Chapter Text
As the wind battered against her body and threw her far out of the water, Avery tried to wrap her arms around her fin and hug it close to her body. Mostly to keep it out of harm's way from the other fish unfortunate enough to get caught up in the storm, but partially also as a muscle memory from when she was younger. The storms that would rage above the surface always made her feel both uncomfortable, and thankful that she lived below the water's edge.
Beneath her, she watched the water grow farther and farther away from her as the storm lifted her higher up. Her vision soon proved unreliable as it began spinning, or rather her body began spinning, rapidly in multiple different directions as she was thrown about by the wind. It was almost impossible to see the dark and stormy horizon now, the water being carried by the wind clouding her vision. Waves ripped around below her, the ocean an angry, dark beast that seemed to be crying out for one of its lost children.
Futilely, Avery tried to push herself towards the water below her, extending her fin and spreading her arms to hopefully catch more of the air like the elders had told her, only to watch the turbulent water grow smaller and smaller. In a panic, she called to her magic to try and push her way through the wind, or make herself heavier so she could fall o-or something! In her haste, she stretched her magic as far as it could, calling for help while reaching for the water below.
Far beneath the waves, too far for Avery to properly say where, she could feel her magic respond to others. Many responses, from panicked (that felt undoubtedly like one of her mother's), to acceptance as if she was already beyond the point of saving. Dozens of responses, many of which she could put a face to, reached her senses like a familiar song note from her youth.
She tried to reach the water again with her magic, watching as multiple amethyst tendrils of magic reached for the water only to watch the ends disappear like smoke after too far a distance.
She reached again with her magic, only to bite back a cry as she watched the tendrils fade with distance. Not for the first time in her life, she cursed her ineptitude with magic as the winds carried her farther and farther away from her kind.
Originally, her day had started off much better than what it was shaping up to be. She had awoken in her home, a simple abode with the bare necessities that had been showing a bit too much algae growth of late than she would've liked, and had started her day by untangling her fin from her anchoring poll like always.
The poll had been a gift from her new neighbors, saving her the trouble of carving one herself. Carved from rock, it had multiple sinews of seaweed roped together that could be used to tie her fin to the poll, keeping her in place without having to worry about ocean currents pulling her from her new home while she slept. It felt like second nature, unwrapping her arms from the poll she had been clinging to in her sleep before getting to work on her tail.
When she was younger, it had been just her and her parents so they had shared one anchoring poll between the three of them. It had gotten somewhat cramped when she had gotten older, but no one had seen a reason to change it, so they hadn't.
After untying herself, she had taken the time to pull a few clams from her bag near the door, which had drifted from its' usual spot by the foot of the anchor.
Clams were widely eaten thanks to their sheer numbers, and their ridiculously long life span. Many of her kind had a stash of them somewhere in their home in case water currents got aggressive, or the water wasn't safe to hunt in.
After all her morning rituals had been taken care of, Avery found herself at a dilemma as she lazily swished her tail back and forth to keep herself still. Her home was slowly growing more algae covered as days went on, and she would need to clean it sometime soon less it take over her home.
But doing so would cut into her usual human watching time! What if she missed a super cool human to talk to! There were so many humans above the water she hadn't talked to yet!
'Wait a second, I could use that new spell mom taught me before I moved out!' Wow, did Avery feel dumb. The one thing that all undersea people could universally come together over, and it took her the longest time to remember it!
Magic, the lifeblood that seeped through all the members of her kind that called the sea their home. How it came to be so attuned with their lives they weren't sure, but nobody seemed to really mind. Why try to figure out the origins when what they had was so nice?
Above the water's edge, it seemed that some humans were in agreement with them. Some say that magic came from a pact between the dwellers of land and water, but nobody could provide definite proof. From what the elders told them, magic above the water was far more secretive than below the water.
"All humans have the capacity to learn magic, but the actual users of magic tend to keep as few others in the know of it as possible." That was what one elder had told her when she had asked, but that only led to more questions.
'Why did magic users keep their abilities a secret from other people? Why limit yourself to so few minds? Power? Control? If she ever met a land dweller that could use magic, she would have to ask. All the humans she had met before either nothing about magic, or had the audacity to call it fake! Magic, something more potent than blood, fake?
Regardless of humanity's majority view on magic, Avery still had plans on meeting some more. Humans had so little areas to live compared to her own kind, but they had somehow managed to grow their population to such a gargantuan amount! From what she managed to piece from the elders and humans she could manage a decent conversation with, humans seemed to lack any predator above them, and had an array of tools to fight back any predators that could harm them.
'Whatever', sure they had tools, but did they have magic the way merfolk did? They had been completely attuned with it, inside and out. When she showed magic to the beings above the water, they were always completely astounded by what she could do. And she didn't even have to show any of the more complicated forms of magic! Just showing them the small little flashy spells that she learned when she was a young one could entertain them. Little bouts of light and music, showing them an image from her thoughts, or conjuring little water effigies of animals.
The idea seemed laughable. Idly reaching into herself, she thought of the algae flaking away like dead scales. Casting forth her magic towards the algae with as much concentrated effort as she could, she was partially disappointed to see only the algae in the center of the room flake away while the at the edges of her abode, the algae remained as still as before.
No matter how hard she tried to learn, many spells still alluded her grasp of knowledge. No matter how hard she studied the tomes, she just couldn't seem to get it to stick. It reminded her of how magic interacted with humans, with each person having a certain type of magic. While under the water, merfolk had no such limits. Many of her kind had multiple areas of magic they could call upon, all the way from healing to affecting the water around them. Water manipulation was the hardest to learn, but obviously the most powerful. Most undersea beings believed that the sea they had been created in had a magic of its own, separated from the magic all merfolk and some humans had that was far older than both races combined. Bending the sea to your will showed a strong control over magic, signaling others that you were either very powerful, or very determined.
'Now that I'm thinking about it, humans are a lot like young ones. So...' She tapped her fingers along the scales of her fin in thought, tapping in tune to a melody she remembered her mother teaching her from her younger days. '...so...naive? No, they're not naive, many of them are quite intelligent. More like...curious!'
Curious, that was it! Always striving to learn about their world and beyond. When Avery would show them magic, or just her fin to be honest, the ones who had reacted rationally would insistently ask questions about her race and her magic. They'd sit at the edge of whatever they were standing on, and watch them with such rapt attention. Many humans would almost fall into the water just trying to get as close a view as they could, eyeing everyone about Avery, from her magic to her face and to her tail that she would splash out of the water from time to time.
Honestly, it always flustered Avery how intensely they viewed her. Humans were different from her own kind, yet they both looked so similar! Most humans had substantially long hair on their head, which was similar to her kind's own, but both were for very different reasons. Humans had head on their head to "protect them from the sun", or so that's what some of the humans say. While for her kind, the hair on their head never grew too long, only stretching down to their neck at most if it wasn't done in a certain style, and was used to detect the currents. The cells of their hair were specialized in touch, so they could detect even the smallest change in currents.
Additionally, another similarity were (some of) their appendages. Humans had fingers, and so did merfolk. But when she had put her hand up to one very curious human's, she could see several small yet key differences between hers' and the human's. For one, the webbing between her fingers were significantly longer than the human's, along with the fact that the human's claws were remarkably shortened and dulled. Hers' were somewhat longer, but ended in points that she was happy to say that she took good care of.
An obvious difference in physiology were their different appendages they had in place of a fin. "Legs" were what the human called them, removing some hard fabric to expose what they called a "foot". It reminded her of a hand, but more...stubby. The human had said that the shape and extra appendages on the end was to help them move around and balance themselves. The "toes" on the end of their "foot" also had dulled claws, curiously enough. What was the point of claws if they didn't use them?
Another small difference between the two species was the placement of a second set of eyelids. Humans were, for some reason, rather astounded by that, despite the clear reasoning. Her kind had two sets of eyelids, one for when they breached water that they could move, and the other that didn't move. Elders had said that her kind had the outer set because of the need to blink when her kind exited the water, like humans because of the air. Below the water, they had no use for that set unless something got caught in it, like flakes of scales or particles of small dust.
A rather obvious difference between the two species was the set of scales that decorated one, and skin which decorated the other. When she was younger, she was always confused by human skin. It lacked feathers or scales, and the hair she could see was remarkably thin and spaced out. When she had asked, the human had said the fabric they wore protected them, so they had no need for such hair that some animals had. "Besides that," the human said, "skin is the largest muscle in our system, and is used to protect our organs and other parts from disease." Well, duh, even Avery knew that, but she wasn't about to say anything and risk offending the human, so she just nodded along.
Furthermore, one additional trait her kind had over humans were their teeth. From the tomes she had read while learning about humans when she was smaller, humans had an omnivorous lifestyle, resulting in multiple flat teeth, with the addition of a few pointed teeth. Her kind however, ate upon mostly seafood for sustenance such as clams, crabs, fish and other animals. Because of that, her kind's teeth were more similar to a shark's, with a row of carnivorous teeth. Despite the differences of teeth, both worked the same way, with only one row of young teeth that would be replaced by bigger ones as they grew.
Facially wise besides the eyes, teeth and sensitive hair, the only other facial difference were the shape of a merfolk's ears. While similar in size and shape of a human's, her kind had more pointed and were far slimmer with simpler shape to decrease drag resistance.
Unfortunately for Avery she had grown very deep in thought from thinking about humans, so she couldn't help the squawk that escaped her when she noticed her home to be much further away than before. She looked around to see herself floating above the rather large reef of coral that was teeming with life of all kinds. Near the edges of the reef were small schools of fish that were scouring around for food, swimming in tight clumps in random directions. Below them, Avery could spot the subtle ridges of a mimic octopus sticking out of the sand under the fish, still like stone. It's flesh matched almost perfectly to the sand around it, only ruined by the pair of deep black eyes.
The water around her darkened followed by the subtle siftings of her hair, causing her to turn upwards where she could see a large manta ray coast over her, followed by a small fleet of manta rays in varying sizes. Her vision flashed as pigments of black, white and in between from the manta rays undersides. The fleet quietly ghosted along, their silence broken intermittently by the crash of waves as manta rays broke the water's edge. Those near the top were leaping out of the water, becoming like little shadows from where she idled, and coming back with little impact.
Watching it all with a smile, Avery slowly swam up in front to meet the leading manta ray. Its mouth was closed, and was most likely leading the way to the reef which sat underneath them. Behind it, the fleet of manta rays glided through the water, the group spanning hundreds of feet from their combined length. She waved slowly to the great fish as she moved in front of it, turning her body parallel as the benevolent behemoth quickly passed under her. Hooking her hands gently onto it, she felt the change in speed push against her lithe form, threatening to take her off the enormous animal. A flick of her tail helped her, and soon she was laying against the manta ray as it curved downwards towards the reef. To her side, the beast's pectoral fins slowly flapped in sync with many of the others behind her, some of the other manta rays already opening their maws to catch some of the scattered plankton.
The manta rays soon descended upon the reef like killer whales would to a whale. Fish swam out of their way, but in no real hurry. Avery made sure to pull her hands away from the ray before it reached the mass of plankton further into the reef. She was not looking forward to plankton getting in her hair, and would do something to keep them away. It felt...weird having such tiny creatures stuck in a person's hair. The cells of her hair were sensitive, and it felt very strange to feel tiny organisms crawl around on it.
As the great gentle beast swam towards its food, she tried to make herself as small as possible to avoid the encroaching manta ray group while also aiming for a cleaning station at the top of a congregation of red coral. A kick with her fin sent her careening to the group of smaller fish, the collision avoided easily by a twist of her body and a small kick in the opposite direction to slow her down. The fish initially scattered from her quick approach, but soon steamed back, swimming to Avery with a frenzy.
She stretched her arms by her side as the fish began picking at her body, eating off of her scales. The cleaner fish moved quickly, darting around her to get as much bacteria as possible. They darted around with fervor, and soon grouped up at the coral again allowing her swim away with a flourish. Behind her, a manta ray quickly took her place, and the cycle began again.
As she swam away from the reef, she took a second to look back at the ecosystem interacting behind her with a fond look. But as she faced forward in preparation of swimming to the coastline, she found herself spinning in a different direction to avoid ramming into an adolescent hammerhead, the shark only mildly adjusting its course to avoid Avery. At its back, she could spot multiple pilot fish tailing it, grouped up around its tail.
'Jerk, could've acted at least a bit more panicky or whatever since I almost rammed into you.' The predator swam along, its back tail cutting through the water with a slow efficiency.
With a spin, Avery turned and shot off towards the surface, her ears popping from the drastic change in pressure. By the time she broke the surface, her speed had slowed to the point she didn't disturb the ocean's waves. She emerged with barely a ripple, taking in the sight of a cloudy sky and uneven waves. In the distance along the horizon, she could see land, and with it a city. From such a distance, the only discernable thing along the horizon was a lump that she guessed was a mountain, and a few small figures which was sure to be a few of the human towers.
Her kind distanced themselves from humans when possible so as to not expose themselves to humanity, as per many witches wishes. They usually lived in view of a human settlement for when they bartered or talked to humans.
So with a glimmer in her eye and a quick dive back under the waves, she shot off towards a familiar stretch of sea bed. It was a familiar path she took towards land, passing creatures of many sizes like a torpedo, already imagining the conversations she could have with someone she was lucky enough to meet.