The surface was getting farther and farther away from me, but every time I tried to push up, the margygur pulled me back down and whispered to one another, stroking my face and belly and waist, my sides and my legs, the outline of my lips. Their burbling talk came through as words.

Beautiful child.

Neglected child. No more.

Pain-filled child. No more.

Confused child. No more.

No more. No more. No more blame. No more pain. No more confusion.

We take it all away. No more stone sinking on your chest.

Beautiful child. We feed you bits of seaweed and the flesh of the great big fish that traps those two-legged, mouth breathers who stay on its back too long. You become happy. Memories and pain gone. Become our water sister, you will. Happy, you will be.

My eyes grew tired as I listened to their silky, song-like voices, and my body weakened until they lifted me up into their scale-patched arms, murmuring sweet things inside my ears. Staring up, the patch of broken ice had disappeared, and no longer led me back to the surface.

All I had to do was sink down and down, and let them weave seaweed into my hair and feast on the flesh of the great big fish, and wait as they wrapped my legs together with an unbreakable cloth until they could feed me the mixture that would make me like them.

No pain. No pain with the cloth. No pain to transform. All your pain seeps into the ocean and is eaten by the one who no more eats his tail. A hand brushed over my temple. Close eyes, land sister, be with us, forever.

My eyes shut.

19

LIFE BOAT

SOMETHING WAS WHISPERING to me. Not the silky voices of the merfolk pulling me down, but something warmer, came from inside me.

Wake up, the voice said. Wake up and swim. This is not your destiny.

My eyes shot back open as I was being bound in seaweed and decorated by mud from the sea floor. I struggled, unable to grab any of my weapons before another feeling of calm flooded me.

You can do this. You defy space, you defy time, you are liminal.

I focused on the axe off my right hip and somehow the seaweed binding that area fell away, as if it were never there at all. I took the axe and hacked at the stem of the plant keeping me in place, and it fell back into the muddy water of the ground of the lake.

My lungs ached painfully, but with how long I’d been down here, they should’ve shut down at least when I was bound, and yet when I breathed in, I breathed air, not water.

Your body will make the plane of existence to keep you alive. Until then, swim! This is not how the great stag ends.