All The Mermaids In The Sea

by Robert W Cabell

  But immortal Cronos was not blinded by it, and his body could bathe within its light, drawing power. He gazed deep into the crystal and saw the flaw that he could strike in order to cleave it into six equal parts. So he struck the crystal and broke it asunder. One piece remained to contain the rent and draw more power from the earth. A second piece was placed into the scepter of the king of Atlantis to control the other four. Each remaining shard was placed into the hearts of the elemental machines, towering metal giants in mockery of the Titans. One machine could split the earth, one machine could control the tides, one could call the wind and thunder, and the last could create fire and lightening.

  It was Cronos, disguised as a mortal man, who urged the king and his brothers on the Council of Nine to challenge the gods of Olympus after the power crystals were completed. They had no idea it was Cronos’ personal agenda of revenge they were furthering, and not their own desires.

  “Hear us, great Zeus,” the Atlantian rulers cried out to him. “Like you, we can throw bolts of lightning,” and they used their mad machine of destruction on the gates of a city in the land of Libya, obliterating its walls, stirring the sky god’s anger.

  “Oh, great Poseidon! We too can control the tides!” And a giant wave was formed that washed across the isle of Crete, drowning and destroying thousands of people and their homes, causing Poseidon to grow white with rage.

  “We can make the earth tremble!” they boasted, and a battle in Persia ended as the ground split open underneath a marching army and swallowed it whole. This made Ares, the god of war, turn his bloody eyes of fury in their direction.

  “We can control the wind!” they bragged as a funnel of air appeared above a fleet of merchant ships in the Aegean Sea and sank them all to the bottom.

  “Why do you do these things?” Zeus called down to them. “You have the best of everything: the grandest city, the finest wines and spices, the most beautiful women, and the finest fields and beasts in all the world. What more can you want?”

  “Immortality!” they cried. “Or we shall continue to use our powers to destroy every land except Atlantis.”

  “Then you want what you can never have. You must be worthy to be a god, and your actions have proven you worthless.”

  With that judgment, the angry Zeus hurled his mighty thunderbolts one after another, destroying each and every machine. Then he continued reigning down upon their palace hilltop, splitting open the earth, laying bare the crystal, and tearing wide the rent in the earth.

  Wider and wider the rent tore until it became a chasm of fire. An abyss of molten lava, it split and cracked like a web across the island. The Atlantian rulers cried out in terror, begging Poseidon, their divine ancestral sire, to save and protect them. But Poseidon shook his head in disgust and sent a mighty wave to cover the island as it caved in upon itself into a fiery pit and sunk beneath the wave, taking the people of Atlantis with it.

  Many perished that day. All of the royal line was incinerated in the inferno except for one boy, the youngest child and only son of the king of Atlantis. As the crown prince, he wore a ring of power Poseidon had fashioned centuries before and given to his son Atlas, the first King of Atlantis. It was the ring passed down to each king in succession. It gave long life and allowed the wearer to live and breathe in the ocean as easily as he did on land. The last crown prince of Atlantis was a favorite of Poseidon’s descendants.

  Before Atlantis was completely destroyed, as the royal family cowered at the foot of the gigantic statue built in his own image, Poseidon possessed the statue and brought it to life. For a moment, the king took this action as a sign of salvation. But his fate was sealed.

  As the very floor of the palace crumbled into a pit of molten lava, the statue of Poseidon transformed into a golden sphere around the young prince and floated upon the river of lava. A towering wave Poseidon had raised blotted out the sky as it stretched up and over the mountaintop, swallowing the entire island and crushing it down onto the bottom of the ocean floor, and the golden sphere rode safely through the torrent.

  The young prince watched in horror as his entire family—in fact his entire life—was erased from the very surface of the world. Deeply saddened, yet grateful that he had been spared, he gasped as the sphere around him dissolved and he found himself deep in the waters of the ocean, breathing like a fish and floating in front of the mighty god Poseidon.

  The prince’s name was Triton, and he was Poseidon’s great, great, great, great-grandson. From that day forward, Poseidon called him his son, and Triton lived in the sea for two thousand years at Poseidon’s side.

  Helmi’s thoughts drifted back to her telling of the tale to Miranda, “To this day, Triton is called the son of Poseidon, and Trident, the word that names the staff of power held by the ruler of the sea, is often confused with his name. What modern archeologists fail to understand is that the Trident was also the symbol for the royal crest of Atlantis.”

  “Was the prince named after the Ring of Triton, or was the ring named for the prince?” Miranda had asked her mother.

  “I’m not really sure,” Helmi had told her. “But from time to time my father would mention him with great affection, and he died seven thousand years before I was born.”

  “The Trident is also the symbol engraved on the Ring of Atlantis. It is the ring my father gave me,” Helmi had added. “By the time I was born, he was not the wrathful, warrior-like, gadabout Poseidon.” Helmi had smiled down at Miranda. “He had become the gentle and wise Aegir. He gave me the ring for my chosen consort. It is necessary from time to time for a sea god to go on land, but he wanted me to stay in the sea.” With these thoughts, all of her love for her father came flooding back like a hug. “He wanted me to be safe,” she had told Miranda tenderly, “and to send my consort king on land to do my bidding.”

  When Valdemar set up the Duchy of Egeskov before he went to live with Helmi in the sea, it was an idea that wound up having more merit than Poseidon could possibly have foreseen.

  The Nine Mirrors of Atargatis

  The Mirrors of Atargatis, named after the very first immortal to assume the half-fish, half-human form, were one of the most prized and sacred possessions of Miranda’s family. Neither Poseidon nor Queen Amphitrite was born or lived in merman or mermaid form, for they had both been born long before Poseidon was given dominion over the oceans and the seas. Their daughters were the first and only immortals born naturally in mermaid form. The ocean was their element, and it was from the Ocean that they drew their health and power.

  In honor of this, at the birth of each daughter, Poseidon built a new sea palace, and initiated the construction of a Mirror of Atargatis, a magical entity that formed a portal that would tether the palace through time and space to the Sacred Grotto of Poseidon. As their family grew, the oceans swelled with enchanted gateways, and in the end, nine daughters and nine mirrors linked the family and the oceans to the Sacred Grotto.

  Creating each mirror was no small feat. Portal magic was very ancient and could be created only by the participation of both male and female power. Additionally, portal magic was keyed to a specific bloodline.

  All the Mirrors of Atargatis were keyed to the House of Aegir, which did not include the entire bloodline of Poseidon. He had not been the philanderer his brother Zeus had been; still, the number of his offspring had been quite impressive. The House of Aegir was specifically keyed to the bloodline of Queen Amphitrite. Only her children with Poseidon and their descendants could activate the portal magic of the mirrors. They also needed the magic of the Lavender Pearls of Amphitrite to tune their minds and activate the mirrors’ magic.

  The mirrors were used several times each year as Miranda was growing up during her first century. There was no mirror in the Faeroe Islands palace. Poseidon and Amphitrite had intended their summer palace in the Northern Sea to be Helmi’s, so her mirror was there. Every year they would travel through the summer palace mirror, and then swim to the Faeroes.

  V
aldemar, Miranda’s father, built a large Manor House on Little Ditma Island in the Faeroes for Helmi, before Miranda’s birth, on the site where a druid monastery had stood. The carved stairway leading down through the mountain from the monastery, and the grotto palace, were constructed by the last of the Druids who mixed their blood with the selkies. Their descendants were Helmi’s loyal servants on land and in the sea.

  Helmi was able to bestow long life on Valdemar, but she could not make him divine or give him powers. Each mirror’s magic was tied to its location. They could not be moved, and it would take a divine male to help her create a new mirror for the Faeroes. To Helmi’s knowledge, there was no such creature left this side of Tartarus. But, it never really seemed to matter.

  It had become the family tradition at the end of every summer to swim through the mirrors to the Caribbean. The royal family literally circled the globe each year. It was not unusual for Helmi to make quick journeys through the mirrors for a day or two from whatever palace they were visiting, or to send Valdemar back and forth to do his “land dealings,” as she called them, since he could not activate a mirror. That eventually led to Miranda taking trips with her father while her mother traveled the seas on royal matters.

  Most of these land dealings were trips to the summer palace near Burgunderholm, Denmark, in Kattegat Bay, where her father had many meetings with the Knights Templar. They often brought treasures from the sea to be stored in Templar vaults.

  Miranda’s very first ride on a ship had been on one of those trips. The oars had made the ship remind her of a whale with far too many silly fins, but she’d been fascinated with the sails, and how they captured the wind and caused the ship to glide with invisible power across the water. Her first use real of magic was to call that wind and send it to fill the sails on a calm day. She had laughed with glee to feel the energy surge from her through the sky to call the wind spirits and bring them back to do her bidding. From that moment forward she’d had a special love for the wind.

  So each year the family traveled through the mirrors. Spring was usually spent in the China Sea. It was so exotic, with dolphins that were pink, white, and yellow, and was full of delicate sea horses that loved to wrap their tails around Miranda’s hair. She loved the majestic manta rays that seemed more like the birds of the sky to her than any other ocean creatures, and mangrove trees that brought the forest right out into the ocean. Most of all, there were atolls in the China Sea—dainty little islands that were scattered upon the sea like stepping-stones.

  Then they spent each summer solstice in celebration of her parent’s anniversary—as her father called it—at the summer palace off the east coast of Denmark. That was where Miranda’s favorite kelp forests were. The massive semitransparent fronds soared up into the light for tens of fathoms, spreading out for leagues. Constantly in motion, dancing in partnership to the water itself, they could sense her presence, and she could feel the pleasure it brought them.

  The kelp forests were, in fact, one of the few things in the ocean that made her feel unimportant. The sheer size and mass of such living things was humbling. Their age and the beauty of their color that shimmered and gleamed with every shade of green, from nearly black to celery green, were magnificent. They formed a world where Miranda could lose herself, and drift in peaceful oblivion.

  She had made up a game that she loved to play with Shifter there. They would swim to the very bottom of a forest and Miranda would stretch out between two giant stems of kelp where they were their deepest, darkest green. Then she would slowly float upward to the surface of the sea as Shifter followed, trying to match the ever changing shades of green. Miranda would giggle every time a small school of fish would jostle the grouper, causing him to lose concentration and flare into some exotic Caribbean color. As the little grouper got older and bigger the game became even more fun, and the local fish became more frustrated and bruised from bashing into the strange massive clump of “kelp” that didn’t seem to belong in the water.

  Helmi, Valdemar, and Miranda spent their winters in the grand palace of Poseidon off the coastline of his sanctuary on the Isthmus of Corinth. There was something magical about the Aegean Sea, even to a mermaid. The waters were such a marvelous blue, and there was a phosphorescent quality to the plants. The scent of power created in a place where so many people still believed and prayed drenched the waters with energy. The combination of spotless white and pure, intense blue was everywhere. The bones of the earth and the mantel of the sky were the perfect representation of Gaia and Uranus, the birth of mankind, and the evolution of the gods. It was the seat of their power on land and among men. So of course, the only place to celebrate every Olympus Day was in the Sacred Grotto where Poseidon had received dominion over the oceans and taken the hand of Miranda’s grandmother, Queen Amphitrite, in marriage.

  Miranda always thought using the mirrors was a grand adventure. How very important they were to keeping the family close together. She thought it was both sad and beautiful that each palace held a portrait or statue of one of her mother’s lost sisters. The memories these statues prompted never failed to make her mother cry, but they also encouraged her to tell stories about them to Miranda. It was her mother’s dream to have nine daughters herself and fill each palace once more with love and joy in honor of her sisters. Miranda looked forward to having so many siblings.

  It was also in the Sacred Grotto of Poseidon that the lavender pearls of Amphitrite were kept. Only two were not there, those that Helmi and Miranda wore. There had been eighteen pearls created by Oceanus, the first god of the waters. The first few were very large, the size of small bird eggs, and were set into the crown of the Queen of the Oceans. It became known as the Crown of Tethys, Queen Amphitrite’s Titan name, which her Titan parents, brothers, and sisters had called her when she was a young immortal.

  The remaining lavender pearls Oceanus created were smaller and perfectly matched to be used in earrings and a necklace to go with the crown. Amphitrite had loved the color and luster of the pearls and decided that each of her daughters should wear one. She used the rarity of the pearls to incorporate them into the magic of the mirrors.

  The crown itself was not in the grotto. It sat instead, in all its glory, on the brow of a marble bust of Queen Amphitrite, beside the cup of the Creator’s Son in the sacred cave deep within the holy city of Oceanus. It was a place so sacred, Miranda had only been to it a handful of times in her life. The stronghold of the gods and the core of their elemental power, this vacant city of beautiful palaces and empty avenues, was as silent as it was vast. Oceanus had been founded on the very site where Gaia first took physical form to join with Uranus, the god of the heavens, and where she subsequently gave birth to the Titans.

  Oceanus was not a place on a map, but a place inside time and space that could only be reached through a magic whirlpool in the Sacred Grotto of Poseidon. And the whirlpool could only be opened by the Trident.

  It was in the city of Oceanus that the lavender pearls were created. That is why each mermaid was given a lavender pearl at the time of her birth, and why when a mermaid chose to leave the sea and become a mortal, the last thing she did was entrust her lavender pearl to a dolphin or selkie to return to the Palace of Aegir.

  The Mirrors of Atargatis actually existed in two places at one time, which was their magic. All nine of them were still in the Palace of Aegir, as were the other seven lavender pearls. The fronts of the mirrors were located in the grotto; the backs of the mirrors were located in the various nine palaces across the globe. When one swam “through” the mirror, one came out the “other side” in another place. Nine pearls for the mother, nine for the daughters, and nine palaces in the earthly waters. Nine circles of three ties that bind, nine spells of power to create nine times nine. Three magic trinities for each pearl: the mother, the daughter, and the pearl. The two-sided mirrors, each with one side in the Grotto of Poseidon and one side in a palace in a distant sea, became a string of pearls themselves around the
neck of Gaia, the Great Goddess of the world, and the first child of the Creator of all kind.

  Now most of the mirror trinities and their powers within powers had been broken, and the world had slowly disconnected from its ties to Gaia. Only two trinities, two pearls, two mermaids, and two mirrors were lit with life from within—Helmi’s and Miranda’s. There had come a time when Helmi was all alone, and Valdemar was still a man and king of Demark, when there was only one of the nine mirrors full of light—Helmi’s. She had thought she would never find love, she would die one day, and all the mirrors would be dark. It was said that if the last Mirror of Atargatis went dark, the world would end. But then Valdemar had returned to Helmi, and when Miranda was born, Helmi’s sister Ploto’s mirror had reawakened with life. Miranda looked forward to the day when the next mirror would come to life.

  The first time Miranda saw her mother use the Mirrors of Atargatis was the first time she saw her mother use real magic. This was not just the moving of water or talking to fish or becoming invisible ordinary kind of magic. This was magic that altered the world around them and shaped it to her mother’s will. Experiencing this awesome power made her realize that she and her mother were truly different from other creatures. It was something that her father—so strong and wise, so magnificent and powerful—could never do, no matter how hard he tried. The magic made Miranda understand that she had been born to do great things and have great responsibilities, a thought that both filled her with pride and made her feel humble. It was then that she realized there was so much she needed to learn about the responsibility she would someday have, and how soon she would need to know when and how to use those powers.

  The Story of Undine