WATER HEART, FUR SOUL

Chapter 3 : Morgana’s Betrayal and the Exile

Chapter 3 : Morgana’s Betrayal and the Exile

I. The Trap of the Quiet Morning

Naïda

The memory of our forced banishment from the Ocean remained an open wound, a story I replayed every time the silence of the lake became too heavy. We lived four years in the Palace beside King Aegaeon. I was sixteen then, and only beginning to accept the loss of my parents, finding comfort in diplomatic studies with my cousin Kaspian.

It had been a deceptively serene morning. The kingdom’s waters were so clear that the anemone gardens could be seen blooming for miles. Sunlight pierced the surface in long shafts of silver and azure. My sisters played in the grand courtyard, laughing while Aunt Galatée handed them sweet coral candies.

Suddenly, a deep rumble shook the abyssal trench. It was not an underwater earthquake, but a magical vibration, viscous and corrupted. The turquoise water instantly darkened into violet, releasing an odor of sulfur, burnt flesh, and decay that turned our stomachs.

Malikor had returned.

What the King and the entire court did not know was that during his four years of exile, my uncle’s heart had blackened completely. Consumed by resentment and an obsessive desire to steal the throne from his elder brother, he had descended into the forbidden abysses to find Morgana, the Sea Witch. Morgana was a creature of pure dark legend, a manipulator of occult magic feared even by sea monsters. She had given Malikor a cursed artifact : a leviathan-bone scepter carved with blood runes.

I still remembered the chaos. King Aegaeon shouting orders, Triton deploying the royal guard, and my cousins screaming. Malikor had appeared in the center of the courtyard with a deranged smile, invoking Morgana’s power. But dark magic is an unstable mistress. Whether it was Malikor’s mistake or the witch’s deliberate betrayal demanding royal blood as tribute, the spell veered from its intended course.

A vortex of swirling violet energy opened with a shrill screech that tore through my gills. It targeted neither the King nor the throne.

It rushed straight toward us, the seven daughters of Prince Nereus.

He wants to erase my father’s bloodline, I realized in a flash of terrified clarity.

With a crash of black foam, the magical current swallowed us. I barely had time to lunge forward, stretching my arms to grab Amphitrite’s hair and Calypso’s tail while clutching the twins to my chest. I refused to let go as space twisted around us and the ocean vanished in an apocalyptic scream.

II. The Fall into Mire

The landing was physically traumatic. We were spat out into the depths of an unfamiliar body of water, slamming into the mud in an explosion of bubbles and brackish sediment.

It was the water that struck me first. It lacked the sharp salvation of salt. It was fresh, light, slippery, almost dead. As it entered my gills, it burned my throat like volcanic smoke. It was a terrifying sensation of suffocation for creatures born in the great saltwater seas. The pressure was gone, replaced by a stagnant heaviness. The bottom was nothing but rotting leaves and gray mud seeping beneath our scales.

— “Naïda! I can’t see anything! It smells like death!” Nerida had screamed as she swam toward the surface.

When we emerged for the first time, the visual shock finished breaking us. No horizon. No endless blue waves. No sunlight dancing upon coral reefs. Nothing but a circular, dark lake surrounded by an impenetrable wall of vegetation: an ancient pine forest so dense its treetops seemed to scrape the gray sky. The trees whispered beneath the wind with a dry, menacing sound utterly foreign to underwater melodies. The outside air smelled of heavy sap, wet earth, and wild beasts.

That was when my sixteen years vanished. Overnight, I became the protective tyrant, the shield and mother of four teenagers and two little girls in a hostile world.

— “Alright, enough nostalgia for today,” I said firmly, shaking my red hair to chase away the invading memories. “We have stomachs to fill. Amphitrite, help me gather the blackberries. Calypso, drop that leech or I’ll feed it to Rin… Actually, to Oceane for her paintings.”

— “You’re outrageously unfair, Naïda,” Calypso sulked, tossing the worm back into the water with disdain. “We’ll see how witty you are when the forest walkers come to attack us.”

If only you knew one of those walkers shared my nights and holds me against his monster’s heart, I thought, a shiver running down my spine as my eyes briefly flashed gold.

III. The Promise Beneath the Pines

I crawled awkwardly onto the flat rock, using my forearms with a grace I knew looked utterly ridiculous. My pale translucent skin immediately began protesting against the dry morning air. My sisters lined up in the water, their six red-haired heads emerging from the mist like a row of magical beacons.

I picked wild blackberries from the bushes hanging above the shore, tossing them one by one into the giant mussel shell that served as our bowl. The scent of pine resin overwhelmed me, instantly reviving the memory of Jameson’s warm, scarred hands against my face.

His clan is hunting us. They think I’m a witch like Morgana… If only they knew we’re nothing more than poor exiles.

— “Naïda ?” little Cleo suddenly asked, her four-year-old voice cutting through the chorus of morning frogs. “Is Uncle Aegaeon going to come get us with Triton’s soldiers ? I don’t like the water here. It tangles my hair and it has no taste.”

Every conversation stopped instantly. Six pairs of eyes, from Amphitrite’s dark green gaze to the twins’ anxious gold, turned toward me. It was the forbidden question, the one that stole my breath every night.

I sat on the edge of the rock, letting my long green, blue, and gold tail soak in the water to keep my scales from drying too quickly. I pulled Cleo into my arms, her small translucent-white hands tangling in my fiery hair.

— “I don’t know if King Aegaeon can open a portal to this place, sweetheart,” I answered with brutal honesty, refusing to soothe them with dangerous illusions. “Morgana’s magic cast us very far away, perhaps into a world no one even knows exists. But look at us. We are the daughters of Nereus and Thalassa. We survived Malikor’s betrayal, the change of water, and Calypso trying to turn the local wildlife into weapons of mass destruction.”

A small collective laugh eased the tension, breaking the crushing weight of the moment.

— “This lake may be small, dark, and surrounded by strange trees,” I continued, my irises blazing with pure determined gold, “but as long as we stay together, no one will break us. I made you a promise the day we fell here, and I will keep it : I will protect you, even if I must drain this lake with my own tail.”

They all moved closer, huddling against me in a collective embrace of cold scales, muffled laughter, and quiet tears. I held my sisters as tightly as I could while staring at the dark line of the ancient forest.

Jameson had told me about the Ritual of Broken Balance. He had explained that for us to unite, for me to walk upon the land or for him to live in the water, our original worlds would have to pay a terrible price. The lake would dry up, condemning my sisters to certain death by desiccation.

Never, I swore inwardly as I looked at Cora and Cleo’s innocent faces. I love you, Jameson, with a love that consumes my soul. But I am these girls’ mother. I will never build my paradise upon the graveyard of my own family.

I gently released the embrace and handed the shell filled with berries to Amphitrite. The lake’s mist was beginning to fade, revealing the harsh reality of our exile and the beginning of a race against time that I did not know whether we would survive.