by Renard, Loki
“You’re beautiful,” Helios says. “But you are no war maiden. Go to Triton. Be safe.”
“What about Sapphire?”
“I can fight,” Sapphire says. She’s sitting up on a barrel of something, playing with a slingshot. “I’ve been fighting Entity since I was born.”
“I doubt you fought Entity when you were an infant.”
“You’d be wrong about that,” Raine interrupts. “Sapphire’s powers are strong.”
Sapphire smirks at me and pokes out her tongue. She’s a brat, that’s what she is.
“Come, Lucy. Time is of the essence,” Helios insists. He has me by the arm and he’s already urging me toward the exit of the burrow.
I barely have time to say goodbye to anybody.
“What about mother?”
“I will guard her,” Helios says.
“Can't you guard me too?”
“It’s better to split up,” he says. “If the worst was to happen, we do not lose the entire family in one strike.”
I saw the invasion. I watched Entity’s missiles land. But nothing has made this situation seem as real as those words coming out of my father’s mouth. He wants to split the family up, so we don’t all die. That means he thinks some of us may die.
That is the darkest thing he has ever said. It’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard. And that includes the time… well, suffice to say, this is very dark.
My mother comes forward to embrace me, and I feel her fear. She's trembling. Entity is very real to her. It is the monster from which she has been running all her life, and now it is here.
“Be safe,” my mother says. “I love you.”
“I love you too, mom.” There are tears in my eyes. I don’t want to cry. I am not pretty when I cry.
“Don’t die,” Raine says with a casual wave of her hand which I know masks her very real concern. Raine has tried to die for me on many occasions. She just doesn’t like to make a big deal out of it.
“Yeah, Aunty Lucy, don’t die!” Sapphire sings out. Again, she’s a brat.
“Don’t you die either,” I tell her smiling little face.
“I won’t. I’m good at fighting.”
I wish I had her confidence. I wish I had her strength. I've never cared about being weak before. It used to just feel like being feminine. Everybody loved me and everybody thought I was pretty and nothing bad ever happened to me. It never occurred to me that I might need to know how to defend myself.
I suppose I still don’t. They’re going to send me to Triton. God of the oceans. He will look after me. But the price of being looked after is exile.
Helios ushers me out of Tanuk’s den, and down toward the beach. Entity is still focusing its attacks on the golden palace. I can see flashes of light and flame in the distance, away from Tanuk’s island. Helios built the grandest structure on all Okeanus. It’s not surprising that Entity chose to target it. The prettiest things are always at greatest risk of destruction.
I suppose I should be flattered that I have been chosen to be saved, but I’m not. I want to stay with my family. They’re all that matters to me.
“Helios? Father?”
He looks at me, then away again. I don’t think he wants me to see the expression in his eyes. Especially if he feels even a fraction of the pain I do at the notion of our family being torn apart.
“I want to stay with you. I want to fight alongside you. I will make myself one with your war effort. You can teach me to fight. I can bring light.”
"We have enough light.” Helios’s voice breaks as he bends down to cup my face in his hands. “You have always known you are my… favorite does not cover the sentiment. It sounds petty. You are my daughter. The only child of my lineage. I will protect you with everything I am, and everything I have. And so will Triton.”
“Why? I’m nothing to him.”
“You know that is not true.”
I feel the ocean surge behind me. Triton is here. They must have already summoned him, without me noticing. I have no idea how that is even possible, but the ways of gods are always mysterious and never more so than when there is danger involved.
“Helios, please. Can we not wait and see how the war progresses? It could be all over within a matter of minutes.”
Triton bursts from the water behind me, foam dripping down his muscular body, his bulky ancient physique completely timeless. I don’t need to look at him to know what he looks like. The image of this god is burned into my heart and mind. The hard lines of his face, the bright aquamarine of his eyes, the resplendently bedraggled swath of hair which becomes a fierce mane when he is beneath his waves. He is handsome in an entirely primal and elemental way. His features are mature, yet not aged. It is a trick of the gods to appear ageless. He could be twenty five, or fifty five depending on the lighting, but in truth, he is eternal. When I am in his presence, I feel the deficit of every bit of my nineteen years. He makes me feel young and small, and ever so soft in comparison to his infinite roughness.
This is far from my first time meeting with Triton, but we are not friends. It’s not actually possible to be friends with an ancient ocean god who views you as nothing much besides an annoyance.
I don’t want to be in Triton’s care. I’d rather my father picked a god at random than sent me down beneath the waves.
“I don’t want to go with him. Please, choose anyone else. Anywhere else,” I beg my father as quietly as possible while still being loud enough to be heard over the crashing waves.
My father tries to comfort me with hollow words. “Triton is my oldest and best friend aside from Ragnar. He is trustworthy and an excellent warrior. He will keep you safe. There is nobody I trust more.”
The great god behind me clears his throat. He can probably hear what we’re saying. Because he has functional ears.
“You might not like him, but you do not need to like him. You just need to do as he says.”
It isn’t that I don’t like him. It is that I do.
I like him a little too much.
A lot too much, actually. Triton is hot. The kind of hot that feels out of my league, and nothing ever felt out of my league until I met him.
“You are welcome in my kingdom, Lucy,” Triton rumbled. “Undersea awaits your pleasure.”
Pleasure. That word on his lips sends completely sinful notions rushing through my mind. I’m still not able to meet his gaze. I hold onto my father’s sleeve, like I used to when I was a small girl. I really do not want to be exiled. I want to stay. For a while now, I have been feeling somewhat outcast from the family. Raine and I, my fathers and my mother made up our little circle for most all of my life. Then, on our eighteenth birthday, everything changed. Raine met the god who would become her mate, and then Sapphire came along and somewhere along the way, I stopped being an integral part of the unit and instead became the single aunt. At nineteen years of age, my family has outgrown me.
“I’m not going!” I take refuge in recalcitrance, because I have nothing else to hide in.
“You are going,” Helios says. “Every moment we argue is another moment Entity becomes stronger. We need to mount our defense, and you need to get to safety.”
“Let me stay. Please.”
“I can’t let you stay. This is war, Lucy. You're not equipped to deal with war. Go with Triton.”
I am not being given the chance to prove myself. I know I am loved, but to have true worth, I have to do something.
But it’s too late. I am out of time. Helios looks over my head.
“Take her.”
Those two words explain everything about the way I am treated. In the end, I am nothing more than a possession. Something to be kept safe, but not respected, and certainly not listened to.
The ocean roars behind me, water rising in a great crested wave. Triton is doing as my father says, and he is coming for me. I start to run away from the water. He can’t get me if I’m suitably far inland. At least, I don’t think he can.
&n
bsp; It turns out to be a moot thought, because I don’t get more than two or three steps before the surging water becomes great godly arms, each one almost the full length of my entire body, reaching out to wrap around me.
“NO! NOOOO!” I scream my refusal at the top of my lungs, but this has happened once before and I know there is no escape once I am in Triton’s grasp. The sun disappears behind a glassy wall of disturbed water. The last I see of the world is my father’s face disappearing into the distance as I am dragged down, down, down through the foam and the waves, down through the bright blue sea and then the green depths, down into the true dark depths of the ocean.
Triton does not say a word to me, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. I couldn’t hear anyway over the rushing torrent of water. I can breathe because of his enchantment which allows anyone he pleases to live in his watery domain, and because I am probably immortal. We’re not certain if I am or if I am not, and we haven’t tested the theory.
This war would be an opportunity to find out if I can take damage and die, but I guess I am not going to get the chance to find out. Raine is mortal, and yet she will be in the midst of things. Raine was born ten minutes before me. Now she is ten years older than I am and has a ten-year-old daughter. I am being left behind in every way.
3
I am outcast.
I am furious.
I am sad.
And I am afraid.
I have no way of knowing if I will ever see my family again. For all I know they will be devoured and I will be the sole survivor, left here for the rest of time.
There is no option except to give in. With Triton’s great arms wrapped around me, I am a passenger on this trip straight to oceanic hell. It is dark as Hades where the water presses down with incredible force and not a speck of light can penetrate. I am the daughter of the sun, but now I am cast in complete darkness.
But there is always light. I have been to Triton’s realm before. That is half the reason I do not want to come back. What happened here is something I haven’t been able to forget.
Triton draws me ever deeper and in time the darkness of the depths starts to give way to a glimmering light.
Undersea.
I remember this city. I have dreamed of it often. I was here for a matter of hours, and in those hours I saw so many wonders my mind has been filled with them ever since.
My father, Helios, considers his golden palace to be the center of Okeanus. His palace has become a vast and sprawling place, but it is nothing compared to this city of many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of buildings built with the most delicate and intricate architecture and adorned in a multitude of colors from delicate jade to perfect coral pink and everything in between. I do not think there is a more beautiful sight on all of Okeanus than this, and I know I am fortunate to see it, for Triton allows precious few to come here.
Helios’ palace is empty besides my family, and we are small in number. But Triton’s ocean city is populated and alive. It is busy in a way which makes the palace on the land seem dull and dead by comparison. This is the last city of the sea elves. Or at least, that is what I call them. They are alien to me with my human form. I have two arms, two legs, a slim waist, and full breasts. I was made in the image of mankind.
They are lithe creatures with large, soulful eyes. They are like people in many ways, but they swim with fins which expand from the rear of their arms, and their heads are shaped to flow with the water, broad browed and then tapering like a tear drop toward the rear. Their legs are not legs at all. From their hips they taper into scaled tails of the most iridescent beauty which allow them to glide through the water without resistance.
I am clumsy beneath the waters. They are not. They are agile and elegant, and beautiful beyond compare. The female sea elves are naturally jeweled, their scales flashing brightly with every rippling motion of their tails. They wear pearls and opals, every jewel in the earth and outside it.
There’s something about those scales which makes me ache with nostalgia for a time which never was. Above the water, I am the most beautiful creature on Okeanus. Below it, I feel less than average. I am limited. My fins do not flow beautifully in the water. My limbs terminate in impractical stumps. My feet are especially egregious here in a world where walking is practically unknown because every creature chooses instead to glide.
Triton carries me above the bustle of the city, and I watch as his happy little subjects swim about their business, unaware that I am being taken as an unwilling captive.
The palace below the ocean sits at the top of an underwater peak. Unlike the land around my father’s palace which is a flat meadow which meets the beach and then the sea, this is a city with an abundance of geography. The city sits in an oceanic valley, above which the palace is perched. There are small volcanoes surrounding the city proper, and an underground river running through it. Corals and sea plants grow hither and thither, making the landscape a vibrant rainbow. This is far too brilliant a city to be held prisoner, and yet that is what I am. Triton will have to hold me against my will to keep me here.
I am determined to resist him and this place, but everywhere I look, there is another distraction from my misery. Deep-sea dolphins play amid the warm streams emerging from cracks and crevices in the ocean floor. They are sleek obsidian in hue, but they have bright flashes of bioluminescence running down their sides in spots and stripes. No two dolphins share the same markings, but it seems to me that there are some who share more similarities than others. They are family, I surmise. I miss my family already. I fear for them. For what they will do, and for what I will not be allowed to do.
I have often daydreamed of Undersea. The irony of the situation is that the first time I came here, I wanted to stay, but was not allowed to. This time, I want to leave, and I am still not allowed to. It seems to me that everything to do with Okeanus is designed to frustrate and annoy.
Triton carries me to a grand balcony and releases me gently, allowing me to sink down to stand upon the oceanstone paving. I know he has put charms on me to make this possible. If I were a normal human here without his permission, the pressure of the depths would crush me instantly. Instead, I stand here as easily as I would have stood on my own personal balcony in the golden palace.
I can’t look at him. Being held by him has brought back many humiliating memories of the last time I was here. Instead of looking at him, I look up. The ‘sky’ as I am used to thinking of it, is black. Completely dark. There are no stars in the ocean.
It would take me an eternity to swim back up through the water with my simple human style limbs, but I would take that eternity to see the sun again.
“You are welcome here, Lucy,” Triton says.
“I want to go home.”
“In time, you will return, when it is safe. For now, you will make your home here, in my palace, among my people.” He looks at me with those eyes which know so much and say so little. “You wanted to stay here once, did you not?”
That question makes me blush bright red. He is referring to a particularly shameful episode which happened on the evening of my eighteenth birthday, the night that my hopeless crush on him started.
One year ago…
It is my birthday. I am eighteen. Finally. I have been waiting to turn eighteen since I found out that eighteen means you get to be whoever it is you really want to be and nobody can tell you what to do ever again. At least, that’s how I always interpreted my mother’s frequent orders to wait until I was eighteen.
Our parents threw us the biggest party Okeanus had ever seen. Raine’s not really interested, but I have made the most of every moment of it, and I’m not done with the evening yet.
One of the gods at the party invited me to his island. I said yes, because I am saying yes to everything. Yes to life. Yes to freedom. Yes to finally being my own demigoddess and not forever under the watchful scowl of my two fathers and the kindly gaze of my loving mother.
Everything was going amazingly, until
my sister turned up. Killjoy Raine, older by a matter of minutes, she must have missed out on the fun gene. She just showed up, squawking about how going away with strange gods is dangerous and how everybody is missing me, simply frantic with worry, apparently.
I told her I wasn’t going to go with her, but she’s made me feel guilty, so I decide to head back with her. She has a boat down by the water. I can see her standing there, talking to the god of the island, arguing with him, probably.
“Raine! I’m coming!”
Before I can get near her, or the boat, the water surges and I am dragged from the beach by cold arms of powerful water.
“Triton! What the…”
There’s only one god capable of a feat like this one. I’ve known Triton all my life. He’s the only god my fathers tolerated near us.
He’s not the friendliest god, nor the nicest one. He’s kind of been like wallpaper in my life, there, but not really significant.
But now, the wallpaper just ruined my dress by plunging me into salt water, and I am not happy about that.
“Triton! Let me go! Triton! Idiot! You’re ruining my clothes! Triton!” It doesn’t matter how much I scream, it’s just all bubbles and flailing. For most of the journey my dress and or hair are over my head, obscuring my view. By the time they clear away, I am standing inside some kind of palace. I’d pay more attention to it, but my view is taken up entirely by the massive bulk of Triton himself.
“What are you doing?
“Protecting you from yourself,” he says. “Tanuk’s island is no place for an innocent princess.”
“Well, I was just leaving, so…”
“You should not have been there in the first place,” he lectures.
I never noticed how muscular he was before. I saw, but I didn’t really see. I met many dozens of handsome gods this evening. Not a single one of them is nearly as attractive as this one, whose face is carved from eternity, hard lines, high cheekbones, aquamarine eyes narrowed in annoyance at me. I’ve never seen him below water before. He makes so much more… sense down here. The way his dark hair moves in the water is mesmerizing, like it has a life of its own, a masculine mane of hirsute magnificence. The dappled light being emitted from glowing fixtures and my own enraged self plays off his eyes and reflects back to me.
