SOULLESS ° BLAISE ZABINI

now.8

ASHERAH WAS MOST CERTAINLY AND almost definitely not afraid of what lurked beneath the waters of the black lake. Of course, she did not fear the sort of things we humans fear - drowning, monsters that can pull us under to drown - but there were things there that frightened her, sent shivers down her spine.

Those things were her father and her uncle.

She had grown up inquisitive and uninhibited, and her mother had always endorsed her little adventures, laughing when she leashed the giant squid and tugged it home for tea, smiling when she captured all the tiny silver fish and held them for ransom. Her father had nothing to say, nothing to offer but a slight frown, but it didn't matter, because Asherah had her mother, and her mother believed in her and thought she was worth something and cared what she had to say.

And then her mother died, and there was no one to believe in her anymore.

Asherah wound her lithe body through the stone archway that marked the boundary of her father's waters. By right, they should be hers as well, but her name had been crossed from the ownership. She was of age, and she resided in it, yet she had no piece of it for herself. Somehow her father always managed to bend the rules.

Her uncle was slung over a stone chair when she swam cautiously inside, her body flowing more fluidly than water itself. Trying her hardest not to disturb the currents around her anymore than she already had, she dived towards the opposite doorway -

"Asherah."

She cringed, bracing herself.

Her father floated before her, his dark hair and eyes shadowed by the filtered light. "What are you doing here?"

"I've just come to collect, uh, something," she said quickly, trying to edge past him. "I know you prefer it if I'm only home in the evenings - and I'm really sorry - but a friend wanted to borrow my slates and I completely forgot this morning, and I will truly make it up to you, I swear, you won't even notice me tomorrow, I'll be so quiet and so careful, the currents will barely move - oh!" She cried out as his hand gripped her hair.

"Is that so?" he leered, and suddenly she knew why he was being so irrational. At least, more irrational than he already was. She wriggled and squirmed, tears burning her eyes as tiny hairs popped from her scalp, but she couldn't look away from the puffiness of his gills. He was drunk on gillywine, and she had stumbled into the thick of it.

"Okay, I won't grab them then, I'll just be going..." she gasped.

"You speak like a human," her father said, tilting his head to the side, his eyes lighting. "You spend too much time watching them up there."

"Well, I'm not allowed here in the day," she said, bitterly. "What else can I do with my time?" Fury seemed to hiss from her father's form, and Asherah swore the water around her shied away from him. This was a man with no soul, she thought. Not Blaise. Blaise is so much better than this.

"Sometimes I wonder if you want to be one of them," her father mused. "After all, you don't have anyone here. But who up there would want you? The human world is no better, sweetling."

Asherah bared her teeth, thinking of Blaise, of his dark skin and dark eyes, but there was no darkness to him inside. Only that weeping black aura that flinched from her gaze and surrounded him like a cloak, blinding him, almost.

"Let me go."

"No." Her father dragged her outside, and sifted through the silt, pulling on her hair as he bent. Asherah couldn't help but cry out, her mouth a channel of pain and hopelessness, and also loss. Loss of her mother, her childhood, her friends, and loss of her hope. What had made her think she could help Blaise? How was she, an incompetent little mermaid, barely classed as human on the wizards' papers, supposed to remove and dementor and heal a broken boy all by herself? What answers could be found in her slates of legends and mer tales? All she could remember was the tale that told of the merfolk's origins, of -

And wait! Her mind gripped the idea with slick fingers, begging all the entities it knew that it would not vanish from her sight. The merfolk had no souls. They didn't need them. They had been made from kelp and stone and water, and were not bound by the confines of a soul, as humans were. There were no rules to their existence. They were fantastical and strange and feral and wild and beautiful and soulless. And they didn't need a soul to make them good or kind or brilliant, because Asherah didn't need to be told to be good by some supernatural force inside her. Goodness was something she absorbed from the world around her. She had made her own sort of soul from her mother's laughter and her antics and the giant squid's slimy embrace. And that was why she could look Blaise in the eye and chase away the darkness, because her 'soul' lived on her skin, and dementors only understood so much.

Blaise didn't need a soul. He just needed to not be wholly darkness. He needed balance, and to see goodness once the dark was gone. He could make his own goodness. Unlike her father, who had absorbed only the evil onto his skin, and wore it now, as he pulled a sharp stone from the sea bed and sawed through her long dark hair.

"No!"

Her severed locks drifted to the bed of the lake, forlorn and already so apart from her. Dumbstruck, she reached a hand up to her short, jagged, chin length hair.

It was not so much that Asherah cared for her hair. No. It was its significance that she had lost, and her father knew it too. He had formed her into even more of an outcast, a mermaid who didn't conform to the expectations and standards of her own world. He had drawn her as a human-lover, a yearner and a dreamer. And that was not okay here.

Asherah fled.

Away away away away away.

But also towards something.

Blaise.

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hello, I know I haven't updated this in forEVER and I'm sorry, but I finally have and here you are? I hope this isn't too terrible haha.

thanks for reading :)