Chatterbox: Inkwell

This is one of those times where I have a story that isn't nearly ready for public exposure but I'm bored and it's late so I'm inflicting it on you dear CBers anyway. You may commence with the merrymaking and/or torches and pitchforks, whichever you prefer.

Regardless. This is the current incaration of Half the Sea as Well, which spent an absurdly long time fermenting in my head before I finally started to write it. It's a tentative extrapolation of past events alluded to in I Want the Good Times Back from The Little Mermaid, which, for those of you who haven't yet experienced the indescribable goodness that is Sherie Rene Scott as Ursula, means that it's essentially Wicked for The Little Mermaid. 

[thunder booms; a scream is heard in the distance]

Yes, yes, I know, I know. Trés cliché; everyone's writing Wickeds nowadays.

But come on! I Want the Good Times Back was practically begging for Ursula-centric Start of Darkness fanfiction to be written, and who am I to argue?

[angry shouts from the distant village]

Time grows short. Let us begin, before the rabble descends!

o0O0o

The subject of my birth has long been a subject of rumor and wild speculation. I myself have heard no less than three different accounts from three equally credible sources, and I am told that there are perhaps a dozen more tawdry myths in fairly regular circulation amongst the lower classes.

For my part, I find the stories to be blatantly exaggerated at best and entirely ridiculous at worst. My time is too precious to spend it on such frivolities as wondering whether my mother was, to use the popular euphemism, involved with one of the few cecaelia that dared to enter the southern realm or if, instead, the victim of a terrible curse. My only concern is with results and unalterable facts, which, on the whole, are rather more interesting anyway.

I am getting ahead of myself, and, I fear, waxing ambiguous. Allow me to start at the beginning. 

My royal upbringing, regrettably, lacked the warmth and adoration lavished upon my elder brother. Hardly surprising, I suppose, given that I was entirely the wrong species and a pertinent child to boot, whereas Triton was the very epitome of the strong royal blood. Golden-haired and sapphire-scaled, my brother was the crown jewel of the family.

I, on the other hand, tarnished the royal crown. How could I do anything else? With a complexion like a fresh corpse and altogether too many limbs, I could not help but bring shame to my family. A cecaelia, in the royal courts of Atlantica? It was a travesty of nature, and yet it was.

A part of me relished the barely-restrained disgust from the merfolk who frequented the gilded halls of the palace. I sought out the rumors that the servants exchanged, collected them the way my brother collected empty clam shells or my father collected courtiers. We all have our vices.

It was an education, spying on the serving class. They knew far more than my family ever gave them credit for, and by cramming myself into a disused cupboard in the kitchen I learnt more of my father’s activities than I could have by hovering over his shoulder as my brother did. 

The greatest revelation of my early years came on my eighth birthday. Father threw me a party, for posterity’s sake, I imagine, more than any actual affection. I lingered in a shadowed alcove afterwards, listening to the chatter of the cleaning staff. The servants usually refrained from discussing my, as Father put it, condition whilst working. Today was an exception, and the brief conversation that I overheard provided me a moment of breathtaking clarity that I still marvel at today.

One of the younger girls on the staff began to cry quietly, and, upon being questioned for this peculiarity, she said, “I’m sorry. It’s just too horrible.”

When pressed, she elaborated thusly: “I keep thinking how brave the princess must be, to carry on as she does. I think I’d be dreadfully upset all the time, in her place. I can’t imagine how she must envy us all.”

From the comments that followed, I surmised that the rest of the merfolk thought me handicapped by my species. In retrospect it seems obvious, true, but my eight-year-old self was naive enough to believe that the merfolk knew how much I reveled in the mobility and flexibility that they could only dream of. 

In fact they were, and many still are, blinded by the relatively slow crawl that is my primary mode of movement. They labored under the impression that I was floor-bound and unable to swim as they did. This is nonsense, of course, and I can swim faster than any merfolk if the mood takes me. Likewise I can scarcely imagine how difficult and boring life must be for the merfolk, who are, to put it mildly, severely limited in their ability to multitask.

But I digress.

The early discovery that the merfolk did not envy me my species but pitied me for it sparked a drastic change in my usual habits. I couldn’t understand the attitude of the servants, and such a state of mind was intolerable. I began, for the first time, to pay attention to the whispers of violence in the northern climes. For months my only reading material was the massive amount of war propaganda published by my father’s lackeys. There was a wealth of anti-selkie and anti-cecaelia literature for me to peruse. I was fascinated, and perhaps a little disturbed, to learn that the perpetual war that raged along Atlantica’s western borders was fought largely against cecaelia who were slovenly and stupid when they were not being devious and cunning. My own experience with the species being limited to myself and the occasional glimpse of the malnourished and perpetually inebriated cecaelia who sometimes fell asleep on the outside steps of the palace, I had, at that time, little evidence with which to combat these accounts.

Further I began to spy, not only on the servants, but on Father and his court as well. I was not, strictly speaking, allowed in the reception hall during the day, lest I disturb the foreign dignitaries, but years of cramming myself into cupboards had given me a knack for fitting into spaces seemingly smaller than I was, and the decorative carvings along the hall presented me with a multitude of crevices in which I could hide.

I learnt of the crop shortages and seaweed blights in the far south, of orca attacks on the outskirts of the kingdom, of the tentatively peaceable relations between Atlantica and the Rusalki clan. I listened as my father haggled the price of kelp with emissaries from the Ningyo Empire and raged against the one and only selkie messenger who dared to enter Atlantica.

My favorites were the delegates from the parts of Atlantica that I had never seen. The kingdom extended deep into the Atlantic ocean that was its namesake, and the merfolk from the colder, wilder half of the kingdom had personalities to match. They argued with my father constantly, and from these clashes I gleaned an in-depth knowledge of the border skirmishes with the western cecaelia tribes and the selkies of the north, of the rioting merfolk and the gradual shifting of the mountains that marked the edge of Atlantica and the beginnings of cecaelian territory.

Some time after my eleventh birthday, the palace was thrown into uproar when a cecaelian sorcerer set up shop in the surrounding city. I was tucked into my usual crevice when the news arrived via my father’s personal messenger, a sunfish called Mola, who was in a rather agitated state at the time. 

Scarcely had she finished describing the stranger when the guards escorted him into the reception hall, in the vaguely passive-aggressive manner of guards everywhere.

It was my first real glimpse of cecaelian culture. The sorcerer’s arms were in constant motion, seeming almost to have minds of their own as he floated regally before my father. He was completely at ease, his shoulders relaxed and a slight smirk on his angular face. Brilliantly red tattoos marked his pale bluish skin, and his pure-white and wild hair billowed around his sharp, angular face. 

He was a magician of the Octessia tribe, exiled for treasonous activity and come to try his luck in a mer city. The smirk never wavered as he told my father this, and though numerous attempts were made to throw him out of the city, somehow he would always reappear in his shop the next day as if nothing had happened. Eventually father began to ignore him, in hopes that he might get bored and leave.

His name was Adrastos, and from that day until his departure years later, he was my tutor in the ways of cecaelian culture. He taught me the magic of my species, a far more primal thing than the orderly type practiced by my father. I would sneak away from the palace to learn the subtle art of potionmaking and the even more subtle art of spellweaving. It was then that I learnt of balance, that for every effect there must first be a cause, that nothing can be gained without sacrifice and that, equally, there is nothing that sacrifice cannot accomplish. 

When at last he was driven permanently from the city, I was on the cusp of adulthood. By mer standards I was fully mature, save for the traditional visit to the World Above, which was to take place on the night of my sixteenth birthday. The event bore great significance amongst the merfolk, and as such was treated with great fanfare. For myself, I had never felt the allure of the World Above, nor have I since. It is altogether too open and bright for my liking.

Nevertheless I spent an hour or so on the beach that evening, nestled comfortably between two spray-slicked boulders and watching the occasional human peasant wander obliviously past. 

Afterwards I returned to the palace, the last formality of childhood crossed neatly off my list of responsibilities. There was a small party, of sorts, to welcome me into adulthood. 

o0O0o

Octopuses have arms, squid have tentacles. There is, in fact, a difference.

Bring on the pitchforks!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Broadway version of The Little Mermaid, this story is based more or less entirely on the following lines from Ursula's act one number, the above-mentioned I Want the Good Times Back: 

When daddy dear was floating on his deathbed,

he divied up the kingdom into two.

I got his magic shell, and half the sea as well;

his trident went to... you know who...

My reign why it was blissfully delicious,

and glamor, glitz, and style were au courant...

Did I use some black magic? Well, oopsie my bad!

Did I mutilate, maim, and destroy? Just a tad.  

Note the reverse title drop. Pretend, for my sake, that it's witty and clever instead of contrived and pretentious.