Dream Knives Glitter
Chapter 4: Like Dying
A/N: Final chapter, you guys!
Now the girl with the tears heard voices calling to her, calling her by a name she had almost forgotten, But it was her sisters in the water! (Of course the man had his wedding on a ship, it was because of a shipwreck he met his golden one.) The sisters looked different from what the girl remembered, All their beautiful swirling hair was gone. All of it.
The girl kept crying, now at the sight of their fuzzy, shorn heads, even as the sisters handed her a glittering knife and said that they had traded it for their hair with the sea witch. If she stabbed the man she loved, she could turn back into a mermaid and be with them again. Live out the rest of her three hundred years.
The girl looked at the knife and how it glittered in the moonlight, She eyed the door of the cabin the man and his golden one had slipped into right after the party. She walked numbly towards the bedroom.
The girl with the knife listened at the door and heard no noises. They had must have fallen asleep, tired from their long day. She opened the door to find them, in states of half undress, entangled in each other. The girl stood over them, and cried more than ever. She saw, on his face, that look of peace and serenity she had been convinced was just for her. But it wasn't. It was for the golden one who lay there with him. Too golden, too perfect.
(You child, think she is going to stab him, I can see it in your eyes. You want vengeance. What kind of story doesn't have a villain to be punished? To you, he is nothing but the villain now.)
But the girl looked at him, at them, and she loved him. She loved him with an intensity that even her broken human heart couldn't contain. It was a fire inside her. She who had been of waterbut a few months ago.
With one last look, one last tear, she left the man she loved and closed the door behind her. She walked to the edge of the ship, just as the sun began to rise, and then turned into nothing but foam on the sea. (You are indignant, and rightly so. It isn't fair. It doesn't make a good story. It is too human, isn't it? It makes you care too much. Essentially, the story ends here, but there is a little bit left. Hardly worth anything but...)
A few seconds after she dissolved into oblivion, the girl was shocked into consciousness; she was floating up, still existing! She was riding the wind up into the clouds—she was the wind in the clouds. Dizzy, she blew around, not understanding, until she heard the other winds talking to her. They were saying she had become too human to die like mermaids do when their time is up—as foam on the sea. The wind that was the girl became Arctic cold, and howled a gust to knock someone off their feet. She had forgotten, but now she remembered all of it. (You thought she was going to be happy now, didn't you? You thought she was going to be a wind child, free and happy. Have I taught you nothing? Haven't you been listening?)
The winds said she had a chance now, however, to die like a human without having someone fall in love with her, She just had to blow all around the world, as they did, forthree hundredyears. She was to blow into children's windows at night and bring them dreams.
But... if she ever encountered a child who was disbelieving, she would cry, and with every tear would be sentenced to another year of this. (Oh, you were sure there was a moral, you knew that was coming. A tear. child, what are you doing to me? Never mind. When the sun rises, I'll just blow away, and if you remember the mergirl's story at all it will be as faint and distant as a dream. Another tear. But this one, not for you.)
A/N: THE END! I'll miss you,
orangepenguin.