Kylo knew that his men would sense a lie before he even spoke it, but that didn't mean he couldn't omit.

He had told them the next most convenient thing: a near truth. He said that he had found a suspiciously torn piece of netting by the watchtower. He believed it had been placed there deliberately for them to find because it didn't synchronize with the tide coming in.

If his Knights had any doubts to the truth of that, they hid it well. Or perhaps they simply knew better than to question their leader to his face. Kylo sent them back on their way, waiting alone on that windswept stretch of beach for several more minutes longer than strictly necessary, and then returned to where he had hidden the mermaid girl away.

The watchtower was a re-purposed lighthouse that had been taken over by Kylo and his Knights when they'd taken over protectorship of the island. While the damp, half-ruined structure offered little for comfort, its security and privacy had lead Kylo into claiming it as his own. It was a place he knew well now, and knowing that someone else was inside it left him with a deeply uneasy feeling weighing at his mind.

When Kylo had dropped her there, he had more or less heaved the girl at an old cot in the basement of the tower before he left to speak to his men. There hadn't been any time for niceties, but he couldn't have been gone for more than twenty minutes if that much.

And yet the girl was already awake, even though his induced sleeps usually last an hour if not more. Kylo finds her there in a sad and hunched over heap of shivering flesh. She lays slumped over the bottom two steps of the staircase going down into the basement, and the empty cot where he'd placed her down on is flipped over onto it's side behind her.

The lost mermaid gives a short, terrified sounding cry when she sees him. She tries to push herself away, but her arms buckle underneath her and her legs simply flail and flop uselessly.

"It's alright,"Kylo tells her. "I'm not here to hurt you."

He has no reason to believe that a creature like this can understand him. Still, she freezes, stopping in her desperate and pointless movements to look up at him with open-eyed wonder.

Kylo grunts, realizing that he had summoned a ball of flames into his hand without thinking. He transfers the energy to a candelabra high on the wall and starts to walk down the steps towards the girl.

She immediately yelps again, pushing away harder but gaining no ground. She falls onto her back, twisting over and half rolling away in her desperation. It's a tragic sight, very much like seeing an invalid thrown from their bed, and Kylo tsks when he approaches.

"If you're going to act like this, I will need to find you some clothes."

Not only is the mermaid absolutely naked, but the damp floor of the watchtower basement is filthy. This room was normally abandoned or, on occasion, used as an armory of storeroom for his Knight's equipment. It was never meant to be flopped upon by a terrified girl who's-

Who's bleeding from a litany of new cuts Kylo knew she hadn't been sporting before.

"Gods."

He kneels next to her, reaching out to turn her so he can see her injuries better in the limited light. The girl shrieks again, curling up tightening around herself. There are gashes all along her legs and several on her back as. From this lower angle Kylo can see the glittering of broken glass along the floor and the pungent smell that accompanies it. When she had upturned the bed, she must have knocked over one of the bottles of wine from the rear shelves. So determined to escape had this girl been that she'd literally crawled through it to reach the stairs.

Kylo grabs her then by the shoulder, trying to turn her despite her howls. She curls ever tighter, and Kylo winces when he sees the extent of the lacerations on her legs. The skin, her new skin there seemingly, must be gossamer delicate. Delicate, and now encrusted with dirt and the saltwater muck that leaks in through the walls of this basement.

Kylo lets go then, rocking back on his heels and regarding the pathetically wounded creature.

"What am I supposed to do with you now?" he barks, annoyance tightening his temper.

It's hardly a question there's an answer to. He should have let her die or killed her to begin with, never taken her back here only for her to wound herself worse than she was even before.

The fingers of Kylo's sword hand slide to the hilt of his saber. This would be the best time to do it. He should have already, but now here in the dark he could do it quickly and cleanly. Assure himself that this creature's suffering would be as brief as possible.

His palm circles around the handle, and then he pauses. One of the girl's eyes is watching him, peeping out from the web of her hair and the crook of the arm where she has curled up tightly.

It's the eye of a human. Deceptively so. Not the slitted gaze of the merfolk in their other form. Not the vicious creatures who had claimed many a villager for their dinner and caused his own Knights nearly endless grief.

She's shivering. Kylo can't find her mind- yet another bewildering facet of this being- but he doesn't have to to sense the sheer terror emanating.

This girl is naked. She's cold. She's scared. Killing her now would be pathetic, and a waste of a dangerous mystery. Kylo needs to find out what she is, and with that what sort of threat she brings with her.

The rope marks on her wrists are starting to turn an angry shade of amethyst. Probably from last night, then. Another mystery that a dead mermaid would only leave unresolved.

"No choice then, is there?"

The eye blinks. The shivering of the arm over her head sharpens as the cold of the room starts to sink in. Kylo can feel it even through his heavy layers of woolen clothes and leather boots.

"You're going to freeze to death. That would be a way I could do it, wouldn't it? Leave my sword clean but my conscience worse off."

Kylo drops his hand away from his saber, and the girl's eye follows it as it reaches for her again.

A low growl echoes. The muscles in her bare arms tense. Kylo raises an eyebrow.

"If I try to pick you up now, carry you someplace and clean your wounds, you're going to make this very hard on me, aren't you?"

He pokes at her shoulder, noticing that the wound his saber had given still is oozing blood. It should have clotted by now. Yet another strangeness.

The girl's growling grows louder in answer. She starts to uncurl her arms, her upper body hunching over and her lips curling into a sharp snarl. Truly the look of a cornered animal who's decided to stop playing dead until it's predator gives up and fight back instead.

Kylo feigns pulling back. Then, quick as he can, he lashes his hand out and raps it around the girl's forehead. Immediately she thrashes, howling and clawing at him, but Kylo closes his eyes and finds her mind. It's so muted, so hidden from him, like pushing through cold, dark waters, but he finds it nonetheless.

Then another tug, he knows how hard to make it this time, and the girl collapses bonelessly into the muck covered floor.

Kylo kept having to put her out.

Somehow, this girl, mermaid, creature, beast, kept waking up from his mental hold on her. Always at inopportune times and always so quietly he had been caught off guard until she'd started to thrash.

Two more times now he'd had to renew his sleep spell on her. That probably wasn't good for her mental wellbeing, and it was taking quite a toll on him as well. The first occasion had been at the top of the spiral staircase. Not the steps from the basement, but the long and tall ascent to the top of the lighthouse. There was no light there any longer, the northern coast to sea had become far too treacherous due to the efforts of her kind for fishermen to traverse so there was no need to keep a warning on at night anymore. Kylo had carried her up there in his arms, first finding the slip of a girl to be so skinny she's felt almost weightless. By the time he'd neared the top step however, now a good hundred and twenty feet above the sea, her weight in his arms had started to make its presence known.

And then, at that perfectly opportune and precious moment, the girl had bitten him. Her teeth, human shaped but still sharp, had sunk themselves into the fleshy part between his neck and shoulder. Kylo had dropped her with a loud curse, and the feral thing had once again tried to escape and nearly sent herself spiraling to her death had Kylo not caught her by the ankles.

He'd tied her up with his cowl after putting her none too gentle back into a state of unnatural slumber.

The second time she'd surprised him it had taken a little longer for her to rise. Kylo had put her under quite deeply, much more so than he would with a normal human, but she'd deeply annoyed him with her ungratefulness and besides, his shoulder hurt. He didn't doubt there were crescent shaped imprints against his skin after her attack on his good will.

The lighthouse room was small and octagonal in design. Windows lined every wall, letting in the now mid-morning light. Kylo checked each one of them, making sure there was no was to pry them open. Luckily they had been built into the stone walls themselves and the glass of them so thick it would ave taken Kylo himself considerable effort to shatter them.

"This will have to do for you," he tells her.

The girl is still sleeping. Now that he's felt her psyche enough times, little pieces of it are starting to peep through to him. She's not dreaming. She's fitful. And she's still very scared. That's all he can tell from her, though it brings the prospect of perhaps growing that understanding of this creature's mind into something more useful.

Kylo had used this room as one of his personal spaces. His bedroom itself was downstairs, no good of having to rush down the spiraling staircase in the middle of the night if his men summoned him, but he'd rather like the bright and openness of the light room.

First, he sets aside his books and papers and calligraphy set into a wooden trunk, mindful to take the pens and any other pointed object with him but the rest could stay. Kylo lays the girl down on the only thing he has that approximates a bed: a long wooden bench along the wall farthest from the hatch down.

But would she even want a bed, though? Kylo supposes that she's used to sleeping in the ocean, probably on a bed of kelp or the like, and as delicate as her skin seems to be he doubts he has any-

The girl wakes up screaming. Very much a human woman's scream, and she falls off the bench right onto the open wounds on her back.

She kicks at Kylo as he stomps toward her. Already she seems to be developing control over her legs, or at least enough to slap and push weakly and him with her feet.

Kylo grabs her ankle again, drags her closer, and dodges her snapping teeth as he wraps his hand over her eyes temple until her eyelids fall closed.

"No bed for you, then."

Ungrateful wretch. He wonders what exactly she thinks he's trying to do to her, or maybe her mind is too animalistic in nature to think beyond the need to escape at any cost.

Now that her room was prepared, or her cell if he was to be more accurate, it was time to clean her wounds. For this Kylo secures her limbs with his cowl because it wouldn't do for her to wake up and resume her pointless flailing in the middle of him picking bits of glass out of her skin. He only has the one free garment, though, which puts him at the very uncomfortable situation of having to hogtie the naked girl's hands and ankles together.

More than once Kylo stands up from his catch to check through the windows that no unwanted guests are making their arrival. He finishes his task as quickly as he can. Most of her wounds aren't serious, though she did a good bit more than just graze or gouge her legs on that dirty floor. She'll be lucky if infection doesn't set it, but with any luck Kylo will figure out what to do with her before that's his problem to deal with.

The wound on her arm, though, continues to bleed. It's been close to two hours now, and still little beads of crimson leak from it as Kylo inspects the damage. It just a small cut, but Kylo can feel the power of his own magic tainting the mark. It's as if this mermaid has somehow absorbed part of the energy of his saber, and is no having the most unexplainable reaction to it.

There were people he could ask. Maz, the old medicine woman in the village, might know. Perhaps some of his Knights, they each had their own unique knowledges they brought with them from the homeland. Neither of those options Kylo could consult without raisin questions, so the best he can do now is slice of a strip from his own cowl and wrap the girl's arm up with that.

"Fate had better pay me back kindly for taking care of you like this. Without me you'd be dead by now and we'd both be all the better for it."

For the third time the girl wakes again. Her back is to him and he can't see her face, but he can sense the jolt of shock that races through her and brings her back to the world of the living.

Her confusion is dizzying, and Kylo retreats from the edges of her mind to watch her reaction. Surprisingly she doesn't start to scream or flail. Perhaps because she can't see him watching her. Instead a long stretch of silence falls, broken only by a reedy sounding gasp from the girl.

It's not until her shoulders start to jump and her head falls heavily against the wooden floorboards that Kylo realizes she's crying. Crying softly and starting down at her still bound wrists.

"Oh."

The girls immediately still at the sound of his voice. Kylo grimaces, both wanting to understand the deeper nature of her fear but also very much preferring not to.

This time he doesn't hesitate to move over her and untie her. The girl doesn't struggle like he'd expected her to. Instead, she fallsAs always, you can find ME on tumblr at lost-inthesunlight and on twitter at Ava_Avdal :) completely slack until the moment her limbs are freed. Then she curls up around herself again, wrapping her body up as tight as she can with her arms and pulling her knees into her chest.

Kylo stands up and regarding first the girl then the cowl in his hands. This tower room is the warmest part of the watchtower, but even still that's not saying much.

"Warmer than an ocean grave," he tells her. "Here, have this. It's torn and no good to me any more."

He drapes his cowl over her like a blanket, finding himself no longer able to stomach the sight of the naked girl shivering. From cold or from fear I doesn't matter, at least now he doesn't ave to look at her.

Then he leaves, hurrying down the hatch and checking more than once that it's properly latched and bolted behind him.

author's note:

If you're wondering, I'm basing the setting of this story on some sort of King Arthur-esque fantasy sword and sorcery set in a land that looks remarkably like the coast of Scotland. Scotland with magic. Yes. That's the place.

As always, you can find ME on tumblr at lost-inthesunlight and on twitter at Ava_Avdal :)

comment replies:

Czokolate: Love your name by the way, I think I get it! I'm glad you liked this first chapter! I'm not sure how long this story will be, but let's just see what happens! I'm really enjoying writing it now and I hope you like ch2 as well! Thanks so much for commenting : )