Chapter Six : Introduction

In which a deal is upheld.

She dives through shadow and silt to meet the echoing call of the deep in her core. Her descent slows only when she is a shadow of displacement in the midst of a silvery shoal. She keeps place and feasts till the water around her grows murky, and feasts still more.

When at last her hunger is sated, she makes swift return to the grotto where her sisters lie resting. It is emptier than it ought to be, but what sisters survive to greet her are well fed. Those who hunger still depart at the news her arrival brings, their destination the cavern beneath the fountain.

She has the thought of following them - her hunger is sated n full, but fish alone are nothing in comparison to sate the insult of captivity - and yet when she leaves, it is another current she sets out to follow. It leads her

She does not need to spend long with her sisters. Their time together is as limitless as their will, as unending as the reach of the sea. Not like humans at all.

Rather than joining this last hunt for the royal Anne, the new rising sun finds her voyaging out into the shoals between islands to find Daughter. Her anticipation had been to discover her aboard ship, something that would require trickery and misdirection to net her her prize. This time, Daughter would be the one trapped in a thin shell of wood at sea.

For all that the cost, the words she had been given were not the strongest of anchors.

Instead, she finds her - not on the Queen Anne, crewed by an entirely new set of pirates, and Captained by one who bares Calypso's touch - but conveniently isolated in a small shell with only a single pirate for assistance, and he no ally to her by the ropes that she wears. He offers no harm but a pistol, and leaves her confined on a shifting islet. Such is his unwitting service that she does no more than track his heading as he scuttles away towards the Fountain. Their waters are busy, but she will not patrol them. Not now.

In the time that is now, she breaches the boundary between wave-foam and cool, clear air smoothly, twisting up and across to land in the shallows like a puffer-poker, gills retracting and scales fading to pale, soft, fragile skin.

Daughter turns from her pacing at the sound of her movement, her hand going to the pistol tucked into her belt and falling away in the next moment in recognition. Smart girl. She is fed and well in the embrace of her element, and Daughter has no fire or nets to make harm.

"You. What do you want."

Her voice has recovered from screaming after the wood-shell trinket of a boat the second Captain left in. Another human weakness she prefers to do without.

Perches on salt bleached white trunk mired in the sands of the shallows. For the sake of her goal, she will take on the form of weakness, but only the image. The ends of her not-fins touch the swell of the rising tide. Let another span pass, and she will wear scales once more. She has escape and shelter both within her grasp. It is a comfort, for her legs are weak still, and that bite of Daughter's means violence just as it did in her father.

She is not here for violent ends.

"A conversation. As I said."

Daughter throws her hands up to her hair - an amazing tangle, suspended in air as if it were water's touch - beginning to pace once more along the narrow stretch of sand. She is easy with her back.

"The tear was used. It didn't work."

And she has survived it. Too many of her sister were not as lucky.

"And a deal was made. A deal you have benefited from."

"It did not work!" The words are a lie, like a wrecked ship in the cave of her mouth. She is of the sea now, the salt of a mermaid's tear in her veins. The ritual had been completed. Even if the currents of fate had shifted their paths ...

"Working was not the accord that was made. Only giving. I gave my tear. Now I will have my due."

She countered the glare - hot and fickle, like fire, and nothing like his ice - with indifference. Daughter is as trapped here as she was in the cage of glass not a handful of tides past.

"Why would I want to have a conversation with you?"

Acknowledgement of her claim being gained is not essential. Far from those shores. She is here and Daughter is here, and her due would be paid in full.

But it is time.

"Not with me."

Daughter startles at her whistle, stumbling back a step with the sand catching at her boots. She startles once more as Si emerges from the blue, skimming in with the waves breaking on the wet sand. "With her."

They eye each other like clams. Some measure of resemblance, as she thought.

"Who - what is - "

Si glances back at her. She flicks a dorsal calmingly, and turns her gaze upon Daughters defiant visage. She has that from her father. Si has her parts of him in other ways.

"You share common heritage. Talk."

She settles back on the wooden outcrop, retwisting strands of sea kelp into a stronger whip, as they eye each other like octopi half ready to be eaten. Their words, when they do begin to talk, she allows to drift away along the bleached bits of shell and sand.

The wind catching at the white-frothed tips of the waves is its own kind of song in a way, she fancies, but one best accompanied by the depth of the sea.

A/N: Fun fact of the day - dolphins can get high off of pufferfish. The more you know.

I'm rather proud of myself for finishing this fic inside a decade. I may come back and do a bit of editing in the future, but for now it's finally done. Not bad for something I started with absolutely no plot.