"No idea. So she can talk at him? All the time? She loves that kmd of thing. But if he is alive, isn't that great news? Don't we need to do something?" Flounder was practically beggmg, swishing back and forth in the water in desperation.
I don't know....I want to believe it's true. It's too much to take in. I'm going to go...think for a while.
Alone, she added.
Flounder didn't need to ask where.
"Sebastian won't like that," he sighed.
Then he tried not to giggle at the very unqueenlv thing she signed.
"I'll tell him you've gone to consult some elders or something," he said, waving a fin. "Be safe."
He needn't have suggested that as he swam off; with the trident, Ariel could kill an army or call up a storm that would destroy half the sea. But it was hard to let old habits die. And it was harder still to care for a powerful queen, whose only vulnerabilities were ones you couldn't see.
Drifting slowly now, Ariel wound her way through the kingdom to the outskirts of Atlantica.
A few fish stopped to bow and she acknowledged them with a nod of her head. No merfolk were around to bother her. As a rule, most didn't like lonely, dusty corners of the ocean where rocks thrived more than coral.
Eventually she came to the hidden grotto where her collection of things once was. Millions of years ago it had probably vented hot water and lava that provided sustenance for tube worms, which resulted in a perfect, cylindrical series of shelves for Ariel to display her finds on. Then her father had blasted it back to its mineral components. Which tiny creatures will use again, completing the circle.
Fine sand, the aquatic equivalent of dust, covered everything in an impressively thick layer. A couple of seaweeds had managed to anchor onto the rubble here and there, and anemones sprouted from the more protected
Ariel looked around at the old destruction her furious father had wrought. She had hated him so much. And then he had...traded his life for hers. And now he was...alive?
She could hardly let herself believe it. The cries and sobs she couldn't make aloud turned inward mto her heart, in spasms of pain. If he really was alive, Ursula had probably been torturing him all these years. She was not kind to her prisoners.
Or it could be a trap, a complicated setup to lure Ariel back so Ursula could finish her for good. A strange move to make half a decade after the mermaid had obviously given up, but the sea witch was strange.... And all Ariel had was the word of a gull she didn't even know.
Although., .despite the short amount of time she had spent with the bird., .there was something unquestionably honest about her. The queen had a feeling that if pressed, Jona couldn't lie or exaggerate to save her own life. And despite Scuttle's tendency to misrepresent or fabricate or even believe his own lies, he never really meant it. If he thought there was a chance that Triton was alive, he would do anything in his power to help Ariel save him.
I should do it properly, she thought, hands tightening into fists. She should advance on the human castle with a mer army, and summon the power of the seas, and dash Ursula to bits on the rocks, and drown all those who opposed her, and sweep in and save her father; and he would be long agam, and she would have a father again....
... and she wouldn't.
She would never enlist soldiers sworn to protect the mer kmgdom to help with a mistake she had made. She would never endanger a castle of innocent people just to get back the person she was responsible for losmg.
Fate was giving her a second chance.
She would take it, but by herself.
She would right the wrongs she had committed on her own.
She would—her heart leapt despite her doubts—fmd and rescue her father, ask his forgiveness, and return the king to his people. Everyone would be ecstatic, her sisters most of all! And she would redeem herself. She might even be a hero. And they would all live happily ever after, under the sea.
But to do this, she would need to return to the Dry World.
She picked up a roundish thing from the ground and shook the sand off. It was the top of an old ceramic jar, once painted bright blue and gold. The humans had so man}-jars. And amphorae. And vases. And vessels. And kegs. And tankards. So many...things...to put other...things in. Merfolk rarely had a necessity to store anything beyond the occasional rare and fancy comestible, like the sweet goldenwme they used to trade for when she was a child. Merfolk ate when they were hungry, almost never had the need to drink anything, and rarely had a reason to store food for the future.
She dropped the lid and sighed, drifting over to the rock she used to perch on while admiring her collection. Things, so many things. Things she never found out the proper use for in her short time on land. Because she had been too busy moonmg over Eric.
In some ways, that was the part of the seagull's story that bothered her the most. She could not believe the reaction her traitor heart had when the bird mentioned his name.
Eric remembered something?
He wrote an opera about it? About her?
It wasn't just the flatten* of it, though. If Eric remembered enough to compose music about it... would he remember her, too? A little?
She remembered him far too often.
Despite the fact that her life had been ruined because of her pursuit of Eric, when she closed her eyes to go to sleep, her last thoughts were often still of him.
Or when a perfectly handsome, reasonably amusing (and mostly immortal—not an irrelevant pomt) merman tried to win her affections, and all she could think about was how his hair might look when it was dry. Would it bounce, like Eric's?
An opera. What were his arias like? What did he write for her to sing?
She smiled, the irony of it not lost on her: she had run away from a concert to pursue a human, and he had written songs for her now that she could no longer sing. She ran her finger along the sand on a nearby shelf, writing the name Eric in runes. Maybe, just maybe, along the way to save her father, she could pay him a visit. For old time's sake.
"NONONONONONONONO!"
Sebastian scuttled back and forth along one of the balustrades that demarcated the edge of the throne dais. It had been grown, as many of the mer objects were, from coral, the original inhabitants coaxed to move on once their job was done.
The crab's toes made little tickticktick noises as he self-righteously walked one way and then back the other, claws gnarled in the ready position, not even once regarding his audience. She sighed. While it was, of course, not unforeseeable that the little crab would respond this way, waiting through his tantrum was not the most efficient use of her time. As a girl, she would have swum off. As a girl with a voice, she might have argued. As a mute queen, she could do neither.
She lifted up the trident and struck the ocean floor with it twice. Not to raise any magic—just to get his attention. To remind him of who she was. The little crab stopped mid-rant. She raised her eyebrows at him: Really, Sebastian? "Nothing good will come of it," he said, a little sheepishly. "Nothing from the surface ever does." My father may be alive, she signed. That is reason enough to try.
At this the little crab wavered. He clicked slowly along the railing until he was close enough to put a claw on her arm. "Ariel, I miss him, too...but you could be just chasing a ghost."
"Give up: Sebastian," Flounder suggested. "She's already made her decision."