Seul

Seul has to admit that sometimes lowering his expectations leads him to better excitement. He was hoping for a mere adventure through a ruin full of trash, with a few bizarre objects of no use but adding to his collection when he found something interesting.

It’s a painting, protected behind a stark frame of metal and a layer of glass, unaffected by the touch of water. It stays face down on the floor as Seul swims into the room and calls for him as soon as he has a thorough look at the interior. He picks the painting up and examines it. The frame is made of metal, and for some reason he can’t put his fingers on it, it isn’t attacked by the rust. There isn’t any sunlight here, either. Seul doesn’t know why it can be that flashy, but it catches his attention.

He turns the frame to look at its front, only to see a blurry face. The glass did a tremendous job of preserving the painting inside, but it took several strikes and became scratched. Despite his wanting to see the face of whoever is drawn inside, Seul knows he can’t take the painting out of the glass. The moment the water touches it, it’s destroyed.
He can only tell that it’s a drawing of a man with black hair, probably a highborn. Seul doesn’t know a lot about the Earth, but he assumes that merpeople and humans are the same to the extent of monarchy and reverence. A higher bloodline deserves fancier jewelry, and the man in the painting is clad with many gold and treasures, all carved in such details that even stained glass fails to cover.

Nonetheless, he can’t bring himself to remove the painting, either. Not that he needs to pay any further attention to the human whose face he can’t see, but this may as well be his first intact object ever collected from a shipwreck, and although Seul’d like to be optimistic and think he may have the same encounter again, he wants to keep the painting as it is, as a tribute for this special occasion.
He takes a few more minutes staring at the painting, checking carefully the frame and the glass, consuming to memory the details of the man-made artifact. His fingers glide through the glazed surface, and his eyes stay on his own reflection, seeing his face hazily lurking in the undamaged patches of the glass, and wondering for the first time how he may appear in a human’s painting.

That’s when Seul sees it, a reflection of another being flashing swiftly like a hasty current, darker than the darkness. It’s merely a shadow cast by the unsettling water, but Seul’s instinct is alert. He can feel his skin jump, the same way it does any time Seul comes into contact with a living creature. He turns around almost immediately and finds himself facing a shadow.

What– or whoever it is, freezes as soon as Seul's eyes land on them as a drop of water turns to ice in the faraway seas of the North. It's silent and unmoving, but Seul can detect living signs underneath its still demeanor. He swallows and peers at it, showing no intention of backing down. He isn’t surprised to see the shadow remain in their spot. The shadow seems like it's been waiting to see him, and Seul just hands it the opportunity.

Seul doesn’t know what, or who, it is, and he has no explanation. It's a bit smaller than Seul, around the size of a fully grown mermaid, but he doesn't feel any similarity. It’s also too big and calm to be a sea creature – they should be either too small to attack or too vicious to stay where they are – so he discards any chance for the shadow to be anything of the sea.

But then he finds it even more mysterious because it is vividly alive. Seul may have little idea about the world of humans, but he knows the basics and one of them is that anything that needs a ship under them while going to the sea doesn't live longer than a few minutes underwater. The shipwreck has been there for a while, shorter than a mere person's life, but longer than those few minutes of a human's survival.

“What are you?” Seul asks, for the sake of asking. Something wise enough to sneak out on him and pause as he recognizes it instead of fleeing mindlessly is worth a try on communication.

The shadow peers at Seul – he isn’t sure if peer is the right expression because he can’t see its eyes, but he assumes so, based on the atmosphere between them. He stares back, feeling the expectation being drained out of him, swirling through the suckle of the sudden water in his surroundings, hearing his voice reverberate through the broken walls. And as he almost gives up on the hope for a talk, he hears an answer.

“What I am doesn’t matter,” a voice shrills through the darkness between them, making Seul’s skin perk. He can’t help a shudder but doesn’t dart his eyes away. It isn’t fear he’s feeling, more like agitation, a mixture of caution and curiosity, with a fine touch of excitement.
“What are you doing, then?” Seul raises his eyebrow. He doesn’t expect the shadow to see his expression, although a part of him starts to think that it may have a vision to see through the dark, at least, see him clearer than he’s seeing it now.

“That’s the right question,” the shadow’s voice drills into his ears again. It belongs to a woman, Seul thinks, considering it's high-pitched and coming from the figure of a mermaid. He isn’t sure. This is the very first time Seul faces something mysterious enough to trigger his nature to question, but uncanny enough to intimidate him and keep him from proceeding ahead.

“Why am I here?” The shadow laughs.

“Do you want to know?”

“It depends on you. Do you want to tell me?” He asks and shrugs. “I think you do.”

“Don’t be so sure, little prince.”

“I can be, though,” Seul chuckles a bit, realizing the shadow is becoming more talkative than he thought it was. “After all, if you didn’t want to tell me, you’d have left.”

“Precisely, wise prince,” he hears a laugh in reply, echoing with his voice in the sullen space of the shipwreck. It urges him to take a step up. The shadow doesn’t move as he approaches, it doesn’t even waver. Still, it stands in a conveniently dark corner of the damaged corridor, hiding its figure in the gloomy shade.

“Say it, then,” Seul says. It sounds more like a command, and less like a plea. He wants to know, and he will have the answer.

“Eager, aren’t we?” The shadow moves ahead, floating out of the shadow. Seul doesn’t flinch to see a woman. Red hair, dark skin, and a screeching voice as she speaks, apparently not anyone he ever knows. She has fins like a mermaid, but hers are all torn off and covered with scars. “I’m here to give you a deal, dear prince,” she bows, “I know what you want.”

“I doubt that,” Seul shakes his head, “I barely share my mind.”

“You don’t,” she nods. “I know, regardless. You want to be in the up-above, no, wait,” she stops, looking at Seul like she’s weighing her words, then smirks at him, “the Earth.”

“Now that's an impressive guess game,” Seul chortles, “apparently someone’s done their research. Should I take it as a prank? A joke? Who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman smiles,

“what matters is, I can give you what you want.”

The certainty in her voice, the confidence in her eyes, and the serious manners with which she delivers the words make Seul laugh. This is for sure a maniac, someone thrown into a war, perhaps, and got knocked off enough to convince her wrecked head of the imaginative scenarios she creates. Someone Seul relates to, to several extent, but he’ll never become, because he treasures his sanity enough not to dwell on lunacy.
“Hard pass,” he sneers, and retreats. He was looking forward to something more interesting, like a wicked unfortunate encounter that challenges his disbelief in the existence of a sea witch, and destiny fails him again by presenting him with a lunatic bitch.

But the woman snatches his arms right before he’s about to turn away. Seul sees her snap her fingers, and then a sparkle flares between them, suddenly he feels something soft touch his palm. He opens his eyes wider, realizing he’s holding onto a paper.

“This is the contract of my magic,” the woman says, keeping her voice piercing in Seul’s head. He looks at the paper and the letters in it, his mind goes blank for a full second, before grasping around the meanings behind those words. “You sign it, and you’ll have a pair of feet to walk on the Earth. You’ll be a human for three days.”

Seul chuckles and shoves the paper back to her. “Thanks,” he says. The magic trick was a good surprise, but it’s not enough to overwrite the lunacy. If anything, it makes her seem even crazier, and that’s a level of madness Seul’d rather not have anything to do with. He politely turns away, this time with more assertiveness.

“I don’t think I want it.”

“You don’t think,” she says, “you know you want it.”

“Not from someone like you,” he says, keeps swimming ahead. He passes the frayed door frame and then proceeds to the corridor. The woman’s voice is no longer in his ears, although Seul can still find it squabbling with his messy head. He gives it no second damn, knowing too well that his mind will soon be attracted and occupied by something else, hopefully with less lunacy than that.

“What if I tell you something that you don’t know, then prove that I’m right?”

The woman interrupts his thoughts again and strikes Seul with surprise as she shows up in the corridor before his eyes, her back leaning against the wall, her gaze dancing on him. He’s sure that he hasn’t passed her on the way out, and she can’t be that quick. She seems to be quite effortless, standing in her position, waiting for his answer.

“Fuck that,” Seul waves his hands and turns away, once again refusing to give the mad woman any piece of his mind larger than a bubble. He stops as he sees the other end of the corridor is blocked by a pile of broken wood. “And fuck you, too,” he stares at the woman. “You’re a maniac.”

“To the extent that you are, my prince,”
he can sense her taunting stronger, and he decides to keep ignoring her. Any kind of response now means that he succumbs to her game of insanity, and Seul likes to keep him locked up, preferably never emerging. “A human is drowning up there.”

“Humans drown,” he scoffs, “it’s not news.”

“But a human is drowning up there, above us,” the woman points through the ceiling of where they are. She looks up as if expecting Seul to do the same. He keeps his gaze on her, and moves ahead, passing the woman without looking up.

“He’s fallen off his boat and is on the verge of dying.” She adds.

Seul pauses. Something about her words makes him stop. “What in the darn ocean do I have anything to do with him?” He asks, knowing too damn well the answer.

“Humans die every day of drowning, my dear,” the woman keeps laughing, “but you won’t let any of them die on your watch, do you?”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t,” Seul hates the way her voice spirals through the water, barging on his ears and senses, “Now that you know one is dying, you’ll go to rescue him or to check, at least. Go, Seul, my dear. Go to him. And remember that among the rocks at the shore, there’s a flat one to the left of the castle that’s a little more yellow than the others. That’s where his people can see him. He’ll be saved if you bring him there in time.”

She pauses, and floats past Seul, now that he’s stopped. He can see a wicked smile at the corner of her mouth, as she speaks her final words. “If you see that I’m right, you’ll know that I’m capable. And my offer still stands. Come to me when you need it.”

Shinichirou

Shinichirou has never been so sure in his whole life like he is now. It’s ironic, almost laughable, that his life is so fucked up the only thing he’s certain of is his last moment of it, ready to fall into the arms of death. He fell off the boat, he was dragged too far away, he’s never been a qualified swimmer, and now he’s accepting his fate.

First, he lost his buoyancy, then he squirmed around like a flailing piece of paper trying in vain to stay afloat, instinctively screaming for help. After a few seconds of silence, Shinichirou realized that it was a stupid attempt, he was too far from anyone within a probable hearing distance. He strayed, so he's frayed.

Then every sound was blocked as he sank. His arms and legs were aching from writhing, his head was still hazy from the sudden fall, and the waves kept pushing him further into the ocean. Water filled in his vision as his body went lower, attacking his mouth and nose.

Shinichirou tried to keep it out by refraining from breathing, but then he realized it’d only lengthen the torture. His chest is bursting with raging pain, his lungs are on the verge of blasting, and his windpipe hurts. His whole body is running out of air and urging him for more. He has to breathe. He should breathe. The water will go in and kill him, but at least then his suffering can end.

Still, Shinichirou doesn’t breathe.
He doesn’t know why he remains, holding onto his clusterfuck of living. Shinichirou never loves his life the slightest, and he never thinks he’d hesitate when Death comes. In his dreams, Shinichirou’d be running to Death’s arms and staying there happily for good. But here he is, keeping his breath in, extending his pain and torment, only for a few more shit fuck moments of this gruesome existence.
Shinichirou can feel his heart sink as his eyes go blurry by the seconds, his limbs go numb and his mind turns blank. He doesn’t care if he breathes – his ending is settled, and pain no longer matters. A flash of repentance cast through him, however, knowing that he’s at the last verse of the sad song called his life, right at the moment it sees some uplifting note.

A pair of arms suddenly swirl around him, making his body feel lighter than ever. Death’s finally arrived, it seems. Shinichirou can no longer see or hear, but somewhere in the back of his head, his senses remain. He wonders if it’s how Death should be, soft and gentle. He regrets not being sober enough. Death’s always been someone he’s dire to see, and now as they finally come, he’s unable to live the encounter.

The thought makes him scoff. It’s horrible wording to state that anyone lives their meeting with Death. They should be the exact opposite of living, they should be dying, losing themselves by the fading heartbeats and weakening breaths. Shinichirou isn’t an exception, and yet he was hoping Death would give him the privilege, for him being the only living man yearning for their touch since his second one.

Death is lifting him now, Shinichirou can vaguely tell, by the change of light through his closed eyelids. Then the water around him becomes dimmer, leaving space for the air to enclose him again. The afterlife is upward. He doesn’t know, however, the implication behind this.

Is there anything beyond that vast blue yonder? Is there only one place for the dead to go to, or are there hell and heaven, and he, despite being a worthless royal his whole life, is still qualified for heaven? Should he be happy about going upper and upper, to heaven or whatever above? Is heaven even the right place to go to, as opposed to hell? What if the concept of heaven is but a deception, and he’s brought to what he deserves to endure after death, for being born into this bloody world, for never treasuring the life that was forced onto him without his consent?

Shinichirou’s question is answered faster than he thought. Right as the last question ended, he feels the hard rock under him, then the constant press on his chest. Then a pang of pain squeezes his windpipe before ruthlessly shaking it, gushing out whatever is inside. Then he feels a soft pair of lips over his, lending him air. Then the presses again. And the kiss of life. And the presses. And the–
Shinichirou coughs, choking on his tongue as the water is pushed out of him. His soul is barging on his eyelids, demanding them to open and acknowledge what’s going on, but they stay shut like they should be on a dead person. Except he doubts that he’s actually dead. Everything that happened suggests that he was saved, although he was drowning a second ago and there wasn’t a single soul around.

He opens his mouth and gasps, feeling the excruciating pain seizing his organs. He wants to see who saved him, but he’s too weak to open his eyes. He can move his fingers a bit, however, so he tries to feel them, anything he can remember them by. He touches human skin for a flashing second, smooth and strangely wet as if that person’s never been out of water for their whole life.

And then he reaches something uncanny underneath. Something rough and rigid, and cold, like a fresh batch of…fish scales?

Seul

It was the first time Seul came into contact with a human. No words or communication, as the human was losing consciousness and only one gulp of water away from dying, but it counted as magnificent progress, further than anywhere he was earlier.

He never thought humans feel that warm, but Seul guesses it makes sense since they have all the time under the sun without any water in between. The man has black hair, in a style that reminds Seul of the painting he found earlier. He casts a look at it, on the wall to the right of his bed, and sighs. The scratches on the glass prevent Seul from seeing his face, but their hair does have some resemblance.

Still, the man he saved today dresses quite humbly. He doesn’t look like a royal. The one in the painting has fancy clothes and dedicated jewelry, and it’s hard to imagine him in anything other than a glamorous outfit. But clothes aren’t skin, they can be changed. A painting is perhaps an important event that requires dress up, which a little trip on the boat doesn’t.

Seul looks at himself in the mirror and realizes for the first time tonight, a smile blooming at the corner of his lips. It’s the thought about this cretinous encounter that makes his mood go up, he can tell. Seul may not know a lot about the human world, but his observation lets him know one or two things about where boats and ships aren’t supposed to operate. The rocky shore, with relatively shallow water, is one of them.

And yet, like the shipwreck that traveled miles within the underwater current, from the edge of the darker sea to near the sunlight area, a boat was there on that day, carrying a man with it. It was the same boat that couldn’t stand some sudden huge waves, probably, and threw the man on board off to the water. Seul shudders and distracts his mind from the topic of what may have happened, had he not arrived in time.

He closes his eyes and recalls the moment, and memories come to him clearer than he’d like it to be. Seul doesn’t resent it, but he’s struck by the abrupt and vivid images of what happened coming in waves. The man wasn’t breathing then – he exhaled a bit, shown by the bubbles coming out of his unmoving lips, but he didn’t inhale enough water to the point that could kill him.

Seul rushed ahead the moment he saw the man sinking. His hair covered a part of his face, all of his limbs were immobile, spread, and left floating in the water, his eyes seemingly closed, and bubbles kept going through his mouth and nose. Seul picks up the man without thinking too much, partially due to his bitch of a moral about not letting anyone in a man shape die while he has the power to save them, but mostly due to the urge of his curiosity. It’d be the first time he ever touched a human.

It didn't take a lot of effort to bring the man to the surface – the water did most of the work for him, and he needed only to make sure that the man stayed inside his clutch as he swam. He uses one hand and his fin to part the water and move up, and the other to hold onto the man. His shirt was hoisted by the water and the movement, letting Seul’s hand come into contact with his skin.

Seul isn’t representing merpeople in general, so he knows it’s foolish to analyze the whole human race based on one random drowning man he happened to rescue. Still, Seul wonders how many of the humans are like that, soft to caress, but hard to seize the grip. For a merman, it means a charmer, but Seul isn’t sure if they share the same beauty standard.

He remembers the same thought coming up, he remembers himself quickly discarding the scattering thoughts to focus on the matter at hand. He could feel the sunlight hotter as he rose, and soon the rays directly hit his shoulders, his wet hair, and his face. In a second, Seul almost forgot that he had a life to save, and but for the sudden weight adding up to his arm, now that they were only half under the water, he’d have lost in this quick rendezvous with the sun.
As the man was up into the air, Seul let him float on his back and darted his eyes to the shore, finding a place to settle him. The lunatic woman’s words suddenly returned to him as his gaze touched a flat, yellow rock at the far end of the shore. It didn’t take much effort to find the rock, and it did look like the right place to let the man stay. Seul swam to it, dragging the man with him.

After he finally got on the rock, Seul put the man lying on his back and glanced at the palace towering over him. It looks huge and intimidating, and yet it lacks many striking aspects. Perhaps it’s what the humans and the merpeople share in common: the absence of creativity, imagination, and good taste.

But his attention shifted back to the man, shrugging him off, again, from his zoning out. Seul thought a bit of his casual observation from the sailor he snuck out on, looking for any time some of them tried to save their friends who fell into the water. It happens more regularly than he thought, as most humans on those ships are drunk all the time, and the sea isn’t always calm, the waves aren't always serene.

In those cases, the humans would press on each other’s chest, like an attempt to push the water out, perhaps. Then they’d touch mouth-to-mouth to lend the air, probably to make it replace the water. The unlucky one who fell would cough and spit the water out, and that was the sign of them being out of Death’s reach.
Seul tried to mimic their actions, pressing on the man’s chest to push the water out, breathing in whatever kind of air was there for him. It was harder than it looked, and Seul was clumsy, but the man coughed, and it was the only thing that mattered. His people came after a while, which wasn't as instant as the shadowy woman predicted, but it was fast enough to let the man be found and long enough for Seul to escape.

Seul had lived to his vow, he didn’t let a man die on his watch. He succeeded, but he is unhappy. Despite spending quite some time around the man, Seul can’t put his memory on how he looks. His hair and the emergency of the situation had taken a lot deal of Seul’s memory. All he can remember is a soft chin and cheeks, a fit body, and the wet black hair that should have been silky, had it not been so drenching.

He tosses around and turns to his left, still bothered by the new memories and not-memories he doesn’t know how to handle. Not until then does he realize that he’d returned home without any clamshell to replace his ragged one, and it’s supposed to be his first reason to ever come to that part of the sea. He doesn’t know where it went wrong and his mind ran a mile astray from his initial intention.

Perhaps it was the encounter with the shipwreck. Perhaps it was the presence of that lunatic shadowy woman. Perhaps it was the sudden rescue mission he didn’t even plan to participate. Perhaps it’s the clusterfuck of all these unfortunate events that made him forget his need for a nice dream hatcher, leading him to sleep in a sharp-edged one with the constant worry of getting cut hanging over his head.

He blinks. The thought of the woman returns, and now Seul’s mind is even more tangled. She’s indeed a crazy bitch, but she seems to know a lot, for someone simply losing her mind, and he hates how he can’t explain that. She must have been sneaking around and listening to people’s talks, but then there are also a lot of things Seul never blurts out. She knows the things Seul keeps to his heart.
She knows his desire to go to the Earth, and she uses his preferred name for that place. Although it remains debatable if she knows how to do so, she seems to be clever enough to snap a contract from thin air without showing any signs of her trick. She knows about the drowning man and the location where he can be laid down and attract attention from his people – and she was right about that.
She may have staged it all, pushing the man off his boat, causing the turmoil, alerting Seul for the sake of whatever idea she has stored in her wicked head, she may have even tested to see which rock is the most likely to leave an unconscious man there for his people to find him in time. But if that’s the case, it means she’s capable. And if she’s able to drown a man, and convince a merman to go save him with a proper way to make sure the man’s rescued, perhaps she wasn’t lying about the contract.

Perhaps she knows more than she showed Seul. He opens his eyes, feeling a surge of chill running down his spine. If she knows about it all, there’s a possibility that she knows who that man is. His name, his look – his more proper look – his face, his personality, his life. Perhaps she’s the answer. She may be. Who would have thought that a lunatic individual is the solution for the saunters of his drifting madness?

Seul lets out a sigh of exhaustion, lying on his back and facing the ceiling. It’s night, there’s no sun, and the moonlight is never strong enough to reach where he is. His room is stuck with the pitch-black darkness, and he can’t help associating it with the space inside the shipwreck earlier. It’s warmer, more cozy, intact, suited better to his liking, and still, the dark is similar enough to make his mind drift.

He knows why. Seul always has the answers for the minor problems, be it the reason behind his tossing and turning, or constant recalling of an uncomfortable place. This time isn’t different. He wants to go on the Earth, he’s been dying to see it with his own eyes, as a human, not a merman sneaking behind the rocks. He used to think of it as an unachievable dream, but now it’s within his reach.

And he even has a motivation adding up to the piled-up yearnings throughout the years. His heart longs for that man, to an extent Seul can’t tell what it is, with a graceful stroke of curiosity that has everything to do with the world above. He wants to hear the man’s story, about how he managed to row through rocks to the sea, why he decided to do it in the first place, and what caused his unfortunate fall.

Before that, the dream of setting foot on Earth was merely a thirst for adventure, without any stable plan or purpose. Now it’s become approachable, he finds himself glaring with more determination. Seul wants to know it all, ask them all, and answer them all. Seul wants the man to know that it was Seul that saved him, Seul wants to be a part of the man’s world, as much as to include him in his world.

And it seems like the solution to that lies in the shipwreck.