Talori and Zale left the room and she shot a worried glance over her shoulder at the wardrobe as she went. Brennan emerged from his hiding place and sighed in relief.
He pushed one of the many chests in the room in front of the door and went to lie down on the bed. At least he assumed it was a bed. It was half of a giant clamshell with a sea sponge as a pillow and some sort of blanket made out of kelp. It would have to do.
Brennan used the kelp blanket as padding rather than draping it over his wings in case he needed to roll over. He should be able to sleep fine; if his glamour could hold when he was unconscious, his bubble should when he was asleep.
He certainly needed the rest after the events of the past twenty-four hours. To think, he had still been on land looking forward to fieldwork this time yesterday!
He had gotten far more than he bargained for in that regard. Who needed fieldwork among fish when he could do it among merfolk? Though it was with one mermaid in particular who seemed rather sheltered.
Talori didn't seem to be aware of the pollution problem the ocean was facing, though her brother was. She may sneak out to go look for trash at night but didn't ever get out of the palace aside from that. Zale knew what was up based on the snippet of conversation Brennan overheard earlier.
With the merfolk's help, it might actually be possible to turn around some of the problems plaguing the ocean. He could use his connections with the marine biology community to help them work together given the chance.
Unfortunately, Brennan didn't think he would get that chance. Talori seemed dead set on him not meeting her brother so he wouldn't know she had been sneaking out.
Zale did seem to want to work with the witches about fixing the problem but also seemed to be caught up in the middle of a power struggle right now. That wasn't likely to happen unless he came out on top. A pity.
The ocean needed all the help it could get. If merfolk—some of the creatures most affected by it—got involved, he was sure the problem could be solved. Or at least get closer to it.
A large part of the issue was greedy corporations refusing to manage their waste properly or switch over to biodegradable alternatives. Landfills weren't always effective. So much trash ended up nature and it horrified him.
The ocean was one of the most polluted places on earth. Sea turtles, sea birds, and all sorts of marine life had been negatively affected by it. Marine animals were dying in droves because of all the microplastics in the ocean. Microplastics were even making it into fish that humans were eating!
Brennan was a firm believer that plastic needed to be banned. There were so many alternatives to it out there that were biodegradable and a lot of them weren't even that expensive to make. It was all a matter of laziness for those greedy humans who weren't willing to make the switch on a large scale. The horribly ironic part was that people tried to guilt the wrong audience.
The average human reducing their waste wouldn't make a dent. It was corporations—the true perpetrators—that needed to make the major changes. If they did that, everyone else who bought the products would be forced to follow suit.
He desperately wished things hadn't gotten this bad. He didn't know if it was even possible to fix the environment at this point with how much had already been destroyed.
So many beautiful landscapes no longer existed because humans wanted to tear them down and put something else there. The fae had lost so much forest. After all this time, it still made him angry whenever he thought about it too much.
Brennan tried not to for the most part. He tried to accept the way the world had changed and coexist with the humans that ruined everything. What else was he supposed to do? All of the fae aside from the merfolk had been forced to. They were far enough removed from it that they were able to ignore the problem.
Not completely though if what Zale said was anything to go off of. And as things got worse, they wouldn't be able to continue ignoring it forever.
He sighed. Thinking about this wasn't going to help him sleep. He needed his rest.
Brennan did his best to turn his brain off and get some much-needed sleep but it took him a while. He always got way too fired up when he thought about how much the humans had ruined things.
===
Talori hoped that Brennan didn't mind her leaving him. He knew he had to stay hidden so she doubted he would leave her room but she didn't want him to get bored.
She had enjoyed the most riveting conversations with him so far! A real surface-dweller who had been around as long as he had and traveled all over the landmass he lived on had so many interesting things to say.
Merfolk typically didn't explore much of the ocean. Occasionally, alliances were made with neighboring kingdoms but none of them were at all close to each other. Nobody could swim between them on their own. On the rare occasions delegations traveled from place to place, they had to use alternative means of transportation such as dolphins or sharks.
Talori had never been able to travel very far since she only got out at night but, as far as she was aware, the rest of her kin weren't much different. Most had no reason to leave their kingdom's borders.
She would love to travel and explore more of the ocean but that wouldn't be possible until Zale managed to take down Queen Nerida and her son Merrick. He didn't want to risk her safety as the only family he had left.
He had always been protective of his little sister but that only got worse after their mother was executed and their half-brother was poisoned. She was 114 years younger than him, which really wasn't that big of an age gap. Most siblings had a minimum of 250 years between them.
Perhaps that was why Queen Nerida had been determined to get rid of their mother. She may have been afraid that Nahla was unusually fertile and would produce another prince.