by Bia

The sea lost something the day the wedding ship departed.

Certainly, on the surface it appeared a festive, joyous occasion, because the merpeople – my people – were chosen guests, just like the humans; to all who wanted to see it exactly that way, it was the perfect way to finally unite two races having been torn apart by fate for much too long, a merging of two worlds, just as Ariel now merged two worlds within her own body. Did you see anything but smiles on that day, no matter which faces you looked at?

A day of celebration, bound to enter the history books of humans and the tidescrolls of merpeople alike. Nobody would deny it if questioned. After all, in the end it could almost pass for a a quite ordinary royal wedding, the kind I'd always wished, if not expected, for all of my daughters, completely regardless of the history or the surroundings. The merpeople were rejoicing, for their youngest princess Ariel had finally found someone's hand in marriage – someone kind, strong and of her own rank, if not necessarily her own species....

Yet there were things all this joy covered up, fragments of the mirror no one yet dared to stare into; there was a current of sadness streaming underneath the surf that day, and while it was one you could easily swim against, it was nevertheless there. We were rejoicing in the path Ariel had chosen, yet each of us – I could see it underneath the smiles of Ariel's older sisters – was in some way affected by the path she had chosen against.

And the sea cried out on that day. It mourned, because for the first time it had lost a daughter and could not retrieve her. In our own way, we are the ocean, and when we die, we return to it as seafoam; but Ariel was human now, and no one could say how much of her was still claimed by the waters she had left.

The ocean wailed, for it had been betrayed, and I could do nothing about it but listen. The stories humans tell about me are wrong. I cannot control the water, as little as a king up on land can control the weather. I can only listen, and try to adjust myself to it.

This was the emptiness my daughter left behind, the hollow of a cave with nothing but the currents rushing through it, the echo of a door closing after someone you love has gone out of the room, but it throbbed through all of Atlantica and penetrated the walls of every dwelling, the echo of a mermaid no longer a mermaid, while I'm certain the humans on their part were exhilarated about their newfound, exotic princess and the happiness her smile put upon their prince's face.

It was a reunion, yes, it was supposed to connect our kingdoms...and yet, it separated them even more forcefully than ever before. One of our kind – my daughter – had crossed the bridge, but now we were even more aware of the bridge.

It was a drawbridge.

They say when you make someone else happy, you keep that happiness for yourself tenfold. I'm not sure how much of this is actually true. I don't know if I could have endured the sadness that had beset Ariel's face that day for longer than another hour, if I could look in the mirror another day having made the same mistake twice. When she looked over to the beach that day, across this distance she could all but cross, at the human who had already taken part of her soul....it looked as though she was already there on the beach with him, as though, had the water really killed him, she would've gladly lain down by his side and died. If I had not changed her, she would have remained with me, with us, with her kind, but she would've always had this longing, mournful look in her eyes, a look I'd finally admitted to myself I recognized: the look of someone who belonged somewhere else, somewhere past the surface.

But I could not follow her there. The surface can be thin as a skin on the water, a mere membrane separating one world from the other; to true merpeople, it has always been a wall of granite. And it hasn't changed since Ariel's departure.

It isn't so much sorrow at missing her, because she hasn't gone, not really, but it is a strange awareness of spaces where she should be. A space of radiant indigo in open water that isn't disturbed by a wave of red hair, an old shipwreck that remains unexplored suddenly (I knew more about her acts of disobedience than I let on) a silence her voice should break through, more beautiful than anything in the sea, and, of course, a seat at the royal table where an eager little mermaid should be sitting. It isn't sorrow as much as a strange sense of incompleteness, something the sea feels, maybe, and her king along with it. It would probably be more relieving if I felt sorrow, if I could actually cry, but none of the merpeople have ever seen their ruler cry. And who wants to see someone cry at a fairy tale ending, a fairy tale ending he himself arranged for?

I closed the wound in my daughter's soul, a wound which had been bleeding for far longer than I had known, but in return I opened a wound in myself and now had to see to it.

Her voice will never resound through the waters of Atlantica again. Sometimes she stands by the shore, on those strange human feet I gave her, and I imagine her voice rolling through the air; you can almost hear it, breaching the surface. But something always keeps me away now; in a way, the surface still frightens me, and perhaps it's the pain of really seeing her, my own daughter, transformed into a creature I had once learned to despise, the pain of still loving her all the same. She will always be my daughter, and yet she is no longer. I imagine her white feet where her turqoise tail used to be, fluttering across the dry sand like the wings of flying fish, free as the bird she wanted to be, a seagull, perhaps, like the one she used to visit to have her questions answered.

Those questions I never even fathomed she had. I knew about her explorations from child-age on, of course I did, and for a time I tolerated them as any good father would, thinking this obsession would grow out of her. How was I to know what dreams were going on inside her head, how far she was actually willing to go? I was already old when she was born, and the Queen's death made all of us age at least ten years.

Sometimes I visit the monstrous skeleton where Ursula's lair used to be. The shroud of dark magic is still clinging to the waters and the walls, stubborn as a barnacle and only leaving gradually, but the sea has been claiming it back. You feel the relief surging through the currents where the entrapped souls were transformed and free to go. It is a good place to go when I'm restless, a place where the rage I feel for that woman becomes real and tangible, enabling me to grasp it, wrestle with it, then let go. According to what the others tell me, this is where Ursula first transformed Ariel, in a thin bubble of human air.

Where she went without thinking of me once, and almost died.

Where she almost died.

There were so many places I should have known about sooner, so many moments where I should've been there sooner.

Sometimes I sit on a rock here for hours, and nearly hear the faint traces of a voice, her voice singing for the last time, a magical echo of the moment when she gave it to Ursula in her magic shell.

But eventually, the shell burst and her voice returned to its true owner.

And she took it with her, into a land where I can't follow.

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