Seul

Unlike others who use the stale word bed for a bed, Seul calls him a dream hatcher because of exactly what it is – where his wild, quietly-nurtured, and hidden thoughts during the days finally make their way into the world, in the form of dreams. He’s creative, he’s poetic, he’s unwavering to the boredom of life, and he shall live it up even in the most private and vulnerable doing of every being – the act of sleep.

Today Seul finds out that the edge of his dream hatcher is sharp and ragged, meaning it’s about time to get a new one. It’s become a routine for Seul to change the bed now and then. He had it coming when he insisted on using a huge clam shell to rest his head, but he doesn’t regret it. It gives him a sense of uniqueness, of daring, of doing what others never think of for the sake of trying. It also gives him reasons to get up and move, especially on the days when all he wants is to snuggle in his room, wishing for his blaring mind to shut up.
With the thought vividly burning in his head, Seul gathers motivation and rolls out of his shell – literally and figuratively. He sighs, watching the bubbles churning around him, and looks up above as a force of habit. The sunlight is still there, too close for him to feel through the water, and yet always too far away to let his skin have a real taste.

The remorse doesn’t last long, nonetheless, as Seul heads to the shallow part of the sea, where the giant clams live. These creatures depend on a huge deal of sunlight to thrive, so he’s going to where he can be closer to the feeling he’s dire to have. The turquoise of the ocean is paler from here, mixing with more gold from the direct sunlight.

Seul lands next to several clams, big enough for him to rest his back comfortably. Sometimes he wonders if they feel the pain of being ripped off from their shells and left to die, but he quickly shrugs the pity away. Clams aren’t meant to have concepts of pain, but to provide comfort to the rulers of the sea, namely Seul’s father, and everyone in his family. It’s a waste of their existence if he doesn’t let them serve.

Today, however, his search is startled, not by the sudden pity with which sometimes his feral heart likes to torture itself, but by an unmentioned desire his ferocious brain always jumps at. As Seul is wandering around the seabed, examining the potential shells suited best for his liking, he runs into the shipwreck.

He knows that’s what it’s called, because of the survival lesson passed down through generations of merpeople, that they should avoid getting impaled by the broken wood of a shipwreck. He’s aware of this particular one’s existence, for Seul being Seul, always going head first into what people advise him against. He has never seen it anywhere that close, nonetheless.

At first, Seul thought he was having a hallucination because he never thought of ever seeing it here. The bottom of the shipwreck is much lower than where he is, but its top stands out and is visible from Seul’s spot. He swims there to make sure that his head isn’t messing with him, and is struck with surprise that it’s indeed one of the (rare?) occasions when he’s in the clear. The ship looms over in front of him.

This is weird, because the last time Seul saw it, it was at the rear of the darker sea, and there hadn’t been any wave strong enough to move it. He’s visited it a few times, for very quick searches, only when he urgently needs something to add up to his collection of the Earth’s objects. Even he can’t stand the feeling of being too close to this unorthodox part of the ocean. The dark sea is the rare case where Seul agrees with other merpeople – that it should be buried and forgotten.
There isn’t anything there, to begin with, no potential for exploration and various potentials of death, like several volcanoes on the verge of blasting and a bunch of unnamed sea creatures that resemble factions of a nightmare. Some even claim that a wicked witch lives there, but Seul never buys those words of mouth. As if the existence of such a place weren’t terrifying enough. 
For now, Seul’s glad. The shipwreck’s been a throbbing topic he has to refrain himself from wondering about. It’s the closest thing he ever has to the human world, and a detailed exploration of it is overshadowed by his fear of the darker sea. Now the shipwreck's ripped away from the darker sea and brought to him, by whatever miracle the ocean has in store, the last barrier is washed away.
The desire shines brighter than it ever does, and Seul finds it driving him down, lower, deeper, closer to the towering pile of broken wood, shattered glass, and deranged whatever it is parts that make a human’s ship.

It feels much colder, now that he leaves the cyan blue water and the sneaking rays of sunshine behind, swimming into the shadow of the broken ship. Seul tries his best not to get cut by the ragged edges, and yet the change of light blinds him. In a second, as soon as he’s enclosed by the crispy embrace of the darkness, Seul feels a dainty pain on his arm, clear enough to notice, not enough to halt his adventure.

The smell of blood fills the air, but Seul doesn’t stop to examine his wound. The excitement overwrites the stinge, and the realization only fuels his curiosity, urging him to move further ahead. He uses both of his arms and fins to enhance the speed, passing through the parts he’s already seen.

A room with shards of broken mirrors. A wall with a huge hole in it. Pieces of metal lying haphazardly, all rusty within the harsh grip of time and the seawater. The corridor that was filled with corpses is now abandoned and empty. The sea creatures have done their feast. The stains and pieces here and there are the sole reminder of the fact that this was once a premise full of lives.

Then comes the part that Seul hardly had the time to go through. He gulps, feeling the water getting colder around him and his determination burning stronger. With a swift quiver of the tail, Seul gets through what he thinks to be a frayed door frame, into a quiet room whose ceiling’s on the brink of collapsing.
The room looks less appealing than he ever imagined, but Seul isn’t disappointed. He knows for a fact that his imagination is a bitch, always going over its own sake, filling him with the frantic expectation that never passes the boring filter of reality, resulting in nothing but him getting bitten on the arse by the frosty fangs of realization. He knows better than to expect anything other than a demolishing pile.

Shinichirou

His tutor is right. The wall behind the oldest oak is broken, but not because of the wild ocean winds, storms, or the direct touch of time. Time plays a role in it, not in the sense of withering the stone by itself, but in making the oak grow larger than the territory assigned for it, pushing the stone wall down and breaking a hole in it.

He also understands why no one in the palace feels the urge to fix that hole. The tree works as a cover, throttling anyone’s hope to sneak into the palace that way. There’s hardly anyone, still, there are more feasible passages to murder Shinichirou’s parents and everyone around him that don’t involve a rocky-strewn patch of the sea too shallow for a ship to anchor and too deep for a human not to drown.

There’s no need, either, for anyone living inside the palace to sneak out of it, at least according to people’s foolish belief. The palace, to them, is the ultimate symbol of a happy house, where they’re well-fed and well-dressed, having to do only the bare necessities of existence and still flourishing with the utmost luxuries. Most people have to earn themselves a spot in this golden cage, and even then they have to prostitute their soul to keep the spot unwavering. It’s crazy and outrageous for anyone born inside the palace to want to leave.

But Shinichirou isn’t one to deny craziness, and outrageousness is what makes his blood boil, his heart beat, and his exhausted soul want to hold onto its pointless existence. So he’s doing exactly what people never believe someone in his position would do: he climbs on the oldest oak, slinking himself through the leaves and branches, reaching the rear that faces the ocean, then jumps down.
There was nobody on the shore as Shinichirou left the tree, but there’s an old lady now, appearing from behind a blind spot under the castle wall, on a tattered cart with a donkey, both are as old as its owner. She’s a no-one – probably a fisherman, probably a wife of someone of no significance. She stares at Shinichirou with eyes full of surprise, and Shinichirou stares back. He expected her to scream. It’s not that she encounters people jumping from a huge tree to the sand every day.

The old lady turns away and urges the donkey to move forward, but doesn’t look back at Shinichirou. She seems to be going faster. Shinichirou looks at his clothes again, and signs. He understands why the old lady wanted to get away from him. Typical peasant, never wanting to have anything to do with a high lord.

His attention shifts back to the scenery as the old lady disappears. The sand beneath him feels soft, and the ocean’s gentle breeze caresses his cheek, raising a surge of curiosity in him. He walks ahead, listening to something, a call, from a voice he’s not even sure if he’s ever heard before. His blood runs faster in his veins, however, urging him to charge forward. The breeze merged into gusts of wind, as he finally reached the water, feeling the saltiness stick to his skin.

It’s a sudden escape, out of Shinichirou's chaotic will and some sheer comments from his tutor. Nobody should be there in the first place, let alone waiting for Shinichirou. Where this call comes from, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t even understand the language. Yet he doesn’t need such unimportant knowledge to tell that it’s his name, to him, solely aiming at him. And it leads his gaze to a paddle boat.

Never in his dreams can he imagine a boat here. This is not the right place for anyone in their right mind to enjoy a boat trip – too rocky, too many waves, the sea isn’t that beautiful, and it’s close enough to a royal asset for them to be brought in as a scapegoat where anything bad takes place in the palace. Still, there’s a boat. Somebody left behind a boat, right as Shinichirou ran out to the shore to see it.

He doesn’t know what tells him to do so, but his feet bring him to the boat, his gaze is fixated on it, and his head doesn’t mind the sand going lower beneath his steps or the waves whispering in his ears. He only thinks of the boat, and probably the mutter of the wind that envelops him within a story whose words he doesn’t understand one bit, and still doesn’t need any word to tell that it’s beautiful.

Shinichirou climbs on the boat and takes the paddle, feeling the slight shake of the water underneath, along with the weight of wood in his palm. The boat seems sturdy, but it has stains suggesting the passing of time throughout its surface. He doesn’t have a lot of knowledge about boats, but he can tell that this is a stubborn one, probably has been through more than it’s supposed to take and manages to prevail over them all.
The wind suddenly takes a faster turn, blasting in his ears, like sweet fuel to his lust for adventure. It blares in no longer than one second, then goes slower, quieter, but the lingering effect of the call’s already planted in his heart. Shinichirou looks at the palace once more, feeling himself drifting further from it, and closer to whatever called for him over there, beyond the waterline on the shore, the rocks, the waves.

He takes the paddles and starts moving ahead, ignoring the logical admonition that he’s never done it before, nor even had any decent knowledge about rowing a boat, let alone slipping one through this rocky shallow water. Normally, he listens to it. Not this time. This time, Shinichirou’s head is dominated by the mysterious call of the wind beyond, making him, for once, determined to ditch his conscience.

It probably takes most of the luck he’s collected his whole life for him to make it through the rocks, but Shinichirou doesn’t regret it anyhow. Something about all of these uncanny coincidences ignites the fading flame of life in him, causing him to yearn, to want, to get hysterical and fuck every royal shackle he’s been wearing around his neck, to press his former life down under the sea and let the waves wash them far away. He’s heard of the will to live, but never once thought he’d be lucky enough to possess such a prestigious thing. Now he’s feeling it and isn’t ready to let it go.
The boat stays still as he finally reaches the deeper water. From such a distance, the palace seems smaller – it’s still towering over a large portion of the shore, but it’s a bit less intimidating, less gold-clad, less tyranny, less carrying the lurking aura of his parents' presence. It appears to be more like a place to live, and less like a golden cage.

And with that, Shinichirou can feel his sense of freedom running more enthusiastically through his veins, in perfect harmony with every heartbeat. He knows that it’s temporary, but it’s the closest thing he ever has to being free, and he’s content with it. The waves are less robust offshore, the sea is more turquoise deeper below, its surface is still, reflecting Shinichirou and the blinking sunshine, and there’s a certain charm about the wind’s story that he never knew existed.

As if it can feel his thoughts, the wind suddenly takes a swift turn up, and the blaring voice in it comes back almost too abruptly, lingering for longer than it should. The stillness of the sea is stirred, the sunlight in it falters, and even Shinichirou’s reflection shatters in various shapes of haphazard pieces, all twisted and crumbled. His boat weavers as the waves roar louder. It feels almost as if the wind’s become too excited for his sake and is calling up the underwater currents.

Which, as Shinichirou realizes a bit too late, is dangerous for him. He tries to stabilize himself and use the paddles to move back to the shore, but the boat keeps turning in circles. Sheer luck was what brought him there, and sheer luck is used up. He has nothing on him now, as the waves and the wind are rampaging down on him, and the sea looks like it can swallow him whole at any minute.

It’s still bizarre, unorthodox even, that the sun remains in the sky and the clouds stay where they are. Shinichirou can still feel the sunlight’s heat, and yet his boat is jumping up and down like it’s caught in a tornado. The chaos seems to remain only on the sea’s surface, the wind stays strictly where it is, causing the waves to rise accordingly.

Shinichirou blinks, as a huge wave suddenly looms over and throws him off from the boat. More of them come crashing, ripping him away and plunging his chances for survival into the depths of the ocean. Shinichirou feels the air gushing out of him as he goes down deeper, the sunlight-covered sea in front of him replaced by the turquoise water.
He isn’t sure if it’s magic, or simply a joke of the darned shit called destiny. It looks like the sea wants to have him on that fateful day, so it does whatever it takes to make him forever within its grasp.