Mervidia

Mervidia

B
y
J.K. Barber

ISBN-13: 978-1499611403

ISBN-10: 1499611404

Copyright © 2014 by Jay and Katherine Barber

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.

First Edition

June 23, 2014

Printed by CreateSpace,

An Amazon.com Company

www.createspace.com

Cover Art and Chapter H
eads

Original I
llustrations by

Fernando Cortés

www.fernandocortes.com

www.facebook.com/fernandocortesdepablo

Cover Design

Eric Bowen

[email protected]

For Our Teachers

Listen fries and harken well

For the life of Mervidia is the tale I tell

From caves beneath the ocean floor

Came the First King who gave us more

United under the Fangs we became

All who bear the Merwin name

The beautiful ethyrie dance in the light

And protect us all with the gift of foresight

The neondra so skilled with trident and spear

Protect Mervidia and the Deeps we fear

The seifeira harvest what the ocean provides

And keep us fed throughout our lives

The luminous jellod use their magic

Saving
us from ends so tragic

The proud octolaide of numerous limb

Plumb the darkness drawing life within

The tiny faera harvest pearls so pretty

While culling the feeble from the city

The grogstack foul and bent at times

Bring us orihalcyon from their mines

But listen most to this I now speak

In Mervidia there is no room for the weak

Your Culling is upon you and I say to thee

As in life survival is victory

Chapter One

Frilled s
harks circled Iago. Their white spiny teeth reflected brightly in the light of the merwin’s orihalcyon stone that he held high in his webbed hand. The radiance caused the iridescent scales on his fingers to shimmer in the darkness. The Queen’s Consort was confused, his mind muddled and his eyes fixated on the light instead of the predators around him. He stared at the stone, wondering why its light was white and not the waxing burnt sienna of the current season. He also didn’t understand why he was out in open water, instead of safe within Mervidia’s confines.

Iago’s
eyes studied the stone chunk before him. Its jagged hewn edges were dark, but the wide rough facets, covering all of its sides, beamed with light. His hand burned from the stone’s intense heat, yet he continued to hold it.
Beryl and I were married in high summer a year ago, when Mervidia’s light was its brightest,
he remembered, trying to alleviate his confusion with the balm of rational facts. The male merwin’s pale pink waist and back tendrils lay dead in the water, when they should have been floating about him.
Something is very wrong,
he thought, unable to clear his mind. His body was heavy and numb. He no longer felt the burning heat of the orihalcyon stone in his hand.

It was then that the first shark bit into the end of Iago’s forked
rosy tail, right at the fin, crippling him so that he couldn’t swim away. He did not feel the pain though, nor did he resist. That confused him further; it was as if his consciousness had somehow separated from his body. The sharks’ pale forms darted in and out of the light, biting chunks of flesh from his fair ethyrie physique. Iago watched as they swam away, his tendrils trailing from the corners of their crimson-stained mouths as they retreated into the gloom with their banquet. His red blood clouded the water, and the stone’s light faded away into the blackness, along with his arm he noticed dully. He closed his eyes, submitting to the permanent night of open water. Iago’s awareness drifted as though he was falling asleep. He had felt no pain when the sharks originally attacked and still felt nothing as they continued to feast upon him… yet suddenly there was a flavor in his mouth. The rest of his senses were shut off; all save for the thick foulness he now tasted on his tongue. He gagged and coughed, his gills befouled with… blood.

Iago’s eyes snapped open, and he sat up in the royal bed, a giant clam magically altered by a hundred machi, who had elongated its edges up and into a graceful canopy. It wasn’t that a hundred machi were required for the task; it was more the city’s finest coming together to shape something exceptional for the royal pair. No other bed in Mervidia came close to its spiraling and swirling beauty. The top remained open, as well as a space at its foot, so that it could be entered from above or below. Some would perceive it as indeed magnificent, but Iago often thought of it as a cage, a representation of the Merwin’s grasp at control. Beryl had laughed when he had shared his opinion of their bedstead; she only recognized its beauty and the great skill used in its crafting.

Iago’s
hands rested behind him on the soft, blue kelp mattress, keeping him upright as he swished his tail to the side, searching to entwine it with his wife’s. He knew something was truly wrong when Queen Beryl was not beside him. The taste of blood in his mouth was overwhelming. His neck gills strained as he tried to flush out his water-breathing lungs, forcing the viscous fluid out through his rib gills. The more he did so though, the more he continued to cough.

Something floated above Iago
, its dark bulk ominous as it loomed over him. He blinked his milky eyes, trying to further wake himself from the dream. Iago and his Queen were well-guarded, but murder in Mervidia was commonplace. He quickly reached over to his coral side-table, producing a small uklod-bone dagger that was two hand spans in length. The Merwin harvested the bones of giant creatures they called uklod, which upon death would sometimes sink to the seafloor. It was a rare occurrence, but one that was cause for great celebration. The meat alone was enough to provide a meal for all of the starving merwin of the Ghet, Mervidia’s slums. One side of the exceptional weapon, as well as the tip, was filed to a deadly edge.

With one forceful flick of his tail fin, Iago’s back was against the stone wall of the bedcha
mber, and he held the weapon out before him defensively. Free of the polluting blood that threatened to seize up his neck and rib gills, he yanked the kelp drape from one of the room’s orihalcyon sconces. Auburn light illuminated the large room, and Iago drew in clean seawater through his gills, purging them of the dense blood.

Iago
gave little attention to the intricately woven seaweed rugs laden with ornately-carved uklod bone chairs and loungers, as he scanned the room for intruders. He grew sad when his eyes lingered momentarily on the empty, small clam crib, lined with warmly glowing orihalcyon that was supposed to serve as the royal incubator. Queen Beryl had inherited the same fertility problems as her mother, Damaris; the royal pair had not produced an heir in their year of marriage, despite their many attempts.

B
rilliant white pearls were set into all of the room’s decorations and even into the grey stone walls in decorative shell murals, depicting giant conchs inlaid with iridescent paua, sprawling starfish, and… sharks. Iago looked past the glittering pearls’ smooth pale surfaces, tinged a ginger color in the waxing orihalcyon’s radiance. The royal consort’s attention focused on the fact that the room was thickly clouded with blood, its dense wisps reaching down at him with noxious red fingers. The light illuminated the mystery form above him.

Queen Beryl float
ed inertly at the top of their bedchamber, her long iridescent tail and ethyrie tendrils dangling limply in the still water. Her loose lava-red hair and the blood it mingled with obscured most of her body. Iago made sure that they were the only two merwin in the room. His eyes darted throughout the chamber as he swam around the walls and uncovered the rest of the half dozen sconces. With it fully illuminated, he noted that the room itself was untouched. Even the Fangs, the Merwin crown fashioned from an angler fish’s jaws which was imbedded with thousands of pearls around the circlet’s base, remained on Queen Beryl’s dressing table. Still clutching the dagger, Iago twirled in place, forcing water away from him and taking the blood along with it. He swam to his wife’s side, brushing her hair gently out of her face with one broad sweep of his forearm.

Iago didn’t have to feel for a pulse to know that his wife was dead.
The neat slice that had opened her throat bore the dire tidings of her passing. He ran a hand lovingly across her fair cheek, still staggeringly beautiful in death. Their marriage had begun as an arrangement, two families forging a political alliance, but he had grown to fiercely love her. Before they were wed, Iago was often rash in his youth and had let his High House sense of self-importance color his everyday actions. Iago had fulfilled his father’s exigent desire for their family, House Paua, to advance politically, so he had been able to set that ambitious part of himself aside after the wedding. When they were alone together, Beryl’s kindness had brought out the best in him, squelching his egocentric side. In public, they were expected to hide any emotions or be perceived as weak and unfit to rule. He treasured the fact that he could be himself with her when they were by themselves. It made him feel satisfied in his marriage, despite their lack of children.

Queen Beryl had been
generous in her short rule, firm in her decisions, easily the most beautiful merwin in Mervidia, and was showing potential towards becoming the most powerful machi seer the Merwin had known in generations. Iago had little control or understanding of his own ethyrie visions, despite his family’s best teachers. It had only been his wife that had been able to help him begin to interpret his nightly dreams and visions, to pick possible futures from common dreamscape. He’d be lost without her guidance now; her teachings had been so successful because he trusted her to the core of his being. She was the best of them all.

Beryl
was one of the many reasons that the Divine Family, House Lumen, had risen so high, their revelations guiding and saving Mervidia time and time again from famine, disease, and the monsters of the Deeps that threatened to destroy their home. The Merwin had begun as a number of disconnected races living in caves, but the First King, the founder of House Lumen, had brought them out into cleaner waters, divining oncoming danger and thwarting adversities with proper preparation. The Divine Family had allowed them to live above the seafloor, to better themselves overall as a collection of intelligent races with advancements in medicine, defense, and magic. The Merwin had banded together and thrived.

How had she not foreseen this?
Iago thought.
She either knew and chose not to alter her fate… or she hadn’t seen it at all.
“
The machi does not choose the vision, the vision chooses the machi,”
Beryl had once said to him. His wife’s death hit him hard in that moment, and Iago dropped his dagger, allowing it to fall from his hand to the woven kelp rug below. While still holding Beryl close, his grief claimed him, and he screamed his rage at the cold walls around them.
Merwin are sinister by nature, but Beryl was good
, Iago thought, his forehead pressed to his wife’s smooth cheek and his eyes closed.
She would have led us well, just as her father, King Reth, had done. Such a waste.
It didn’t matter now. Beryl was dead
.

“Guards!” Iago yelled,
raising his head and forcing himself to take charge of the situation. The dual, fused-solid uklod doors were already being opened though, the Serfin, elite merwin warriors tasked with protecting the queen, responding to his initial shout. Two of them swam into the room with their long spears raised and their polished shell breastplates glinting in the orihalcyon sconces’ glow. One approached the royal pair and the other, seeing the state of the Queen, went straight to the balcony, unbarred the amalgamated bone doors and threw them open, searching for an absconding perpetrator.

Iago
’s heartache was building in his chest. He had to focus on something else, even if just for a moment, or he feared he’d act rashly. Acting emotional would not help matters. The Queen’s Consort stared hopelessly outside at the shimmering lights of Mervidia, which flashed at him like predators’ eyes hunting in the dark. The city’s houses’ exteriors were decorated with glowing orihalcyon for aesthetic appeal but also to serve as aids, guiding merwin through the massive city. He knew well that the high ranking houses had their crests emblazoned above their intricately-carved, bone entry doors. None of the city’s stalagmite and stone spires rose as high as the Royal Tower out of respect for the Divine Family, but there were a few High Houses that were ambitious enough to build their center spires to just below the palace’s soaring, black stone towers. Regardless of height, the city spanned into the distance as far as the eye could see.

The only evidence of life outside
at this hour though was a school of tiny bioluminescent fish that trailed behind and above a giant manta ray, whose body was covered in a linear design composed of thousands of radiant dots. The ray swam languidly across the balcony’s view.

Iago knew better than to assume that there were no
t predators lying in wait for smaller prey to wander outdoors alone. It was early in the day, and no merwin ventured outside in the designated nighttime hours, as dangerous as the Deeps were. There were too many hungry beasts lurking in the dark and some of those terrors were even other merwin. The monstrous grogstack would eat anything, including their own kind. Children were not permitted outside their respective houses at all, not until they reached adolescence and had been trained to defend themselves with weaponry or magic, or both.

Opening the balcony doors
had helped diffuse the blood, but there was danger in doing so; it would attract sharks first and foremost. The Serfin on the balcony was a strapping male neondra, House Yellowtail by the bright gold color of his tail and large musculature. He stood guard by the veranda door, keeping watch outside, while the female guard rushed out of the room to seek out more help.

Within a matter of heartbeats
, the room was swarmed by more Serfin. Iago knew better than to move; even though he was the Queen’s Consort, they were Beryl’s guards, not his. With her dead, they had failed in their duties. Each of them would be seeking a way to redeem themselves, perhaps condemning her consort on the spot as the assassin and dispatching him. Iago grimaced as one picked up his uklod bone dagger from the lavender kelp rug, below where he held his queen. He looked back at Beryl’s neck. The cut was clean, not a ragged wound as a coral dagger would have left. The sharp edge of his bone dagger, its use meant for their protection, was incriminating evidence that might condemn him.

Iago
protectively held Queen Beryl in his arms. Her lithe torso and head were pressed to his lean-muscled chest, under the wary watch of the Serfin, as they searched the room for evidence. Not finding anything besides the dagger and turning to the only one who had been in the room when the assassination transpired, four guards had him at spear point when Nayan, the Coral Assembly’s jellod representative, entered the room. Nayan’s ballooning jellyfish lower body undulated gently as she swam into the room. Her yellow kelp shawl pressed to her chest as she gracefully propelled forward to the queen’s side.