Page 110 of Female Fantasy
To land.
To live among the humans.
Among my own kind.
I watch Ryke’s throat work as he swallows.
“Thank you for this kindness,” he says. “I promise to be worthy of it.”
“Go ahead,” Nix chuckles. “Let us see you get your tail further into a twist.”
Ryke glares at Nix, who smiles in return. He is enjoying this. Us, divided. Distrusting each other.
Ryke sighs, running a hand through his midnight hair.
“I have already told you that my family has ruled over Atlantia for millennia. That I was born into this fight, given little choice about my path in life. And that this birthright was an isolating, lonely one. Even my brothers and sisters in the Upper Shoal could never quite understand the burden bestowed upon me at birth. And then the sirens staged their coup, and I escaped Atlantia with the conch, destined to remain onshore until the time finally came for the resistance to strike.”
Ryke pauses, searching my eyes. I nod. We have already discussed this. I am familiar with his history.
“What I never told you was that I was in hiding for centuries. Three, in fact.”
Three centuries.
Three hundred years, concealed in my tiny village.
He had moved there when my ancestors were but babes.
The uprising of the church. The poverty of my people. Burning houses and famine.
He had witnessed it all, a creature in the shadows.
And that meant Ryke was…
I could not even fathom how old he might be.
We lock eyes, and I signal for him to continue.
“Those first few centuries were some of the most difficult years of my life. I mourned my parents and siblings. The days were dark, the nights endless. The ocean beckoned to me, but I knew I could not risk answering the water’s call. There were several times when I considered succumbing to the dark thoughts that swam inside my head. In those moments, I pictured Dylan and Kai’s faces, remembered the lilting laughter that sprang eternal from Guinn and Mira’s mouths. My salvation was my thirst for vengeance. I longed to be the one to wring Talassa’s neck, to watch the life drain from the false queen’s eyes. I knew I needed to swim in Atlantia’s waters again, but the longer I lived on land, the less likely that felt. I was beginning to run out of the one resource I needed to survive above the surface.”
“Fish food?” Nix mocks.
“Hope,” he continues, unfazed. “Then one day nearly one and twenty years ago, I awoke in the dead of night. Hovering above my bed, I saw what can only be described as a tiny dancing light. Not quite a flash or a flame—more like a flicker,a shimmering tendril. The light twisted and sparkled above me, a living, breathing entity. The sight was so beautiful it brought me to tears. It was moving, clearly attempting to lead me somewhere, and I felt compelled to rise and follow it. And do you know where it brought me?”
The air seizes inside my lungs.
“To me?” I ask.
He smiles, small and sad. “I could barely see you through your father’s window. But I could sense you. Your bones were so breakable, your breath so shallow. You were completely, utterly human. I did not know at first what it meant that the light had led me to you. I had never come across two interloched mer before. No one had ever described to me what the pull of Fates’ strings might feel like. I had only the lore to go off of. Stories my mother told me before she rocked me to sleep.”
I choke on my next exhale.
Ryke was no stranger when I met him, then.
In a sense, he had known me all my life.
“But sensing you—so small and innocent, glowing with that tendril of light, of life—returned to me that shred of hope I’d lost, as if you had been holding on to it for safekeeping. It reminded me what I was fighting for: the future of not only my world but the human world as well. In fact, the very idea of a siren one day sucking the life force out of you, stealing that light…it was enough to encourage me to embark on my journey the very next day.”
“Where did you go?”
