Never swim upwards to the shorehis father had always warned, brows lowered angrily and mouth set in a belligerent line.It is too dangerous. Humans are cruel, vicious beings, and would rather kill you on sight than try to open up to something they don't understand.

Blaine had heard the legends, everyone had, curled up beneath his father's steely gaze as he spoke of horrors that belonged in the realm of black nightmares. Scales stripped from a pinned tail and made into a fashion for human kind; merpeople captured in nets of thick-woven rope and used as a carnival attraction, trapped in too-small tanks filled with poisoned water; sharp, barbed metal hooks digging deep into flesh, rendering its prey incapable of escape. Those were tales designed to frighten and disgust, to deter young merpeople from ever wishing to explore the land beyond the squeaks of the dolphins and deep rumbling cries of the whales.

But Blaine had heard legends, whispered by the turtles and the seabirds, telling of a land above that was not so bad. He heard stories of sunlight streaming over golden dunes, rolling fields of shining green grass like seaweed, buildings unlike castles but soaring so high they reached past the swirling clouds, myths that made him long to visit the land beyond the ebb and flow of waves, crave to see sunlight from above the water, ache with wanting for a land he'd never know of.

The sky was dark, the creatures fled below the pitching, rolling waves, the mothers chivvying their children into safer waters, but Blaine swam closer to the surface, eyes alight with the anticipation of the unknown. His head broke the waves, the sky above his head deep foreboding grey, waves rising foaming heads all around him, rearing to the sky and crashing down, vicious with their flying white fangs.

He ducked below the waves again, the shore a pale line far off, and started to swim fast towards the place he sought, tail beating powerfully at the water and arms curving through the waves as he had been born to move. His body thrummed with something like lightning, rushing through him at the speed of a racing wave as the pale line grew closer, more distinct, and curtains of steel grey came into view instead of the burnished blue sky he had been led to believe he would find.

There was debris washing through the water, wooden planks like those buried in the sand from shipwrecks, rocks flying through the waves like dolphins leaping and arcing, ropes that flashed past, twisting and turning and looking to wrap around innocent creatures and drag them down, vulnerable and trapped. Blaine dodged everything, his eyes trained on the shore that became more distinct with every flick of his tailfin. It was grey and bleak, the golden sunlight that the dunes should be awash with nowhere to be found, the legends fading away in front of Blaine's fast-maturing eyes.

Water came from above when he pushed above the waves, but cold and flickering sharp over his skin, unfamiliar and raising shivers like ripples over his body, as if the needling water falling from the sky was a pebble and his body was the ocean. The shore was close now, clear to his eyes and calling out to him as a siren would, begging to be explored and memorised and told of in carefully crafted legends.

It all happened in barely a moment. In the time that seaweed could catch on arms slicing through water, a dolphin could chatter about a thousand things, a whale could send its song echoing far across the ocean. One moment Blaine was spinning through the water, dodging the debris that flew from nowhere on all sides, the next something thick and heavy hit him with the force of an overenthusiastic seal pup. A net, made of rope, binding him together, trapping his arms tight against his sides and tangling his tail so movement became an impossibility.

The waves, once his friends, his familiar territory, became his enemy as he tried to escape his trappings, utterly at the mercy of the forces of nature. The flying foam fangs clashed with him, the strength of the pounding water slammed him into rocks until his head spun with pain, blood seeping red like fading seaweed into the monstrous ocean.

Wet sand was soft beneath his abused body, the waves now barely lapping at his tail, apologetic for its earlier viciousness. Blaine looked down at the thick-woven ropes around his body, tried to wriggle an arm free, his tail lashing the shore in frustration, his teeth gritted with the effort as he fought against the bindings that trapped him, rendering him useless, helpless as a newly-hatched puffin chick.

There was music, soft as the whisper of legends through the coral. Cool hands, cool like the soothing touch of the ocean, pulling at ropes and gradually loosening their vicious hold. Eyes like the water, mingling colours on a deepening canvas, reflected with shock as the saviour's gaze strayed downwards.

A human.

Blaine didn't think, didn't pause to wonder upon those ocean eyes. The moment the ropes loosened around his tail, he wriggled free and slipped from sand back into the water, diving beneath the waves with a sinuous flick of his tail.