ONWARD IMAGINES

Strange as a Dream, Real as the Sea (part four) | Barley Lightfoot

a longer chapter again to make up for the shorter one a few days ago. i hope you guys like this series <3

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The strangest part of being on land was that it wasn't at all what you pictured. Of course, you couldn't get up and explore anything without a pair of legs, so that limited your exploring to just the bathroom, until Ian and Barley went out and bought an inflatable kiddie pool which was moved and refilled in different areas of the house. Not that you wanted to go on an adventure necessarily. You were paralyzed by the fear of what was happening back home and how you would inevitably have to face all of it soon. 

Still, your days were filled with laying back in your pool of water, either in the sun or in the cool, air conditioned air of the Lightfoot home. You and Barley went through books and books (and seriously, he had a lot about the history of merfolk) but you found nothing about the merpeople of the Trenches.

"They don't exist," you said, closing another book that went over the establishment of your kingdom. You wondered how Barley got it. Your heart ached to remember it so full and beautiful and alive. "They don't exist in any of your books." 

"They probably only exist in yours," Barley admitted. "I don't think there's ever been a story where an elf or a goblin or a pixie met a merman or mermaid from the Trenches. The only merpeople to ever travel to the surface and meet us have been you. And everyone gets this information from stories, so... whatever information we need is probably in the books at home."

"We don't have books at home," you said, slinking further into the water. "We have our stories scratched on our marble walls of the palace, where all of the crowns of the ancient sea kings and queens remain." You covered your face with your hands, balled up in closed fists that shook. "But I don't remember a thing written on them."

"Hey, don't be hard on yourself," he said. 

You dropped your hands, splashing in the water as you sat up quickly. "I am the princess of that kingdom and I don't know anything about it! I wasted all of my time sitting on the shore dreaming that I could go away and now... and now look at the trouble we're in! I don't know anything about who I'm about to have to go up against. I'm such a screw-up."

"No you are not!" Barley's eyebrows pulled together and he scoffed with anger. "Don't call yourself a screw-up. Whatever lies ahead of you is lying ahead of us. You aren't fighting this on your own. I may not be your guard, but I am your best friend. Which is further proof that spending time on shore didn't make you a screw-up! If you didn't do that, we would've never met. And then you wouldn't have me on your side." He smiled, and you felt yourself relax. 

"I guess you're right," you said, folding your hands together and resting them on top of your fin. You bit your lip and sighed, the pressure heavy on your shoulders---

"I'm not going to let anything happen to you," Barley said, and he sounded so sincere and believable that you smiled too. "Look, we have a few more books. Let's get through them and see what we can find." 

"Okay," you said. You scooted to the edge of the pool and leaned over it as Barley opened up a book. It told at first the location where the author had met the mermaid that told him the story, and then it described the story and included his own illustrations of it.

The story told of a mermaid that met a sailor upon the shore. They swapped their own stories from their homes and fell in love. You tried not to picture you and Barley as the mermaid and the sailor, but it was difficult when he was reading the story to you, his shoulder pressed against yours. When the mermaid wanted to spend the remainder of her life with him, she stole a book of enchantments from a sea witch and placed a spell on herself that could allow her to have legs.