Disclaimer: I don't own TLM. I do own this plot.


29

Ursula stared at Eric for a moment, slack jawed, before bursting out in laughter. "Oh, oh," she cried, wiping tears from her eyes. "How precious. Flotsam, Jetsam did you hear that?" She turned to address two slimy, gruesome and gray heads that had popped out of the surf at her side. "The human want's to make a deal. How sweet. How noble. How pathetic!" She threw the last word back at him with malice. "Sorry sweetheart but you have nothing I want. You think your tiny kingdom is important to me? You think that your small bit of land or few thousand people means anything?" she glared at the people who had receded towards land, gawking with fascinated horror. The naval ship had come in as close as it could by now. Eric could see the Admiral's figure at the bow, watching the proceedings with a careful eye. But like the pirates, they could not come any closer without risk of grounding the ship and they were too far away for artillery to reach them.

Ursula was not finished insulting his kingdom and his people. "They mean nothing to me! They are but a speck in the grand scheme of things. The entire ocean should be mine! All of the merpeople and sea creatures are mine to control!"

Eric glared at her. "Yours to control?" he demanded. "A ruler does not control their people! They put them first. A monarch first and foremost serves their people. You may have been born to the title but you have done nothing to earn it." It was not the right thing to say to the hair-trigger woman, Eric knew that as soon as the words left his lips. He saw the visceral response in the witch.

"You pitiful, insignificant fool!" she screeched. "I may not have control over all the sea creatures yet but that little mermaid is mine!"

Eric had been fully aware of Ariel in his arms up to that moment but with his eyes trained on Ursula he had not seen that her transformation had finally completed. She was slumped in his arms now, drained from the process. Where pale thin legs had once emerged from her nightgown there was now a beautiful glistening green tail. Eric had not forgotten what she looked like as a mermaid but his memories had done her no justice. He could never quite remember the color of her tail or the graceful curves of her fins. The sight of it now caught his breath in awe and frightened him all at once.

Before he had a moment to respond to the witch two slimy gray tails shot out of the water in front of them. The couple had been perched just on the edge of the pier and the eels had no trouble in reaching Ariel. She was ripped from Eric's arms and dragged towards the water.

Eric lunged forward to try and catch her but she was gone beneath the water. A split second later she reemerged at Ursula's side not ten feet away, screaming and wrapped in two thick tentacles.

"Let her go!" Eric and Triton commanded in one voice. Triton raised his trident and aimed it at the witch. Blinding gold light shot from the tip, crackling like lightening, and arched towards the witch. The hair on Eric's arms stood up at the residual charge.

He watched in horror as the golden light enveloped the pair. For two heart pounding seconds Ariel was not visible. Then the light cleared and Ursula's laugh could be heard in the otherwise absolute silence.

"Oh dear Triton," she chuckled, emerging unscathed from the attack, Ariel still clutched tightly to her side. "You have no power here. She signed a contract of her own free will. She's mine. Now, what is more important to you, brother? Your power? Or your daughter?"

The Sea King's face gave nothing away as he watched his sister with cold eyes. Eric was holding his breath. What could be done? A king's most important job was to protect his people but a father's most important job was to protect his children. Eric did not know what the man would choose; the responsibility that he had been born into, or the one that he had chosen.

"I do not understand," Eric said, hoping that a few seconds of distraction would afford him time to come up with a plan. The witch turned to glare at him once again. "If you worked so hard to get Ariel then why did you give her to the pirates?" He was just guessing. He did not know for sure if Ursula had set up the pirate attack but it was the only thing that made sense. The pirates had gone for Ariel during the attack and the only person who would potentially gain from Ariel being hurt was Ursula.

The witch did not seem surprised by the accusation and instead answered. "Those idiots," she scoffed. "They were supposed to take her from you, yes. It was the best way I could think of to separate the two of you. I told them she was a mermaid and could breathe underwater. They were supposed to put her in water. It's not my fault they almost drowned her." She shrugged without remorse. "But they are no longer a problem. Had your men and my dear brother not taken care of them I would have seen to it myself." Eric suppressed a shiver at the coolness in her voice.

"Why did you need to separate them?" Triton demanded. "You are the one who made it possible for them to be together."

"But that's exactly why!" she exclaimed. "They were getting too close to winning the bet. You all were. So I was forced to redirect your efforts."

Eric felt a sudden fury burn through his body and mind. "You made a contract with her!" he exclaimed. "If she won the bet she got to stay human. You are saying she could have won it!"

"She could have," the crazed woman replied. "Which is why I stopped her. I did not agree to stay idle while she tried."

There were two kinds of people in the world; those that acted directly in order to achieve a result and those that analyzed and planned before acting. Eric had always thought that the former was more dangerous, one that acted without thought. Talking with Ursula made him realize that he was wrong. A person who acted first always gave their intentions away. Someone like Ursula, who bided their time and planned, was unpredictable and most dangerous of all.

"What was the solution to the bet, then?" Eric demanded, curiosity overwhelming his ability to keep quiet. What had they been so close to?

The witch rolled her eyes.

"Truly pathetic," she sighed melodramatically. "It stares you in the face yet you do not see it. I suppose that was to my benefit. That's what made the plan so brilliant after all." Eric was getting tired of her gloating and had to fight himself not to making a snide remark that would derail the topic of conversation. Luckily the witch wanted to gloat and continued on. "In order to win the bet all this sweet little mermaid," she briefly shook Ariel much to Eric chagrin, "had to do was get her father to accept her choice to be a human." She threw Triton a taunting look, obviously wanting him to feel guilty for his daughter's failure. "For him to accept her little human as part of his family."

Eric felt his heart thump painfully in his chest. Acceptance. That was what the witch wanted. What they had apparently been close to. Eric thought back to his one-sided conversation with the Sea King after he proposed to Ariel. The Sea King said he had heard him. Had Eric managed to impress the man enough for him to consider accepting his relationship with Ariel? Had he not been close to doing so right before the witch appeared herself and changed Ariel back?

"So what shall it be?" she asked when neither man asked further questions. Eric was at a loss for words and no closer to a plan. He looked to Triton but the man's expression gave nothing away.

Apparently Ariel could see something in her father's face that neither Eric nor the witch could because she spoke up for the first time. "Daddy don't!" she exclaimed, renewing her struggle to break the Sea Witch's hold. Her attempts were in vain.

"Hush!" Ursula snapped, whipping another tentacle over the mermaid's mouth. "Now Triton, do choose quickly. I don't have all day."

The man sighed, his face adopting a placating look, his trident drooping to touch the surface of the water where it glowed faintly, as if in supplication. "You can have anything you want," he said. "Just do not harm Ariel."

The lavender woman's face stretched wide with a sharp smile, eyes gleaming as her eyes greedily eyed the trident. "Hand it over," she demanded with a nod at the object in question.

Then the large Sea King stretched out a hand, offering his trident to the witch.

Eric knew—he knew—that if the woman got her hands on the trident it was all over. He doubted seriously that she would keep any promises that were not written in a contract and come to think of it, she had not made any promises, only threats. The world around them was still. The mer-guards watched tensely and immobile from their wide perimeter. Each one of them was too far away to act quickly enough and too obvious to act stealthily enough.

Ariel watched her father, eyes wide as they peered out over the tentacle still covering her mouth. The rest of her was still held immobile. Ursula's minions peered out above the water, a matching set of eyes, one white and one yellow. The only movement came from the Sea King slowly extending the trident.

And then Eric saw movement. A dark shadow darting beneath the water, swift and silent. It came to a stop below the pier and in the light of the rising moon Eric saw a figure take shape. A large tropical fish, yellow and striped blue, with a small crab clutching his tail.

Eric recognized the crab. His eyes widened but he managed not to call out Sebastian's name as the fish—Flounder by the way Ariel had described him— slowly rose in the water, hovering just beneath the surface. This close Eric could see something else.

In Sebastian's other claw he clutched a large metal object. Eric could not believe what he was seeing; the crab was holding his knife! The one he had tossed into the waves months ago after he drew Ariel's blood. How had he found it? Eric had thrown it to the sea several miles from here. But…but the king of the sea was right beside him, and he had lowered his glowing all-powerful trident into the water just moments ago. Apparently he was not giving up without a fight either.

The witch's hand closed around the trident as she let out a howl of success.

"And now to put you in your place, dear brother!" she crowed, turning the king's trident on him. Ariel let out a muffled shriek behind her gag as blinding light arched from the three prongs of the trident and surrounded the merman. Unlike when Triton turned the power of the trident on Ariel those months ago, this time it had an effect.

Eric watched, frozen, as the Sea King shrank before his eyes, shriveling in on himself until nothing but a sickly gray polyp remained, swiftly sinking beneath the waves. His eyes flicked in disbelief between where Triton had just disappeared and where the Sea Witch was, laughing boisterously. She swung the trident around and sent another arch of light towards the guards. In the space of a second all the guards were shrinking, disappearing beneath the waves with their king. How was this possible? Where would she stop?

Eric decided to stop questioning things and start acting before she turned the weapon on anyone else. He had realized that those that planned were more dangerous than those that acted, but acting fast had its perks too. In the next moment he thrust his hand down into the water and had a grip around the familiar hilt of his knife. A bit tarnished and rusted from its time in the sea, the weapon was made of the finest materials and still held a wicked sharp double-edged blade. The crab released it quickly and the fish carted him swiftly beneath the pier and presumably towards their king.

Ursula had been so intent on her newfound success that she reacted slowly to Eric's actions. Knife in hand he launched himself off the pier and across the ten foot expanse of water between it and Ariel.

He slammed into the coils of tentacles, scrambling for purchase. He found it and in a burst of bunching muscles and snakelike reflexes he brought the knife down over-handed, embedding it to the hilt in one of the Sea Witches meaty tentacles.

"AH!" The woman gave a horse cry, tentacles recoiling in reflex, throwing Eric into the water and releasing Ariel as they did. Eric caught her as they slipped into the water, pulling her to his side and kicking wildly to find orientation in the water column. Ariel's tail thrashed against his legs in a similar attempt and together and they broke through the surface. The witch was hugging her injured tentacle to herself with one hand, howling in pain and anger, while the other hand leveled the trident threateningly at the couple.

"You will pay for that!" she raged and swung the glowing trident, directing it not at Eric and Ariel, but at the sky. The weather responded immediately. The storm clouds that had receded after the sinking of the pirate ship—was that only minutes ago?—returned, racing across the sky like roiling waves crashing over the shore. The water around them began to swirl viciously, pulling them further and further away from the pier and out towards sea.

Eric clutched Ariel tightly, unwilling to let her out of his arms ever again.


So much was happening around her—crashing white-capped waves, strong currents, booming thunder and flashing lightening forking through the cloudy night sky—that Ariel was in complete sensory overload. When the rain started pelting down in thick stinging sheets she felt an intense longing for the warmth of her bed in the palace, a mere shadow on the distant shore. Her only comfort was Eric's arms wrapped around her. Her body still stung with residual shockwaves from her transformation, so much quicker and more painful than the initial change from mermaid to human. Ariel felt a strange mixture of familiarity and longing at the return of her tail. This was familiar to her. She'd spent her entire life with a tail. There were no tricks or secrets about it that she didn't know, unlike legs, which constantly provided her with surprises from muscle cramps to her foot 'falling asleep'. Legs were much more unpredictable than her tail and yet she longed to have them back. She'd willingly traded her tail for legs and she'd never regretted it. She was meant to be human and to live on land with Eric. The constraining feeling of having her legs bound together in a tail seemed to only solidify her inability to return to the life she'd chosen.

Her terror and aching heart aside she had other things to worry about, like her father and the guards, transformed into polyps back at the pier and Eric who, despite his best efforts and impeccable physical shape, was quickly tiring in the strong waves. Ariel was helping to support him above the water now, trying to keep him from drowning like he'd done for her less than an hour before.

Ursula was before them, brandishing her father's trident as she continued to worsen the weather conditions. Far to her left Ariel could see the shape of another ship, the naval vessel that Eric had arrived on, struggling to approach them as it was battered by the storm. It wouldn't make it near them, she knew, and realized that she and Eric would have to deal with this situation on their own.

The Sea Witch turned to look at them now, malicious intent reflected clearly in her features, injured tentacle still clutched tightly to her side. Ariel could still see the hilt of the knife protruding from it.

"Now you, you slimy little worms!" she snarled, glaring at them as if they were indeed spineless creatures she had found lurking in a deep ocean cavern. "You dare to attack me?" Ariel felt as if it would be pointless to point out that Triton had relinquished his trident with the stipulation that she would not be harmed. No, Ariel doubted the Sea Witch cared much as she was clearly preparing to do some form of bodily injury to both her and Eric. "I am the ruler of all the oceans! The waves obey my every command!"

Ariel watched in horror as the cecaelian grew before her eyes. She had lived in the same home as the trident her entire life and she'd never seen it used for anything like this before. Of course, her father never abused the trident's power like Ursula was. The woman swelled in size, growing larger and larger until a behemoth version of the Sea Witch loomed, half submerged before them, visible tentacles the width of boat masts. Ariel was certain that the people on land could see the woman from there and knew by the sudden alteration of course, that at least the helmsman aboard the naval ship could too.

Eric's grip on her tightened, holding her closer, as if to offer the protection of his body.

The water around them started to rotate; faster and faster the whirlpool grew, seeming bent on tearing the lovers apart. And it worked. With a final slip of her fingertips Ariel was thrown from Eric's side and towards the center of the pool while he was dragged to the periphery.

"NO!" she shrieked, voice lost amid the howling winds as she descended further and further down the funnel of water created by the witch. She slammed into the basalt seafloor with breathtaking force, bursts of light dancing before her eyes. When her vision cleared she was alone at the bottom of a one-hundred foot high tunnel of water. The witch's ire held back the sea on either side of Ariel, creating a whirling window into her old home, so close and yet unobtainable.

Eric. Where is Eric? Is he alright? she wondered frantically as she searched for him amid her surroundings. He was nowhere to be seen.

Back at the surface Ursula glared down at Ariel, large form making her feel incredibly small and insignificant in the world. She leveled the trident at Ariel and laughed. Her laughter boomed over the sea, mixing with thunder and crashing waves but when she spoke, she was not addressing Ariel. She glanced up at something Ariel could not see and said "Say good-bye to your sweetheart!" before firing.


Ariel was ripped from his arms and he felt the loss as if a piece of his heart went with her.

"NO!" he shouted, slipping briefly beneath the waves before breaking free of their deadly grip and emerging on the surface once again. Ariel was nowhere to be seen; only a large swirling mass of water that created the expanse between him and the Sea Witch. He immediately struck out into the lethal current, heading for where he knew Ariel must be…

…only to be restrained. He was jerked back onto the periphery of the whirlpool by two strong, constricting forces wrapping tightly around his biceps. Glancing to his left he saw the slimy tail of a large eel, wrapped around his arm, another on his right. Ursula's little minions.

"Let go!" he grunted out, fighting his captors to no avail.

Ursula turned to look at Eric, a wicked gleam in her eye.

"Say good-bye to your sweetheart!"

The witch leveled the trident at where Ariel had disappeared into the whirlpool and fired. "Ariel no!" Eric shouted, fighting against the swirling water to get to where Ariel had disappeared.

"Ariel!" he cried out in distress, imagining the horror of her being struck down with him so near and yet unable to go to her aid. For a few horror-filled moments he thought she was dead as he struggled helplessly against his restraints. But then the witch once more leveled the trident, apparently not finished.

Ariel, she was still alive. Still fighting.

He needed to get to her.

The eels were made of pure muscle, their grip as strong as any iron shackles. Try as he might, Eric could not break their hold.

Until they suddenly let go.

In his surprise Eric dropped beneath the surface once again, plunging several feet before regaining his faculties. Squinting through the turbulent water he saw a flash of red clinging to the tail of a fleeing eel, its partner under assault from a blur of yellow and blue.

Ariel's friends had once again come to the rescue.

Unwilling to let their aid go to waste he rocketed to the surface again and struck out into the whirlpool, dodging debris as he went. Apparently the whirlpool had stirred up wreckage from a shipwreck.

As he doggedly closed in on his goal another form burst from the water before him. At first he thought it was the eels returning for him but the form was much too large and still growing.

At last the enormous, damaged form of a ship bobbed up among the blustering winds. A ship with no figurehead.

The Sea Witch had pulled the pirate ship from its recent watery grave. Eric spared no time in heading for a trailing line of rigging, using it to heave himself towards the deck towering above. His arms did not want to function properly, exhausted from treading water for so long, but he managed it anyway. When he pulled himself onto the waterlogged deck at last he saw no signs of its earlier inhabitants. The pirates had not emerged from their watery graves, a fact for which Eric was profoundly grateful.

Eric turned to look back at Ursula. She was still firing down at the center of the whirlpool, toying both with Ariel at the bottom and with his emotions. Eric's anger surged within him as he ran for the helm. He did not know how the ship was floating after rupturing its keel but for now he was in no position to argue. There was no figurehead on the ship but the fallen foremast had caught its rigging on the bow of the ship, creating a veritable harpoon from splintered wood. The perfect size to use on the gigantic Sea Witch.

The wheel was spinning uninhibited as the ship was tossed about in the storm. Sheets of rain pelted him, stinging his exposed skin and plastering his hair to his forehead and neck. He reached for the wheel, wincing as the spokes bashed his knuckles on the first two attempts. At last he was able to secure a firm grip on it and threw his body weight behind his attempt to redirect the vessel. Slowly, the makeshift harpoon changed trajectory, turning to aim at his intended target, the larger than life cecaelian before him.

As the clouds poured forth above him and lightening forked through the sky the picture before him was one straight from myths of old, reminding him of the fearsome kraken. He had often told Ariel—and thought to himself—that mermaids were once a myth to him, one that he was glad had come to life. Looking at the real life kraken before him now he wished this was one myth that would have remained mere lore. He could understand how mermaids were praised for their beauty and ability to lure sailors to their deaths (if for nothing more than tempting men to forgo safety in exchange for mere moments with such alluring beings—he would, obviously, risk everything for his own mermaid) and he had to wonder if the men who first spread the tale of the kraken had come across their own cecaelian.

The ship drew closer to Ursula. Eric battled the helm, trying to keep his aim true. He had one shot, one chance to stop the witch and save Ariel. How much longer did Ariel have? Ursula was still taunting her, having momentarily shifted her attention from punishing him for stabbing her (a punishment conducted by attacking the one he loved) to enjoying her torture of the young mermaid. Eric was about to use that momentary lapse of attention.

The Sea Witch suddenly reared back, straightening her back and raising the trident high overhead. "So much for true love," she said, bringing the trident down in a deadly arch.

And Eric slammed into the witch. His aim was true. The fallen mast buried itself deep into the Sea Witch's plentiful midsection.

For a moment the world froze as the witch looked down in shock, following the wooden protrusion to the ship, and then its helmsman. Eric met her eyes for the briefest of moments and hoped that she saw his true disgust and hatred for her. She threw back her head and let loose a terrifying howl of agony and fury.

And then the world exploded.