Disclaimer: The settings, events and one or two characters are essentially JK Rowling's. I have expanded on the little we know and have developed it into more. I receive no money from this, so don't sue me! I'm poor.

A View From The Lake

Chapter one: Meeting the Mermaids

Many Greetings. Others call me Hazin. As you witches and wizards from up there at The School know of my kind, I am a mermaid. I live in the lake. All of you witches and wizards walk past every day, and you don't know what it is like down here. You learn your wizarding ways, and we Mermish folk learn our own ways.

I'll start by telling you about me shall I? I am aged as 17 of your years; I live with my ma and pa, my 16 brothers, 40 sisters and our pet grindylow (Uck) in a small cave not far from the town square.

I don't like living in my cave. It is too close to 'The Great Cave'. It makes me shudder to think that anytime I go in or out, I have to be careful of that… that thing! The Giant Squid, as you call it, eats anything. I don't know if it does it intentionally, but it eats pretty much whatever it comes across.

Up there in The School, you have ways of protecting yourselves from things like giant monsters with too many tentacles that inhale whole families… I really don't like my cave!

I spend as much time as I can learning. I love to learn. Although, from talks with human-folk, I know that what I learn isn't like the things you learn. We Mer-folk learn how to catch food at an early age, and then we learn how to protect our families. Oh and when we are eight years of age, we are officially adults. I don't know how it works up there in The Land World, but once we are adults, we are taught how to mould our minds. We get taught about correct grammar, how to draw and how to write (see A/n 1), and, if you know someone who can teach you, you can be taught how to speak human.

I am age 17 now, and my pa taught me how to speak human when I turned 12. I can now retell my life as I remember it, and thanks to my friend, the lovely human who is writing as I am speaking, my life can be recounted.

A/n 1: Mer-people cannot use paper, they draw and write on the cave walls

Chapter 2: When the adventures began

I'll skip the boring parts of "the early years" and get straight into the interesting parts.

I was aged 7.

Nothing interesting had happened down in the town square for a long time. It was just us Mer-folk dealing with our daily lives of collecting food, avoiding the Giant Squid, dealing with the little things that the lake life throws at you, and then it happened.

The Giant Squid had developed a taste for us Mermish folk, and it decided one day to force its way into our city of Mermania. It happened as suddenly as that!

Mermen were acting in fright, using their weapons to fight the hideous creature, mermaids were protecting the mer-babes, and generally the whole city was in uproar. We needed to have some kind of protection, but the Squid was rampaging around the city. We fled and hid away in places where the Squid was too large to enter.

My best friends Dusty, Murkie, Greta and myself figured out what we could do to stop the Squid when we were hiding in the gallery[1]. We had to scare the Squid away.

It was so simple, yet so brilliant, that we had to contact the whole city so that they could perform our great plan.

Greta swam to her pa (the Deputy-chieftain- Gloomak) and told him our plan.

He agreed that we had to get the Giant Squid to leave soon, because it was scaring away all of our food. Gloomak announced our plan to everyone who was in the town square, but his voice couldn't carry much farther.

Everyone that was within earshot swam over fast to help; our plan required a large number of fins. We needed all the help we could get. We armed ourselves with long spears as a backup, in case our plan didn't work.

Gloomak led us all the way to what we call The Valley. It is really lots of plants that reach from the bed of the lake to beyond the surface. It is where all of the mermaids that are of age go to lay their eggs, and where the mermen look for a wife. This was where the Giant Squid was.

The valley was too important to our kind to let the Squid remain there. We would have all died out. All of the inhabitants of the Great Lake, not only Mermania were distraught over the Squid infiltrating our sacred nesting ground.

In order to get the squid out, Gloomak and all of the mermen he could gather surrounded the best, and charged it out of the Valley. They drew spears, wore some of the hardest shells they could find as armour, and stood in a crowd, spread as far around the beast as they could. They charged, screaming at the top of their lungs, while we back in the Village Square worked on our part of the plan.

When the Squid was far enough out of the Valley, I shouted my command to the town folk-

"Everyone, the plan has to come to action. Places!" We arranged ourselves a good distance away from the demon, in a wide circle. Our mer-person circle was upright, so that the squid would have fit inside us if it came close enough.

"Ready- Set- Go!"

All of us moved as we had planed. We all swam around, holding hands in the circle, spinning the circle as fast as we could. After we had built up enough momentum, the effect was amazing. There were 200 or so mer-folk all spinning, creating a fast moving water tornado towards the beast.

It seemed confused at first, and then when it realised that the Merperson tornado was advancing upon it, it began to back slowly away, and then fled far from the Valley, and fled from the city.

I also heard, that in its anger, the squid was fearful, and when a small wizard[2] fell into the lake, the squid accidentally knocked the small wizard back up out of the water, which saved him, rather than eat him as it would normally have done. Wasn't it a good idea?

Everyone was so happy about the Giant Squid leaving, and so proud of my idea, as a reward, they allowed me to do my very first drawing on the entrance to the city. I drew myself and Gloomak charging at the Giant Squid with spears. I was rather proud of my drawing, and my transcriber agrees that when she came here in her forth year, it was very impressive.

[1] A/n: a cave full of different Mer-artists work

[2] A/n: Dennis Creevy