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A flash of light blinded me, a prism shooting up from the water at my waist and shining to the heavens. My body felt hollow, and my head felt light and empty as my sight left me. The sound of crashing waves became nothing. I was awake. Barely. My consciousness was slipping away, drowning in the darkness of disorientation.
“Open your eyes, little mermaid.” Serena’s voice sounded underwater.
My weak eyes fluttered open with timid blinks. The white light died down, leaving behind the sight of the waves washing back to reveal my bare legs in place of where my tail had been.
“Well, you proved your strength. You’re fully human now.” She stood at my back, where she had been the whole time. I twisted around to look back over my shoulder, my body still wobbly and trembling from the trauma it’d just endured.
“Thank you,” I managed to utter. I touched my fingers to my stomach and ran them down to my hips. My waist was smooth, except for a small scar in the shape of a cluster of scales just in front of my hip bone. I glanced at Serena with surprise.
“A little reminder for you. Of what you could’ve been. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure if you would really do it.” She stepped forward, offering her hand to help me up. Getting to my feet was a task in itself, my legs shaking as if they’d never been used before.
I shivered, hugging myself in the night sea breeze. Serena motioned with her hand and summoned the tide. It washed up my legs, spiraling upwards around me until it formed a flowing dress, the top shimmering midnight blue, fading into a gradient silver cascading skirt for the bottom. “You’ll always be a daughter of the sea.”
To hear those words was a relief, somehow freeing, and yet a small bit of sadness lingered. Regardless of how much I hated it, and even though I’d only known about it for a few months, I’d still just given up a part of myself. There was a weird sort of heartbreak that came with goodbyes of any sort. My body felt regenerated, and though it was back to my normal human form, it was somehow different in a way I couldn’t quite identify.
“I…I have a soul now?” I asked with timid breaths.
Serena nodded. “You do. And there’s one more thing I think you’ve earned. A bit of a surprise I have for you.” She gestured toward the water, and I squinted out to see a figure on the water, a shadow walking along the surface like a ghost. Finally, I could see the figure was that of a woman, clothed in a similar, more subtle dress than mine. And as she stepped through the night fog, closer to the shoreline, she locked her eyes with mine and I knew them right away.
“Mom!” I took off running on my wobbly legs, each step feeling like the first as my feet kicked up sand behind me. She flung her arms open and I met her embrace with possibly the tightest hug I’d ever given her. “Are you…”
“Fully human,” Serena finished. “She asked me for this before you did.”
“Is that where you were?” I studied my mother’s face. She was still beautiful, still the same. But I noticed now that she had a few creases where she hadn’t before. Just a tinge of sagging beneath her eyes held the promise of aging to come. She was aging normally now, as no one in our family line ever had the chance to do. She had a soul.
“I wasn’t strong enough to do it, Trina.” My mom slid her slender hands over my face, brushing my scar as she spoke in a tender voice that I hadn’t heard since I was a child running to her from my nightmares. “But you, beautiful girl, once again, you saved the both of us.”
I gulped back a lump in my throat. “No, Mom,” I whispered. “You gave up yourself to save all of us. Into a world you only just found out about a few days ago. You were protecting us that whole time. Who knows what Bastian might have done to us if you hadn’t?”
My mom pulled back long enough to look at me with a broken smile. The starlight reflected on the tiny teardrops rolling along her eyelashes. “I love you, Trina.”
“I love you, Mom.” I squeezed her in a tight hug and whatever rift was left between us seemed to drift away in the tide at our feet.
When we pulled away, I noticed Serena was gone. I followed the path of footprints in the sand only to find her a ways off, facing the other side of the shore. Turning, as if she knew I was watching her, she wore a tender smile beneath tired eyes that refused to meet my gaze.
“I like this little shoal,” she uttered. “I think Bellamy would, too.”
There was a long silence between us before I finally said something. “Let’s get the others.”
Serena bit her lip and looked away, the breeze catching a few loose unbraided strands of her hair. “Yes,” She barely spoke loud enough for me to hear over the lapping of the waves. “Let’s get the others.”
She cupped her hands and dipped them in a small tide pool, lifting the handful of water to her lips where she whispered a message. She poured the water into the ocean, and it trickled down in droplets of gold and zipped away through the water back towards the mainland shore in a trail of light.
“Now we wait,” she said.
54
Burial At Sea
Katrina
Iwasn’t sure how much time had passed. I’d never been any good at keeping track. But dawn hadn’t come yet. My mother and I sat on the shore watching for the others while Serena stood alone, unmoving, some meters away.
A small glow broke through the fog in the distance, burning from a lantern on a glass-clear canoe formed of water as it approached with the others on board. Their faces were somber, with Milo and McKenzie flanking one side of Bellamy’s body and Noah and Russell on the other.
They slid ashore, bringing the enchanted boat in, where it dissipated back into the waves once everyone was out. No one uttered a sound. There was only the song of the waves and the patter of footsteps crunching wet sand as Milo and Noah carried Bellamy to Serena and laid him at her feet.
Serena looked down at her lifeless lover. With movements far too graceful for any human, she knelt down and kissed his forehead. We all stood encircling them, honoring this moment as best we knew how.
