Marin Goranich wanted to be an artist. The Great Depression saw to a different profession: fish trawling. When a hurricane destroys the cliff face he lives on, Marin encounters a wounded merman. In trying to save the creature’s tail, the would-be artist learns the hard way that he may be a little more fish than human himself.
Genre: adult, fantasy, romance
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
- Chapter 11
- Chapter 12
- Chapter 13
- Chapter 14
- Chapter 15
- Chapter 16
- Chapter 17
- Chapter 18
- Chapter 19
- Chapter 20
Chapter 1
A corn muffin with honey on top? Good idea. A corn muffin with maple syrup on top? A great idea, though pricey. A corn muffin in my coffee thermos? I should have known better.
Chapter 2
Black fins flashed in deep water. A low voice echoed in the cave, a lecture to an audience of one. “There are moments in time when humans can slip the Antumnos Veil. When they see things they aren’t supposed to see. Those moments are when we find those that were lost to us. Babes that had been carried away in the night. The products of mating from our side and theirs.” Bubbles slipped past the cracks as a sharp green tail slid into the shadows, away from the voluminous black.
Chapter 3
It wasn’t for a lack of trying. I pushed. I fought. I wrote letters. I showed up. I begged. I did what I could. Yet, my desire for a fine arts degree fell apart. I worked for the pharmacist during the days when I wasn’t working over dad’s farm to save up for the impossible. The economy collapsed. Men were flinging themselves from windows on Wall Street. Dad lost his farm. We lost everything. My two younger siblings were placed with my aunt and uncle who ran a mercantile, something that couldn’t go under in the little town. It was the only place that we could trust they would be fed.
Chapter 4
“Jarl, I need a room!” I demanded as the door pulled open beneath my fist.
“Marin, what is with banging on my door in the middle of-” my brother’s eyes settled on what was draped on my back.
Chapter 5
Coming to was like that morning after I was welcomed on board ship by Captain and the crew. Homegrown hooch with anchovies. Unstable, my stomach wanted to live outside of my body and my brain was wrapped around an anchor. The storm threw buckets at the windows of Jarl’s apartment. He had rolled towels and bed clothes at the seams to keep the seeping to a minimum. First time I had slept on a mattress in five months.
Chapter 6
“Marin?” Jarl popped in, scaring the hell out of me and making the creature in the tub hiss. “Oh, it can make noise, neat. Are you having coffee or am I drinking your share?”
Chapter 7
Saeesar was going to be pissed. That’s if Taigre ever saw him again. Or his father. Or the nesting ground. Mostly though, he was concerned with the part that his father’s top gladiator was going to be pissed.
Chapter 8
Late into the night, or maybe early into the morning, I put away my guitar and set my mandolin back in its cradle. The winds continued to slam the boarding house, but I could not keep my eyes open any longer. My shoulders were feeling better, for one having been bit a few hours before by a merman. He had slowly drifted off after a time of me playing through a multitude of songs stored in my head. Not since we had moved to Grabble had I actually sung anything. Fiddled a bit with chords, but this was the first time I had really felt the weight of my heart. It had been interesting to watch his colours shift in response to the tunes. Some seemed to distress him; others turned him brilliant shades of crimson or sometimes thoroughly green.
Chapter 9
Jarl wasn’t joking about the don’t drown bit. At the front steps of the boarding house, a floor down, I encountered a world turned on its head. The water level lapped three steps up. Murk and gunk drifted in the high water.
Chapter 10
I woke where I had been left. The shore trees, backlit, cast long afternoon shadows. The water had receded to my feet, leaving me covered in mud and leaves.
Chapter 11
The solution, for the moment, was a long abandoned dock a few miles from the bay. It had belonged to a private property. From the water edge, appearances were that the roof of the mansion had collapsed years ago. The beach receded into a cobbled-together mass of sandstone boulder and shrub brush before the boards and old tree trunks jutted out to make a slapdash deck. Hauling myself up over a particularly large boulder under the dock, I sat down to regard Saeesar and Taigre. “You guys going home?”
Chapter 12
“The problem remains, though, even in accepting your dowry, that I don’t speak Antumnos, and I can’t use my gills. What is there for us if I have an aversion to the water?” I motioned to the horizon behind Saeesar.
Chapter 13
“I heard Siren Voice so far out, I had to come investigate, Bet-tah,” Leviathan chuckled to itself. “And here I find you hiding a Kraken child. Who’s do you have? Cuttle? Lineolata, Mestus? Typica’s, mayhaps?”
Chapter 14
“Tell me of your home.” I studied paper white skin at the edge of my cheek. Green flecks of plankton and salt drifted in swirls of ocean waters across Saeesar’s chest. The sun beat down on us as we floated over calm waves. His fins billowed out around him, soft and translucent like threadbare muslin. Absently, I ran a finger along the edge of a frill, mesmerized with the gentle tickle across my senses.
Chapter 15
“You will need to tell him, Saeesar. It will do him no good to learn you are Fomorii, a child of Domnu and not a child of Llyr,” a low voice said over me in the dark. I had been asleep on Saeesar, heading out to sea. Now, I found myself stationary.
Chapter 16
“Marin!” Saeesar called behind me as I broke the surface of the ocean. We were surprisingly closer than I thought to land. The crevice had been part of a deep section off a long shallow shelf. Instead of wasting the charm, I used it to push myself towards the soft sand beach. “Marin!” Saeesar called again. I ignored the call, intent on putting feet to earth.
Chapter 17
“What can I do when I get there? Is there a way to undo a mark?” I asked as water rushed past me. Holding onto his back fin, I could not be improving Saeesar’s aerodynamics, but it was easier to hold on this way and freed up his arms for propulsion.
Chapter 18
The nesting grounds caught me by surprise as we exited from the current. It spat us out into a shallower area where the light could penetrate to the seafloor. Coral arches and swaths of reef unfolded in brilliant colours beneath the oscillating sparkles. “Welcome to Keris’s territory.” Saeesar took me for an overview above the grounds, or at least part of the grounds. It reached well past the end of my sight. Children of Llyr peered out from arches, cracks, and crevices. Soon, recognizing the Fomorii, they emerged, waving to him. He circled back towards a low hill amid the reef.
Chapter 19
“Saeesar, Keris never had plans of letting you go.” Pursha blocked our way from the cave, coming down to our level such that her massive eyes wouldn’t leave my sight.
Chapter 20
The cave floor held forty or fifty circles of lines and waves. As I etched the last pattern Saeesar held in his hand, my eyelids kept closing on me.
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapel Orahamm 