My father had laughed softly, ruffling my hair, and told me the origins of my name.
Marin—of the sea.
But it was just a name. A tribute to the rolling waves outside our beloved manor and the fairylike story of its history. Mermaids might be real, but I wasn't one of them. I didn’t belong here.
This wasn’t my dream. It was my nightmare. And I needed to go home.
“Is anyone there?”
I tumbled off the kelp bed, my fin propelling me unsteadily toward the coral bars. I landed in the sand with a thud, my upper body sinking into the silt. A hysterical laugh burnedin my throat. I could barely move, the only mermaid who couldn't swim. I might as well have been a crab burrowing into the gritty floor.
Terror swelled beneath the humor. I wasn't just trapped. I was helpless.
I'd clawed my way out of the gutter, over mountaintops, and through ruins, vowing never to fall that far again. And here I was. At the bottom. In the muck. Bars in front of me, instead of freedom.
Using my arms, I dragged myself forward and wrapped my hands around the rough coral, anchoring myself in place. I pressed my face into the narrow gap.
“Let me out of here!”
No one answered.
Across from me was another empty cell. And more lined the dark passage. A silent wing of rock and coral, echoing my pain. Where were the guards? The other prisoners? What had I done to earn solitary confinement?
The only sounds were the slow, deep groan from somewhere beyond the bars, the faint clink of metal, and the subtle shifting of sand beneath my tail.
I shouted again. Over and over. Until my voice turned hoarse, and the shadows began to shift. The glowing anemones moved across the ceiling in a crude passage of time.
A wretched ache twisted in my stomach. I slumped into the sand. My friends were gone, and I’d never escape—left to rot in cold, wet silence.
But as the day stretched, the ache also sharpened into hunger.
I lifted my head when I heard the sand shift, and a lone figure slowly slithered in front of the bars.
“Your bowl.”
The voice was low and garbled. I glimpsed the guard's features between a mass of silver hair swirling around his craggy face—pale eyes, a hooked nose, and firm, grim lips. He had inky scales and blended in with the shadows as if he lived inside them. He could have been there the whole time, and I never would've known.
There was no softness. No mercy in his stormy gaze.
His skin was smooth but stretched tight over rigid muscle. Arms like bands of steel. A guard's belt hung low on his waist, weighed down with strange tools, coral keys, and a faintly glowing disc no bigger than Gavin's trick coin.
When I didn’t move fast enough, he removed a metal rod from a sleeve in his belt and raked it unevenly across the bars.
The muffled clang echoed through my cell and jarred my bones. I crawled backward on my hands, heart hammering, and searched for the corroded dish I’d seen covered in sand.
I held it out; the bowl shaking as a ladle slipped through the coral and dumped a heavy plant-like sludge that settled into the bottom. I swallowed thickly as a rotten stench reached my senses.
My hunger vanished.
“Why am I here?” I asked, extending my hand through the bars.
The guard branded me with his metal rod. It released a shockwave that blistered my knuckles, pain radiating to my wrist. It sizzled through my body like a fuse, blinding me in sick, searing agony.
When my vision cleared, he had already moved on; the sand shifting behind his fin.
“Wait! Come back. Answer me!”
The guard vanished down the dark tunnel, and I sank to the ground with a trembling sob. I pressed my injured knuckles to my mouth. I felt woozy and weak. Dread clawed me from the inside out, while isolation wanted in, threatening to sink into my bones and become a cruel mirage of a permanent companion.
