Page 93 of The Noble's Merman

“Oh my God, Mo, what is happening?!” cried Kent. He felt his hand delicately on his shoulder.

“I…” Mo could barely speak, moaning from the pain. He squinted his eyes shut. “I… don’t know…”

It was as if a sword was tearing through his tail, slicing it in two. It wasn’t just his tail that hurt, no, his forearms tensed. The tips of his fingers simmered. His ribs quaked. His neck muscles clenched. A thorny lump formed in his throat. Even his teeth ached.

Panic surged through him as he groaned through the pressure, and he wondered what went wrong for the magic to think he deserved this. It felt like he was dying, when every bit of him stung and throbbed. Was he, or—what else could this be?

No, he wasn’t dying. The magic pulsed again, glowing brighter, and it reassured him with a warm, sweet wave.

He was changing.

The pain lessened. It never went away completely, but the striking, tearing intensity had stopped, falling into a dull ache. The throbbing throughout his body diminished, his heart rate slowed, and the pulsing magic dissolved into a soft, background presence. Just as suddenly as it had appeared, it left him.

He sucked in deep breaths, in and out, in and out, keeping his eyes closed. He was alive. Thank the seas he was alive. But his mind was spinning like a whirlpool, hectic and dizzy. What even was that? Why did it happen?

His tail in particular felt so bizarre.

He could feel Kent’s hand quivering on his shoulder. Even Kent’s lap was shaking underneath his head.

“Mo, ho—holy mother of God! Mo, please! Open your eyes!”

He opened them, looking straight up at Kent’s frantic face above him. The sunlight shining in the sky, glowing around Kent’s head, looked so beautiful. “I… I’m here.”

“Look down! Mo, you—you have legs!”

“I have what?!”

Mo sat up slightly on his elbows, Kent helping support him by holding his shoulders, and there?—

Instead of his familiar blue scales, instead of his fanning gold and brown fins?—

—was pale skin, matching the color of his torso.

He tried flexing his muscles, wincing at the pain that was still there, and he curled his toes.

Mo had legs.

“Kent, I… I…” He sniffed, and he couldn’t help crying from happiness. “I can’t believe it!”

“Look at you, Mo!” Kent squeezed his shoulders in a frantic, excited hug. “You’re human!”

“I’m human…”

He really was, wasn’t he? It wasn’t just the fact that he had legs now. No, everything about him felt different. He tried to sit up straight again, but as he did so, pain shot up from his new feet to his hips. It was as if his body was telling him: separate your legs. You can move them independently from each other. And so, he did, bending his left knee first as he pushed on the heels of his hands to sit up straight, Kent keeping a hold on his back. Oh, did that ever feel so foreign. As he bent his legs, he couldn’t ignore how utterly strange his privates felt, brushing gently against the skin of his thighs.

Once fully seated upright, he adjusted his legs underneath him, still keeping his knees touching each other for the most part but separating his calves to get more comfortable. That was strange—alleviating the pain by moving the two limbs of his lower body away from each other. It’s not just one tail anymore. It’s two legs.

Kent kept a hand flat and steady resting on Mo’s back, helping him balance. “How do you feel? Oh God, I can’t even imagine what it must be like to have your body change so drastically like that.”

“I feel extremely sore,” said Mo honestly. He felt like he was pronouncing words a bit strange, but he couldn’t place why. “It was so much pain all at once, and I’m still feeling quite a bit now. I’m surprised I don’t see any blood.” He held out one of his arms horizontally in front of him. “I don’t have my forearm fins anymore. Where they used to be… it looks like one of my other scars.”

Kent leant in a little closer. “You’re right! Your gills too, they look different. They look somewhat like scars as well.”

Mo took his hand and traced where the gills on his neck were, and Kent was right. They were closed, feeling about the same as any other scar.

“Your hair is different, too! There are no more blond patches; now it’s brown all over.”

Mo grabbed a lock by his cheek—a part that had always been blond his entire life—only to find it brown. “Wow…”

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