The Mermaid They Never Knew

Chapter 19: What Remains

Liren drifted through the weightless, glowing morning air, feeling at once like nothing and everything — a transparent, intangible presence that only moments ago had been an aching, exhausted body, and was now something elusive and light as the wind itself.

One of the sisters who now shared her new existence — another translucent, weightless figure drifting gracefully through the warm currents of air, with a grace no living creature could possess — approached her with a gentle, radiant smile. It was not so much a smile upon a face as a feeling carried in the very light emanating from her ethereal form.

“Do not be afraid, sister,” she said.

Her voice, though no longer bound to a physical body, reached Liren with perfect clarity, directly within her mind, needing neither ears nor air to carry it.

“You are one of us now, daughters of the air. We are not born with immortal souls, just as no creature of the sea is. But the soul is not forever beyond our reach.”

“What must I do?” Liren asked.

To her astonishment, she realized that the question had been just as clear to the spirits around her as if she had spoken it aloud. Here, in this new existence, thought and voice had become one.

“For three hundred years, we drift unseen above the human world,” answered another Daughter of the Air nearby, “and do what good we can. We scatter the oppressive heat above a suffering field. We bring a cool breeze to a traveler exhausted by the road. We calm a sudden storm and save a fishing boat from destruction.”

“Every good deed shortens the length of our trial. After three hundred years, we are granted immortal souls, and rise into the eternal light that no mortal creature of the sea can ever reach.”

“And what if people are cruel and do not deserve our kindness?” Liren asked.

She could not help remembering her own brief human life, filled with pain and unspoken love.

“Then our trial is extended,” the first sister replied softly. “For every tear we shed when we witness human cruelty, or when we are powerless to ease another’s suffering, another day is added to our journey.”

“But do not be afraid, sister. This is not a punishment.”

“It is a gift.”

“A chance to earn what we were never given at birth.”

Liren drifted through this new, weightless existence and, despite everything she had endured, felt something like a timid, barely flickering hope.

And without spending another moment mourning what she had lost, she followed her new sisters toward her first good deed on the long, invisible journey that lay ahead.

She flew over the palace at the very hour when preparations for the wedding ceremony were underway — terraces adorned with flowers, musicians tuning their instruments for the festive melody, servants hurrying about with the final arrangements.

Adrian, dressed in his ceremonial robes, stood before the altar awaiting the arrival of his bride. His face shone with the peaceful, expectant happiness of a man whose joy was untouched by even the faintest shadow of memory of the silent girl who had shared his days and evenings only yesterday.

He did not think of his little one that morning.

Not once.

He was completely consumed by the happiness that lay ahead of him.

Liren, invisible and weightless, drifted beside him as the prince spoke his vows before the altar. She brushed his forehead with the same light, intangible breath of cool air she had already discovered as the first gesture of kindness available to her in her new existence.

He merely smiled at something he could not see, taking the breeze for a fleeting caress of the morning air, and turned his radiant gaze once more toward his bride as she walked toward him in her white gown.

Liren did not resent him for forgetting.

In this new existence, detached from the passions of the flesh, she saw Adrian differently than she had before. No longer as the object of a desperate, all-consuming love, but simply as a good man who, without any cruel intention, had been blind to another person’s suffering — a man who had the right to his own happiness, for which she herself had once paid such a terrible price.

In the palace where the mermaid had spent the final months of her human life, no one noticed her absence until several days after the wedding.

One of the ladies-in-waiting came across the discarded dress of the silent girl and, shrugging, remarked casually:

“By the way, whatever happened to that poor mute girl? I haven’t seen her since the wedding.”

“True. She must have run off somewhere,” another replied without much sympathy. “Poor thing. But what can you do?”

No one spoke of the mermaid again.

The palace continued on with its ordinary rhythm, filled with new concerns and the young happiness of the newlyweds. The memory of the silent foundling from the sea faded from people’s conversations as quickly and quietly as sea foam disappears from the shore when the tide recedes.

The sisters who had remained among the coastal rocks at the moment Liren’s body dissolved into foam above the waves could not bring themselves to move at first.

Stunned and overwhelmed by grief, they watched the last particles of light disappear into the water where their youngest sister had stood only moments before.

The eldest was the first to recover.

Her grief instantly turned into blind, desperate fury.

“He is to blame!” she cried, staring toward the cliff where the wedding preparations were taking place amid flowers and decorations, completely unaware of the tragedy unfolding below.

“He took her life without even knowing it! He must pay!”

The middle sisters, consumed by the same blind despair, began calling upon the waves, joining their powers to summon a storm the shores had not seen in many years — a storm meant to descend upon the celebrating palace in revenge for their sister’s death.

The water around them darkened and churned into foam.

The wind they summoned howled more fiercely over the waves.

But before the storm could reach its full strength, something unexpected stopped it halfway.

A light, warm breeze passed over the water, as though an invisible hand had touched the raging waves and smoothed them flat, calming the fury of the storm before it could cause any real harm.

The sisters froze, bewildered by the inexplicable intervention.

They did not know that Liren herself, still unaccustomed to her new, weightless nature but already beginning to feel the first impulse toward goodness that now moved her in place of the passions of her former human life, had turned her newfound power against the storm born of their grief.

She did not want revenge for her own death to bring new victims and new sorrow to the innocent people inside the palace.

The storm died away as quickly as it had risen, leaving the sisters standing in confused silence.

Drained by the burst of anger that had found no outlet, they finally turned for home, carrying with them nothing but the grief they would now have to bear without the comfort of revenge.

The news of what had happened reached the underwater kingdom before the family even made it home — and the grief that descended upon them was heavier than any sorrow they had ever known.

Keilor fell silent for a long time.

He sought no comfort in matters of state or in conversations with his courtiers. Instead, he spent long hours sitting at that same boundary of the gardens, and there was more grief in his silence than any words could have expressed.

Sevil was silent too, but hers was a different kind of silence than before. It was no longer the cold, deliberate silence of a woman accustomed to hiding her emotions for the sake of maintaining order.

It was the heavy, burdened silence of someone who had finally understood the full price of decisions she had made many years ago.

The Queen Mother spoke nothing of it aloud. She asked no questions. But something in her posture, in her gaze, had changed irrevocably, as though the weight of that grief had settled upon her shoulders just as it had upon everyone else’s.

The five sisters grieved in their own ways, quietly, without the noisy, carefree life that had once filled their chambers.

In the evenings, they gathered together and remembered Liren — her quiet thoughtfulness, her fascination with the darkness beyond the gardens, the laughter that came less often from her than from the other sisters, but seemed all the more precious whenever it did.

Velara returned to her grotto consumed by the deepest, most hopeless grief, blaming herself for what had happened more fiercely than anyone else in the family ever could.

The creatures of the grotto fell strangely quiet, as though they could sense the weight of a mother’s grief filling every corner of their dark refuge.

The polyps at the entrance barely moved unless necessary. The slimy creatures of the deep retreated into their niches, unwilling to disturb their mistress even with the familiar rustle of their scales, as though the entire grotto had fallen into a respectful silence, waiting for the storm of her sorrow to pass on its own.

Velara spent long hours sitting motionless in that silence, remembering the one moment when she could have told her daughter the truth at their first meeting — but had chosen silence instead.

And that thought, that endless and relentless thought of how everything might have been different if only she had been honest that night, took up permanent residence within her, inseparable from her very being.

But time, as it always does, continued to move.

And slowly, little by little, the daughters began finding their way into the depths more often than before, no longer waiting for a special reason or some urgent need.

The princesses came simply to sit beside their mother, to tell her the latest news from the palace, and to listen in return to the few warm memories Velara still carried of their shared, far-too-brief years of motherhood.

Gradually, something grew between them that had not existed for so many years.

Not the old, irretrievable closeness of a family that once shared a home, but something new, quiet, and genuine.

A habit of visiting one another.

Of sharing the small things and the important ones.

Of sitting together in silence when there were no words to be found.

Life in the underwater kingdom continued as it always did.

But within that ordinary, unstoppable flow of days, there remained an emptiness nothing could fill.

Little Liren — the girl who had once looked into the darkness beyond the gardens with curiosity instead of fear — was no longer among them.