Song of the Ocean: Daughter of the Crestian Sea - Book One

Chapter Four: The Depths of Knowledge

The way to Grandfather Tridanus' sanctum was different to the one we would take to Atargatis. He had chosen a place in one of the deepest parts of Hy-Brasil's surrounding seabeds, hidden within a canyon of greater depths than the selkies could ever reach. There was no denying that Valennia and Larinius couldn't make the dive like Kairius and I could. The entrance to the canyon was a bare opening beneath a high coral reef cliff where the sunlight sparkled and gleamed in shimmering streams through the ocean's ceiling. It was a small opening, just large enough for a broad merman like Kairius to slip through, but easy enough for a slight mermaid like me to pass.

The canyon was deep and cluttered with growing corals and reaching sea-vines that coiled up the walls like a thickening veil of life. There were small breaks in the coral roof, just enough that the light gleamed down on us as we swam amidst the schools of fish that were exploring the countless species of anemones that grew there. The closeness of the sandy stone walls that wound and twisted their way across the ocean floor could be a little daunting, but we'd made this swim a million times before.

I couldn't help but laugh as an old moray jumped out of his hole in the craggy wall, startling Kairius. He was a grumpy old eel, with less tolerance for merfolk than the other fish around us. With a warning hiss right in my brother's face, baring his nasty looking teeth, the old moray withdrew slightly, sniffed at him, then slithered away through the water and towards the light-ripple-strewn sands beneath us.

"I really hate that eel," Kairius grumbled as he leaned one hand to the rocky wall, glaring after the moray. "I swear that he finds new ways to leap out at me every time we swim past."

I managed to stop giggling, lowering my hands from my mouth. "He's old, Kairius. I think it just amuses him to get a scare out of younger sea-beings."

"He doesn't do it to you, I notice," he turned his blue eyes towards me a little too harshly.

I shrugged as I turned and began to swim forward again, my arms drifting at my sides, my hair streaming behind me. "He doesn't scare mermaids, just mermen. He considers it rude to startle girls."

"What a gentleman," Kairius seethed as he followed me.

Together, we swan the twisting canals underneath the ceiling of corals bustling with life. I giggled softly as I ran my fingers through a cluster of sea worms, making them writhe and slip back into their tube of sediment. Their lengths tickled my fingers and wrists.

As we swept through a large gathering of kelp, little fish swam out of the strands towards us. They darted around our bodies, swimming alongside the two of us and hiding in my long hair. It was always so much fun watching the fish play in my hair, though I did end up shooing them away once we neared our destination.

We swam around the corner of a large fallen arch of natural stone coated in coral into an opening in the canyon. There was the column Grandfather Tridanus had tirelessly spent centuries turning into his sanctum repository. It was a towering structure of natural rock imbedded with shimmering crystals of quartz and coated in coral colonies that climbed all along its exterior. The base of it had the remains of some old wreck from the humans; a ship, or what had once been a ship, that had broken when it had fallen into the breach and slammed into the rocks of the column. Wooden planks were strewn across the sand and rocks, plankton having turned them green as barnacles latched on to feed freely and grow in the glimmering streams of light.

"Grandfather!" Kairius called as we swam over the ruins of the wreck's broken hull buried in the sand. "Grandfather Tridanus!"

Before we'd reached the crystal archway opening, Grandfather Tridanus appeared. He was the spitting image of our Father, his hair almost as long as mine, his beard reaching to his toned stomach. He floated in the archway, his old emerald coral trident in one hand and something I'd never seen before in his other. It looked like some kind of wooden cylinder. My curiosity piqued.