Total pages in book: 33
Estimated words: 31279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 31279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 156(@200wpm)___ 125(@250wpm)___ 104(@300wpm)
I can’t argue with any of it. He’s not wrong.
The plaza holds its breath. Time tightens, then snaps.
“You are banished from Starfall Lake, Ariel,” Father proclaims.
He says my name like he’s swallowed glass. His shoulders hitch once before they straighten. “If there were another road,” he says, too low for the crowd, “I would lay my body over it.”
“Appa, please,” I whisper the childhood name.
His eyes flick to mine, raw and bright; then the king swallows the father. “You will not speak of our home. You will not approach our borders or our people. If you are seen within our realm, you will suffer the consequences.” A flinch flickers through him, but he swallows it down. “You will go above, to the surface you defend, and live with the humans. When you breach the air, your magic will be stripped. You will be”—he hesitates, a single tear escaping before he drags it away with the back of his hand—“human. Go now. Goodbye, daughter.” His voice breaks on the last word.
Something in me breaks. I want to argue, beg, and throw myself on his mercy.
I don’t. I lift my chin and do the unforgivable.
“Then make it mercy, not treason,” I blurt out, hands open, palms stinging with the current. “Bind my magic for a season. Chain me to the reef for a moon. Let me prove I didn’t endanger us. Let me show you he means no harm.”
A murmur ripples through the plaza. Salina’s hiss is a blade behind me. Father’s gaze doesn’t leave my face.
“If there were a way to keep you and keep them out,” he says, voice raw under the iron, “I would tear the lake in two.”
“Appa,” I whisper. “Please. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay below the vents. I’ll—”
“You will leave,” he says, but the words wobble. His hand lifts one helpless inch from his side as if some old habit wants to tuck a curl behind my ear, like when I was little and brave only because he was there. He forces it down.
“Let me say goodbye to Grandmother,” I try, a last, desperate barb of hope.
He closes his eyes. For a heartbeat, the world stills. Even the kelp forgets to sway. “Go,” he says hoarsely. “Before I cannot make you.”
Grandmother drifts to the edge of the circle, grief folded into the lines of her mouth. Our eyes catch. Swim, hers say. While there is still a daughter to save.
I swallow salt that has nothing to do with the lake. “I love you,” I tell him, because if I don’t say it now, it will rot inside me and turn to something bitter.
His breath shivers. He does not turn.
Around us, the crowd performs the ritual of pretending not to hear a family break. One by one, backs present themselves in armor made of obedience.
I force my body to move. Every inch tastes like refusal. I pass beneath him, close enough that my shoulder brushes the hem of his mantle. He doesn’t flinch, but the fabric trembles, and that is worse.
“Princess,” Salina calls brightly, too brightly. “Shall I escort you to the boundary?”
“No,” Father says, and the no is sharp enough to cut. He doesn’t look at me when he adds, softer, “She knows the way.”
Of course I do. The way out is the same as the way in. I was born in that corridor of light and cold. The lake remembers.
I don’t look back. If I do, I’ll beg again. Colors smear; stone and frond and familiar archways blur into the tunnel’s pale dawn. The water changes as I climb, becoming warmer and thinner, threaded with the taste of rain. My gills flutter wrong, like frightened birds.
At the mouth of the corridor, I pause where the light webs over the rock, one palm flat to the stone that held my childhood. “Appa,” I breathe into the rock, into the old bones of our home, as if stone carries messages up as well as down. “Keep them safe.”
The current brushes my cheek like a goodbye.
I push through.
Up, up, up, through coin-bright shafts, through the hush between heartbeats, until the surface scalds my face with air and I sob on instinct, already breaking in two.
Shore. Mud. Reeds rattling with the wind.
Pain detonates in my tail, hot and white, as it shears along a line that didn’t exist a breath ago. I scream. The sound is wrong in the open air, thin and ripped. Bones bud and branch where there were none. Muscles unspool as skin drags over new angles. My tail splits into two pale limbs and collapse under me like newborn deer.
I have joints in places where there shouldn’t be joints. My sea-silk top clings wetly to curves I apparently still get to keep. My toes—toes—wiggle. I stare. Then I giggle, because apparently my brain has decided we live here now, in the uncanny valley between agony and hysterical awe.