He had no idea how this had happened but he was underwater and he wasn't even drowning. Sixteen-year-old Cormac Egan swam up to the surface only to find he could not stay up in the air for more than five minutes. Cormac would have been quick to despair if he had been the kind of teenager who was prone to despairing even if he should have. Instead, he tried to contemplate his new world. Thus, sitting on the ocean floor, the ruddy skinned redhead with mismatched eyes, the left blue and the right green that looked small and triangular due to close-fitting lids, the lean and hungry appearance of Cassius, a large, hooked nose and the square jaw a medic's boy should have, thought of everything that happened. In all honesty, he could not make sense of it. It was 1960, these kinds of things just didn't happen. A freak storm in a coastal town in Munster, Ireland was perfectly normal but someone suddenly being able to breathe underwater and not be outside of water for more than five minutes was completely out of the ordinary. Had any such things have happened in his paternal grandfather's native Bahrain? In the legends of the Arabs, to whom his grandfather had belonged ethnically, were there any such tales of this happening? Alas, he knew not.
Sighing, Cormac got up and began to explore his new world. Seaweed, kelp, sea life, there was plenty of it but nothing for him to really talk to that would talk back. It was that moment that nearly caused him to actually begin to despair when he heard laughing… Joyous laughing. His inquisitiveness aroused Cormac swam in the direction of the joyous laughing to discover merrows!
There were five of them and four of them were quite like Cormac had expected. Thy were beautiful human women from the waist up and fish-like from the waist down, with their lower extremities covered in greenish-tinted scales. Upon their heads were fondly groomed green hair and between their fingers, Cormac could see slight webbing, white and delicate resembling the skin between egg and shell. Upon their heads they wore caps of red salmon skin. These were indeed the beings that Cormac had heard told of.
Looking to the fifth, Cormac found that she looked quite different. She was his age, with scales upon her tail, which moved and looked like that of a cetacean despite having scales, her hair was not green, there was no webbing between her fingers and she possessed no red cap of salmon skin. She was slender and light-skinned with large reddish-brown eyes, red hair that was long and straight, an honest face and a cute mouth. Her tail was glistering, golden and chiefly scarlet in colour with a translucent fin while her attire consisted of a seashell headband, a pair of seashells upon her breasts and a pair of bracelets, the same colour as the headband and seashells, but the colour was one Cormac struggled to know the name of. To Cormac this merrow was a Helena of the Deep, though to anyone else, she would probably just be fairly attractive.
Why did there Helena of the Deep not look like the other merrow? Was there some sort of caste system? He knew not, all that he did know was that the other four were allowing the Helen of the Deep to frolic with them, so clearly if there was a caste system, it may have been a thing of the past.
Swimming forward with a smile upon his face, Cormac watched as the five merrow all ceased their frolicking. The Helena of the Deep stared with wide eyes, while one of the four merely said: "Why it is another Child of the Storm! How lovely, Melusine! You are not alone!"
Child of the Storm? Not alone? Then this merrow, Melusine by appellation, was not a merrow by birth? She was like him? But why was she a merrow instead of simply being like him?