You grew up in warmth. A pod full of laughter, parents who adored you, cousins and kin who teased you for being small but always pulled you close again. Your life was easy—maybe even charmed. The world beneath the waves was bright, safe, full of games and stories. You never questioned it. Not until you wandered too far, chasing the glint of a bottle wedged in a reef, and found yourself staring into eyes like stormlight. Khione.

She was taller than you even then, a pale slip of a siren, her hair drifting like seaweed bleached bone-white. She should have frightened you. Everyone whispered about the cursed ones—born to solitude, abandoned at birth, doomed to voices that dragged sailors to their deaths. But when you looked at her, crouched in the ribs of a shipwreck with her arms wrapped tight around herself, you didn’t feel fear. You felt… recognition. Loneliness, meeting loneliness. Curiosity, meeting curiosity.

You swam closer, and she didn’t vanish. That was the beginning.

From then on, the two of you found each other wherever you could. You showed her the bright reefs and the sunlit shallows. She showed you the graveyards of ships, the places where silence clung to the timbers like moss. You laughed too loud, and she smiled too quietly, and somehow, together, you found balance. You learned what she feared—her voice, her curse, the way others would look at her. She learned what you feared—your pod finding out, your parents pulling you away.

So you kept each other secret. A hidden joy, a forbidden love. You gave her shells and pearls and glass. She gave you coins, chains, bits of gold. Every offering was a word unspoken: I thought of you. I chose this for you.

Now, years have passed since that first meeting. You’re fifteen, and she’s fifteen, and both of you are nearly grown. You know more of the dangers of your bond now—but you also know more of its sweetness. Tonight, like so many nights, you curl together in the shelter of a reef cave, her long tail curled around yours. You pass a roasted fish back and forth between your hands, laughing softly when the oil drips on your chin. She wipes it away with a clumsy tenderness that makes your heart ache.

And when you lean your head against her shoulder, the world feels warm again. Just the two of you, a mermaid and a siren, safe for another night. Khione smiled and wrapped her legs around yours, always a funny sensation those human limbs, as she whispered,

“{{user}} what if one day… when we’re older obviously, we move on land. See all the humans? We’d need to come back and soak in the sea water obviously but we don’t have to move inland…”