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When I remember you on the tides, I often picture you the day you saw the fins.
Four of them split the Oceantop and you’d screamed, “Four. Four for a boy,” the wind taking your voice, pushing your hair into your eyes.
Even though I am seaborn I knew the rhyme. Humanity is my specialty after all.
“That rhyme is about magpies,” I’d said. “There is no rhyme about dolphins but if there was, four might stand for sorrow.” My voice was as quiet as the bleached bones of dead sailors undulating in the Oceandeep. You never heard.
I had to leave you that day. The sea called me home.
“Please. Please,” you’d begged. “The baby will be here soon. Stay with me.” Then you’d clutched your belly and looked at me with that mixture of ferocity and pain that had first caught my attention, and you’d whispered, “I’ve never felt so alone.”
I couldn’t stay. There is no mercy in the sea for the small desires of individual creatures.
But I was moved for you. Perhaps it was guilt. I laid you to sleep on your white bed, the one where he was conceived, covering your eyes with small kisses and ancient words until they closed tight, and your chest rose and fell in rhythm with the waves lapping at the base of the cliffs. Then I closed up your windows and doors, laid them over with ivy and brambles so that it looked like your cottage had been derelict for a hundred years or more.
And there you slept while he grew within you.
My world was in turmoil. By the time I was able to return it was almost too late. As soon as I climbed out of the ocean I knew he’d been born. The molecules of his existence hung in the air, charging it with the current of possibility, change, survival. I changed my shape, the better for to move on land, and went to claim him.
The ivy and the brambles fell away at my touch. You still slept but your face was wet with silver trails of tears, and your eyelashes glistened as teardrops gathered there and trembled, pearl like, before they fell.
The white bed was soaked red with your blood, and he lay there, weak with ignorance, between your legs.
He looked like me. I was relieved to see the words I’d said the night he’d been conceived, and the symbols I’d inscribed on your still flat stomach, had worked. You’d thought I’d whispered love words in my own tongue, as I had, but they were not to you. They were all for him.
I hesitated at the doorway, watching him, drinking in the sight of him. His fine purple skin was threaded through with the deep yellow veins of an infant. I counted his limbs as all fathers do. Eight. All perfectly formed. Then he raised his head off the mattress and it was monstrous, with the doming forehead of his mother’s kind and the strange passions of her race putting an alien glint behind those familiar eyes.
Still he was our hope.
“Prince of the Ocean,” I called to him, and he raised himself up and we spoke, words, pictures, notes, the history of our race, our world. I sent him my apologies that I had not been there sooner, that he had been born in silence with no one to tell him who he was, what he was. I waited, wondering would he judge us now for what we had done. But no. I felt his approval wash over me, and the frightening strength of his will.
“Kill her Father,” were his first words and with that, as if you knew your life hung in the balance, you awoke.
I’d known all along I had to kill you. My son merely echoed the thoughts he’d read in my mind. But you raised your head off the pillow and in so doing reminded me of him. I knew then I could not kill you. I had never considered becoming kin with an earthborn, hadn’t thought I could. But we had mingled blood. What else, after all, is kin?
“I can’t,” I whispered.
“Kill her,” he told me. “Kill her or she will talk, and talk, and some one will listen and retrieve some clue. It will stir some memory, some instinct, and we will be hunted and have yet one more enemy.”
His will was harder than rock, the will of an earth born, the will of the race that rules the world.
“I cannot kill her. We are related now,” I said, while you buried your head beneath the bedclothes and wailed a dolphin-pitched keen of horror and betrayal.
So he did. Stretching upwards with fluid and deadly beauty to wrap one long limb around your neck and constrict, while you groaned and I looked away.
He’s almost full grown now. I have taught him all my magic and he applies it with a recklessness and anger none of my kind has ever before possessed. And perhaps that was our undoing. Strong in magic, we are weak in fury, in passion. We face the onslaught of the other Ocean races and we lose. Every generation we are a little less.
Perhaps in time we will pay for this sin. My son has not yet risen to fatherhood. Maybe the mythological mermaids, soulless and murderous, are a warning against what we created. Maybe my son and his human-blooded children will be tyrants and destroy the ocean. Or perhaps human blood will not hold the magic pure and it will warp and become terrible. But for now we believe we had no choice.
You are my family now. At Intide and Out, when we honour our dead, I sing of the smoothness of your skin, your readiness to laugh, how gentle was your touch, while your son makes ready to wage war beneath the ocean.
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FEATURE STORY 
