. They had ferociously attacked the Bimini Empire.
The underwater war had been waged for many years, causing a massive amount of collateral damage in the form of land-dweller casualties. The area became known as the “Bermuda Triangle” to superstitious seafarers. It was a well-known technique that mermaids used against each other, to attack ships or nearby surface settlements and bring huge numbers of suspicious investigators to the area, making it unlivable. In the 1940s, Bimini finally fell. The inhabitants of the empire were forced to relocate to nearby land, or to other underwater settlements. Adlivun had gained quite a few citizens from the fall of Bimini.
Aazuria’s thoughts and memories were interrupted as she felt Trevain tighten his grip on her. She was pulled away from her focus on maritime warfare and returned to the second story of this land-based dwelling. She was returned to the sorrow of the terrestrial man of whom she had grown so fond. She felt a consuming rush of anger, thinking of how both worlds and so many lives had been ravaged over the past century due to the cruelty and selfishness of the Clan of Zalcan. She hoped that they were not really the ones responsible for the minor attacks on the outskirts of Adlivun and on fishing boats in the area. There was still no confirmation; it could be anyone. But in her heart, she knew what was coming—just as Trevain had somehow known.
“How did you sense that there would be danger?” Aazuria asked him softly, feeling his soft grey hair under her fingertips.
He did not move from where he weakly rested his head against her chest before he responded in an empty voice. “It was just a stupid feeling. I don’t know. I was being irrational…”
“But you were right,” she answered. “Did you see or hear anything?”
“I thought I saw some dark shapes in the water. It really gave me the chills.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why?” he repeated blankly. “I don’t know. Some old story I heard or something. I… I’m a fool. I shouldn’t have let them use my boat.”
She bit her lip before speaking. “It is too dangerous out there now. You know this as well as I do. There are forces at work which aggressively seek to cause you harm. You must promise me that you will not go out on the water again. Please say that you will not!”
“I don’t think I’m in any state to do so anytime soon, Aazuria,” he answered. “I mean, I will have to eventually. People are counting on me. But this… first Leander and now…” The strength seemed to drain from him as he exhaled all of his willpower in a single breath. “I need to lie down.”
He pulled away from her and moved to lean back on the pillows. She stood and unfolded the blanket from the foot of the bed, tugging it over his legs to keep him warm. He extended his hand to her.
“Zuri, would you stay with me?”
She took his hand and slipped under the blanket with him, hugging his arm and resting her forehead against his shoulder.
“I never considered leaving.”