A/N: Hello all! This story has gone through many revisions, but I think I'm finally on the right track. To older readers, I have made the minor correction from "Sunny" to "Sun", but you'll see the original name in later chapters again as a special nickname.
Some sensitive themes that will be explored in this story include disability and mental health. By the time the characters are in second year, I expect things to be very divergent from canon. This first chapter is backstory-heavy to get a feel for our protagonist. Let me know your thoughts; please be an active reader!
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and plot ideas. Cover art is by bearbrickjia.
"You dance differently when you know you won't live forever."
―Leigh Bardugo, Wonder Woman: Warbringer
I. Somewhere Beyond the Sea
Larkana, Pakistan. Present day.
Overlooked in the Ursa Major constellation, the star Suha is said to shine at the tip of the bear's snout and guide the weary traveler home even in the darkest of nights. On Earth, the girl Suha can barely maintain her own light, much less bring peace of mind to other people.
In her big family, and every family around them, girls do not count. Suha learns this from a young age, the unspoken law etched into her skin like permanent mehndi. She is eight years old when she first tries to mimic her brothers and works at their uncle's tire shop. A week later, her youngest brother watches on in mild horror, mild humor as father beats her, the wood coming down with a hard thwack!
This, she never forgets. This, she never forgives. The scars run down her back and dig into her spine like a strangler fig, swollen and vindictive. In the future, Suha learns to hide in the places the men never visit, like the bakery and old excavation site.
The one person who comes looking for her is Amir, the second oldest. She spots him from a mile away, all whiskey-colored skin and green eyes that light up when he sees her. Mother often gossips about his future, about how he'll become a "civil engineer" and rebuild their city, but Amir is not like the others. He has kind hands that wrap up her bruises and carry her home in a wool blanket; she likes the sound of his pulse in her ear, as she presses close to his neck.
Late in the night, when he tucks her in, he tells Suha about the rainbow lights in the north and about the angels that visit people as butterflies and doves. Things he has told no other soul.
"I want to leave. Leave and find out who I really am. Maybe in America, or Switzerland, even the Philippines. Anywhere but here."
Amir's real dream is sweet and simple; the road is not. They bring his body back in the same wool blanket, shot down before seventeen, and the corpses of her other brothers in pieces. Girl and casket. Casket and noise. Noise and girl. She is ten and throws a tantrum because Amir isn't waking up. Laid in a bed of lilies, he is buried by sunset in a place where grass refuses to grow. In the next few years, their father is killed and they lose the house.
It is in a dingy apartment with peeling walls and a single window overlooking a fumigation facility that the youngest and final daughter, Fatima, is born. In those glittering charcoal eyes, Suha finds her redemption and fills the hole in her heart. The moonless curtain of night revels in their harmony, as the pair play peek-a-boo in the darkness and memorize each other's movements.
"I will save you," Suha tells the baby, the bars of the crib shadowing her face. "I will save us all."
When a tiny fist reaches out between the spaces, the older girl has her answer. Thirteen and resolved, Suha trades in her hijab and skirt for a newsboy cap and chest-binder.
At first, she takes on odd jobs, but when her mother and older sisters are out of factory work, she finds her talent for gambling. With a body quilted by male clothes, she becomes her family's sole source of income and deals hands to drunk men more powerful than any slap to the face.
The coins at her hip are heavy as sin but sweet as virtue; the dreams she crushes into powder make the best baby formula. All legal transactions, so long as no one can identify her face and she comes down on them with an iron fist first. The gambling business requires this, and sometimes, her heart does too.
Most days, Suha no longer recognizes herself: lean, hard-faced, and powerful. A "boy" who can go anywhere, be anyone. Her bacha posh metamorphosis is complete.
Her only return to girlhood is through her baby sister. With Fatima, the little things in life—often interrupted by blood and pain from a night at the pub—give another chance. Hours spent stealing their older sisters' make-up, sewing old hijabs into blankets, and playing house while sipping tea like the British women in the magazines, pinkies raised.
By far, their best activity is picking up an old, poorly translated comic book at the newspaper stand. They find a cool spot in the alleyways to flip through it, wide-eyed and appreciative of every kick and flip.
Their favorite superhero? The one and only Wonder Woman.
"I want to be her when I grow up." Fatima points to a panel of the goddess helping a civilian up from the rubble.
"Any reason?"
"She never gives up, even when people disappoint her."
They close up the book and fall into each other's sleepy embrace. Secretly, Suha wishes for a radioactive spider, a magical shield, or star-blessed might. Anything to be more than some poor girl playing make-believe in a city full of sand.
Anything to be a better person.
Nothing good lasts forever.
The last guy Suha conned was the lackey of a big crime lord, intent on coming for her and everything she holds dear. She makes sure the apartment is empty for the dangerous company that day, bribing a teacher to give Fatima an extra hour of lessons and urging her other sisters to visit the marketplace.
The men are quick with their business. They kick the door, hold her at gun point, and demand the one thing she can't—could never—give up.
"You touch her, you die."
"You don't give her up, your whole family dies, bacha posh." The one guy spits in her face. "Payment for disrespecting the boss's men."
After they set a deadline and leave, Suha contemplates her options. Maybe Allah think she deserves this, or maybe she's just tired of setting others on fire to keep herself warm. She can't pretend to be a man forever, not when she bleeds every month and feels her body spill out over the binder.
But she still makes sure that the next worthless girl will never have to experience famine or abandonment again, never have to trade in her identity for a few rupees. Because Suha the girl is also a star; stars don't burn out when travelers depend on them.
In the end, Suha pulls one last trick. After packing some bags and writing some letters, she sends her baby sister to the land of the free, to the land of their superheroes. Their final act of sisterhood, like the nerds they are, is pirating the new Wonder Woman at a neighbor's house and sipping smuggled juice boxes. Fatima says nothing as her older sibling cries especially hard at the ending, squeezing her hand in comfort.
Fatima can be anyone she wants to be; she won't have to steal from others to live. She will stand tall, chin up like Diana Prince, as she parts with her criminal sister. Waving her sister down the Indus River, Suha hears before she feels the stab through her heart, but at least she shoots the scumbag and takes him with her.
She never expected the afterlife to be like this: a long poker table and two calm but vicious faces, illuminated by a single garish lightbulb. She blinks back the fog and scans the emptiness, looking for some way out. The twins deal her a crappy hand and she discards a four of hearts on instinct, unable to clearly see their expressions.
"Allah?" Suha asks.
"If it comforts you," Player One replies. It doesn't. He throws a flush down immediately, fanning himself with the rest of his cards.
"Am I dead?"
"Aren't we all?" Player Two giggles. "You're just lucky to know you are, is all."
She does not think herself lucky at all, but she plays their little game effortlessly. Three tens and a pair of fives rain upon the card pile.
"Let's have a looksie here." Player One throws down four mighty jacks and steals the round, starting it up again with a queen of spades, who is the spitting image of Suha: all cropped hair, bruises, and bitterness. She flushes at the invasion of privacy; they pry into her life like they own it.
"Cross-dresser."
"Bacha posh."
"Hero complex."
"Sister complex."
"Gambler."
"Thief."
"Murderer."
One by one, they shuffle through her memories, laughter rising to a fever pitch as each image exposes a part of her meaningless life to the darkness. Suha feels more than hears their accusations, painful reminders of the humility she endured for all those years.
Fatima came out alive, she reassures herself. That's all that matters.
"That, she did!" Player One reads her mind. "We love a dedicated sibling."
"So what now?" The girl demands, tears refusing to fall from her eyes. "You lock me up? Send me to Jahannam? Our family was already there."
"Well, you did have an entertaining run." The second twin remarks, shuffling the deck between sooty palms. "Bonus points for killing the unlucky bastard who came at you with a knife. Such a sore loser!"
"I didn't like him very much," the other brother comments. "Wanted for every count of kidnapping and assault in the book. High-crime, he was. You got him before his friends snagged your sister. Could've trafficked her."
"Since you did us a favor for bringing him with you, we'll let you pull the trigger."
"What?" Suha narrows her eyes.
"A good girl like you knows exactly what to do."
They stand up from the table and snap their fingers, procuring the criminal. He yells through a gag, arms bound to his burly sides with golden rope. Everything poker disappears, and suddenly, Suha finds a fully-loaded pistol in her left hand, aimed point-blank at her killer. She suddenly remembers the way he drove the steel into her chest and how she lodged a bullet into his neck in retaliation.
"Think of what he did to you! To your family!"
"Yes, all the pain and terror!"
"You would've left that city too!"
"You could've gone with your sister to America! Fulfilled Amir's dream!"
Judge and prisoner exchange eye contact with one another, and she can't seem to breathe through her nose and her throat itches and her mind is on fire and she's really dead and she'll never see Fatima again—
Suha shoots Player One in the stomach and Player Two in the collarbone without blinking. The gun steams as the man, the face of evil who killed her, melts away to reveal a blinding smile.
"Judgment has been passed," the figure says, less like the compassionate god of scriptures and more of a menacing force. "Good girl."
"My sister is the good girl," Suha counters, dropping the gun and shutting her eyes. The nightmare closes in on itself. "I made sure to show her what a life without mercy will do to the soul."
"Then I will show you what a life with mercy can do for you."
Somewhere in the Yellow Sea. December 13th, 1980.
The next time Suha opens her eyes, a woman with hair the color of rich soil and a smile filled with loving wishes coos down at her. This person must be a mother; she knows this, even having only experienced an unsupportive, withdrawn one.
The world is blurry and dream-like, bedazzled in nothing but blues, greens, and pinks. Mobility is impossible when everything is submerged and slow, but that comes with being a baby too. Suha has no particular qualms with her lack of freedom, not when the angel of a woman, who holds her with such care, makes her feel like the most precious thing in the world.
I must really be in Jannah now.
Her fingers are small and webbed and useless, as if freshly molded from clay, but they still grasp at the warm figure for attention. When the mother reciprocates, Suha hears herself laugh with pure delight.
I haven't done that in a while, she thinks absentmindedly, lulled to sleep by an ocean lullaby. Soon, "mother" will be "Murong" and "Suha" will be "Sungjin", fondly shortened to "Sun." It's an ironic change, going from a star in a full constellation to the center of someone's universe.
It takes her about a year to register her death—this isn't a dream—and another one to figure out that she is inhaling water without drowning and halfway to the earth's core—I am not disappearing. Under the sea, her senses are both amplified and dulled, a limbo that keeps her from making this place her new home.
To her ultimate surprise, Merpeople are really nothing like their fairy tale counterparts.
One: no one is even remotely like "Ariel" here.
They don't have talking guppies and crab servants or look for adventure in abandoned ships. The creatures of the deep have translucent complexions, shark teeth, long nails, and magnified pupils spanning across the whites of their eyes. Some are more refined than others; sirens are probably the most attractive of the lot and speak a sing-song form of Mermish, so different yet familiar to Urdu and English.
Sun hasn't gotten a hold of a mirror yet. Frankly, she's not sure she wants one anymore.
Two: merpeople are systematic and label their communities based on bones, mapping out the ocean like one great anatomical chart.
Skull, spine, rib—every group accounts for something or another, like how her home represents the Eastern tailbone. Their architecture consists of intricate salt formations cradled among the empty bellies of whales and barnacle husks, tall buildings bridged together and based in cross-like formation.
Sun has so far managed to play off her discomfort of dead animals as childhood shyness, but parenting works differently in this world. Merpeople would sooner throw their offspring into a volcano than let them get away with being soft-hearted. Her own mother, Murong, has thrown her over the coral bed for complaining of fatigue. She had to adapt to the currents and swim upward through the algae bed, lest she die in the sharp reefs below.
When she finally returned home, Murong greeted her achievement with more advanced Mermish lessons, as if she didn't get enough of that every day.
Three: sirens have adapted East Asian practices (or did the Asians learn from them, hm).
This fascinated Sun the most, having lived in Pakistan for her entire life, with the occasional exposure to American media. They run on the Lunar Calendar, red lanterns made from bioluminescent-algae, squid ink wash paintings, the Analects of Confucius, a man whose beard ran longer than the sea.
Sun spends a great deal of time home-schooled on these ancient arts and texts, as there is no formal educational facility in their part of the world. Most merpeople are interested in military pursuits, not libraries. Both tridents and polearms are in use, sometimes chakrams and war scythes with handles plated with fish bone, and warrior training often involves servitude in temples like Buddhist monks.
To what god they pray to, the Pakistani does not know. Not that she believed in hers anymore, anyway.
The rest of their time is dedicated to the upkeep of appearance, an activity that has effectively rendered Sun spiteful.
Her past self had an identity crisis with clothing, having lived her childhood a girl and her adolescence like a man. It is no different for her current self, who decides against hair accessories or seashell clasps. They squeeze and scrape at her already small breasts the way the bras and binders did to her old body.
No matter the culture, breasts always had to follow some kind of rule. Murong, unlike mother #1, though, actually encourages rule-breaking. So Sun, unlike the other children of the sea, swims through these waters bare as the day she was reborn.
Four: sometimes, trinkets from the surface world wind up at the bottom of the sea.
Plastic containers, dolls, music boxes, coins, bits and pieces of ship. These were the few times Sun did feel like the little mermaid, running webbed fingers along things she once knew as a land-dweller. Murong neither approved nor disapproved of her collection, but once in a while, she threw in a warning.
"The more you touch things from the surface, the more you will be targeted. They reek of human."
Five: merpeople aren't fond of humans, particularly wizards―whatever they are. Long ago, there had been a pact between the two races before the magic-users disrespected their underwater partners, effectively erasing their history and causing the species to isolate themselves.
Naturally, they aren't too keen on Sun either. She neglects to mention often, as if blotting it from her mind, but her lack of tail has proven to be the biggest phenomenon of them all.
There are gills, fins, and scales all across her body, but what distinguishes a mermaid from a human being is absent. She stares at the two scrawny, pale legs glaring up at her with a vengeance. She moves more sluggish than the rest, can rarely steady herself against updrifts, and feels many, many eyes on her the moment she and Murong appear in town.
It doesn't take long for this new world to pick on her the way the last one did; it also doesn't take long for her to understand what happens to those who dream of the sun.
"P-please! I was only trying to help him! He was drowning!"
At the epicenter of the city, a public execution takes place: a faceless merman interacted with a fisherman near the coast. For once, Murong puts a hand over her daughter's face, shielding her from the carnage.
"Murong, why did they kill him?" Sun asks, long after the merpeople have left the square. They left his body there for the sharks to feast upon.
"Because the hatred still runs deep," Murong replies. The look on her face ends the conversation, even if Sun wants to know more. More about the differences between merpeople and humans, about their history, about herself.
A week later, the siren moves their two-people family away from civilization and closer to the riptides, where nothing and no one ventures close enough to bother them. If they do, Murong is two steps ahead and releases their flesh-eating seahorses.
The nasty gardener got what was coming to him, the twat. They celebrate that victory with a couple of abalone. It is over this meal that Sun acutely feels her mutation, her intrusion into this world. For what had she been reborn, if only to be strange and displaced again?
"I am incomplete," she says, letting the shell slip to the ground. A few moments bubble by before Murong scoops it up and wraps the end of her tail around her daughter's calves. She gives the girl a moment to herself, before waving a hand over her own left cheek. In seconds, the skin begins to cave in, revealing an old burn carved all the way up to the cheekbone.
Lastly: mermaids can use magic. Not much, but enough.
They also cry pearls, ones of which floats in soft spirals down Sun's face as she stares, heartbroken, at her mother's dispelled glamour.
"We are all incomplete, Sungjin," Murong finally answers, using her full name. "Do not pity yourself. You just need to learn how to work around it. Even if the world does not accept your disability, you must."
That only makes Sun cry harder, and for once, Murong lets her as she swims right into the arms of her newly-found unconditional love.
"I don't deserve you," the daughter sniffs.
"Wrong: you deserve the best," the mother replies, pressing a cheek to the top of a small head. "Therefore, it is my mission to be the best."
The next hour is spent bullying a stranded mola mola around town, enjoying each other's company. Momentarily, Sun forgets her flaw and fears no future.
July 31st, 1985.
Under a staircase somewhere, a motherless green-eyed boy celebrates his sixth birthday alone.
Sun laments him, waking frightfully from the dream. It takes too long for her to stop trembling, legs subconsciously convulsing in terror.
Who is he? Why did she want to reach for him? It's almost like she knew him—was him, living his nightmare, cradling a broken arm—and it confuses her. These thoughts are not hers, a mad voice. Madness festering from solitude. The darkness her old self had almost been engulfed in, had Fatima not been with her.
She unleashes a scream, feeling a phantom knife wound in her back.
There is no Fatima to heal this, but Murong now. The siren is right there by her daughter's side to talk in comforting circles and make the bad dreams go away. These days, she's been kinder—like a storm is fast approaching and they are each other's only anchors.
Sun welcomes a dreamless sleep, for both her and the lonely boy.
August 2nd, 1988.
Her curiosity for the surface never does die, only amplified by the strange dreams she has about the boy with the green eyes. Sun wonders what year it is now, what people have accomplished, what her place without humanity is; how much has the human condition changed in her absence?
The brimming intrigue induces a melancholy in her chest that she fails to shake, even when she learns more and more about this blue world. In fact, when she learns about her origins, that heartache only gets worse.
Murong speaks little of her human lover—and isn't that a wild thing to claim?—but when she does, Sun feels like she too lost a best friend. Having gills and scales never bothered Sun so much as knowing next to nothing about the other woman who might've participated in her rebirth.
It hurts all the more seeing the absence eat away at her mother's smiles as the years go on. Sometimes, Murong will swim about aimlessly at night, searching for a sign, as Sun watches sadly from around the corner. They need this family talk, whether Murong wants to avoid it for the rest of their lives or not.
"What is her name?" the girl asks one day, as she polishes Murong's daggers.
"Pandora," the siren automatically replies from the kitchen. She cringes afterwards at the ease with which she reveals the identity.
"She was a witch?"
"That's right."
"They can do magic like us?"
"Yes, but they have many different spells to make up for their lack of other weapons."
"If merpeople avoid humans," Sun begins, "why didn't you?"
"Foolish rule to begin with, we aren't at war anymore," Murong replies. "But… well, she fell out of her research boat, and I was young and never liked the rules—"
"So you save her and get unofficially married?" Sun interrupts, switching excitedly to English.
"What did I tell you about speaking human?" her mother hisses. The siren scoops up her little ray of sunshine and handles her with care; that is to say, puts her in an impressive headlock. Foiled again!
"N-no one ever visits them, and studies s-show that extensive use of M-Mermish leads to brain damage—"
"There goes that imagination of yours again, speaking between your fins!"
The little mermaid blows out bubbles from her nose. "Oh, I give! I give! I just wanted to talk about my other mother. I don't resemble anyone like I do her."
A silence descends upon the pair faster than the humans pillage the tuna. Murong looks thoughtfully at Sun, searching for a reason not to cave and confess.
"She animated me from mud, right? With magic?" Sun pokes at her skin, as if her arm will pop off at any moment and reveal the ugly truth; that she's nothing more than a figment of imagination. The youth, for all her bickering, wants to know things about her other mother, to make the witch more of a person in her mind than a fairy tale. She wants to know her favorite color. What she liked and didn't like to eat. Favorite animal, holiday. What made her cry.
Murong could see this longing as clear as day; no point avoiding it now. Finally, in the pink light of their jellyfish lamps, she holds her daughter at arms' length and sighs.
"Yes," Murong answers. "I was never very interested in the mermen, and out of nowhere, a human woman gave me a child for saving her life."
"So I was a gift?" Sun perks up.
"A gift with a rebel streak, just like her. Pandora could never go a day without cooking up some new idea about this or that."
"I like what I'm hearing. What did she do for a living?"
"She invented spells. I gave her my sheddings for a fireworks one; they burst into something called 'ladybugs' in the sky."
That has to be the coolest thing Sun has ever heard; mermaid scales could make fireworks? What else could they be used for?
"When she left me, she'd achieved her greatest feat yet: you."
"Will I ever meet her?" the child asks.
"Oh, Sun. Do not make me miss someone I cannot have." The words collapse in Sun's ears like fissures imploding on themselves, ready to erupt into a new day. "She chose her people and I chose ours. I chose you. I will not regret that."
"But you already do! I look like her, I talk like her. You even said I think like her." Sun shakes her mother desperately, reverting back to the miserable human language with which she started this conversation. "You don't smile the way you used to. I will surely be your unhappiness."
"Sungjin," Murong murmurs, tucking a stray strand of hair behind a small ear. She never, ever uses the full name; it always means trouble. "We may have parted, but Pandora and I made you out of love. To this day, you remind me of what life must be lived for."
And like every dignified mother, heavy-hearted but light-tailed, she ends the conversation with a kiss, returning to her anemone wall arrangement.
In a fit, Sun does what she always has: escape. Without fully understanding the situation, she darts out on her mother, who calls to her over and over again to remedy the confusion.
Outside, on the edge of the purple reef, where the ocean beyond is nothing but ink and unknown, something sad and terrifying brews inside her mind. She watches as one by one, her tears become pearls that drop like pins into the abyss, and how from the darkness, an impulse is born.
August 24th, 1988.
Finding a sea witch proves to be much easier than people let on. It has nothing to do with following two eels into the lair of a lipstick-wearing octopus, and everything to do with just looking for the outlier in a kingdom full of irreplaceable beauty: the moorish area behind the abandoned human pipes.
The sea witch is a slight mermaid, whittled to the color of sunken ships and decomposed whales, with deep-set eyes and weary swim. She peers forebodingly into her cauldron, never once looking up at her young visitor, who swims stiffly into her hollow home. Her collarbone is held so tightly in her pallid skin that it looks about ready to burst forth with a life of its own.
The most curious thing about her is the moving—truly, moving—image hung upon her breast by a silver wire. A woman that highly resembles the witch is laughing uncontrollably into the shoulder of a well-groomed man, enchanted to repeat the movement over and over again.
For a moment, Sun wonders about her circumstances. Who was she before this? Who was that man with a loving smile?
The witch seems to sense these thoughts and disperses them immediately, as if psychic.
"Mirabella, I presume?"
"Hmph. I know what you want, kelpling," she rasps. Sun has never heard such a voice before. The Mermish grates on her ears, like the creature inhaled nails and was forced to breathe between the remaining spaces.
"How are you doing that?" the girl asks. "Knowing what I want to say before I say it."
"Legilimency. Not that you would know anything about wizard magic. Does your mother know you are here?"
"No," Sun says, never missing a beat. "I came alone, and I intend to fulfill this alone."
"So you think that suffering ennobles you?" laughs the witch. She circles Sun, wrinkled fingers sliding across the little mermaid's flesh and leaving rose-tinged marks in their wake. She shivers uncontrollably at the decaying smile. "Did that work for you last time?"
Sun narrows her eyes. "You looked into my memories?"
The cackle crackles like lightning. "I know everything about you, little star. You are far away from home."
"Murong is my home. Not Pakistan."
"Bold, bold statement," the witch says. "Have you forgotten that baby sister of yours already?"
Sun ignores the question, her heart distantly aching at the thought; there is business to conduct.
"Why did you become... this?"
The sea witch falls silent, claws wrapped around the edges of her cauldron.
"I chose wrong, simple as that," Mirabella finally says. "To our kind, love is once, but for the humans, love is every empty bed that can be filled. You still wish to proceed, knowing that the human witch might have moved on?"
"She may have," Sun begins, "but my mother never will. Name your price."
"Well, I simply adore speechless sirens..."
"Don't let her escape!"
The guards come to take her away at the drop of an urchin's pin. Someone must've seen her going to and from Mirabella's cavern and reported it.
But they're too late; Sun has already made her pact with the devil. That night, she and Murong were coming home from the autumn festival. While her mother animatedly chatted about the dancing, her daughter threw a drought of deepest sleep into her face and the magic word.
"Verto."
From there, the concoction grew the siren fine, supple legs that would carry her into a better life. Against the rippling shadows of night, her daughter stowed away with the sleeping Murong to the surface. The crisp air was foreign and alarming, but Sun was determined, pushing Murong onto the shoreline. Beside her, Sun set a bag of human clothes, gold trinkets, and pearls she had cried the day before for the idea of losing the best mother she'd ever had. Once the deed was done, the girl swam without looking back. No farewells, no regrets.
She hadn't accounted for the starfish that watched the beach closely. They alerted the merpeople of her absence, and now, Sun floats before the court, face bruised and burning. Under the dawn light, her trial becomes a rush of sounds and curses. She has never seen the royal family before, and she isn't sure she wants to, now that all angry eyes are on her.
"What have you done, turning to the sea witch?"
"Murong sacrificed everything for you!"
"Traitor!"
"You are only here by the good grace of your mother."
"Infidel!"
I saved her, Sun thinks to herself, as if in reply to the condescension. But her tongue is barely a tongue anymore, silenced once and for all as Mirabella's single condition. She faces straight ahead, locking with the King's cold eyes.
I saved the mother I always needed.
But what about the child left behind?
The King hits his trident against the ground, an awful ring across the marble floor. Exile, blood, a social death. The insolent human-esque mermaid has taken one of theirs; no one but the merpeople themselves are allowed to do so, especially not a half-breed creation.
"Goodbye, child of the sea."
Camber Sands, East Sussex. September 1st, 1988.
September, much like the act of praying, begins with abandonment and discovery.
A low, ominous breathing escapes the notice of midnight beach-goers, drawing closer and closer to the distinct smell of an open wound. Dark wings flutter and press into equally black ribs. The shadow is misplaced, far from home and too massive to fit the landscape, like a manmade rift in the shore.
Except it really isn't much bigger than a chair, bumbling forward without animosity. The infant beast senses loss in the air and sinks across the sand one timid hoof at a time. It only ceases its course when its gray, opaque eyes find the source of unspoken pain.
In a bed of putrid kelp, a child lays on her side, hands gripped around a slowly but surely bleeding gut. She looks to be about seven or eight, all pale skin and sand. What appear to be gills line her neck but soon retract, the fin-like appendages across her limbs popping off like bubbles.
The breeze does her no favors, drying out an otherwise smooth complexion. She fades in and out of consciousness, only mildly aware that three people have walked past her without batting a lash. A dog stays a moment longer to lick her exposed neck.
The old owner throws a towel over her, like a good arm's-length samaritan. "You take care now," he nervously says. "Not v-very good with blood, I'm afraid. The police will be here shortly."
Bedazzled in sweat and cracked skin, the girl peers up slowly at her newest company, the awkward midnight creature. Oddly enough, they share the same eye color, so she shyly smiles at the angel of death.
The beast tilts its head, observing the strange child. "He" has never seen one before, and they watch each other quietly with equally fascination.
Finally, the "human" opens her mouth to speak but no words leave her tongue—or what's left of it. This draws sudden, scattered tears that pool into pearls. The creature needs nothing else to know what she has sacrificed.
Suddenly, the bat-horse hangs his head, knees tucked in to lie by her side. It rests its beak across her chest. The girl no longer feels the pain, only the vaguely warm ribs against her forearm. She reaches out and pats the animal in time to her own heartbeat.
In this moment, they want nothing but each other, not hearing the heavy footsteps or rustling of robes approaching them.
Kingsley Shacklebolt has seen a great many things, but this? They didn't tell him about this. His tawny owl companion, perched on his great right shoulder, makes an unhappy hoot.
"Bentley, you better get going," he announces. "We're going to need Newt Scamander at once."