Enchantment

Keen was awake early the morning that the prophecy of the Oracle came out, but he was of no importance to the Sea Nation, so he didn’t hear about it until much later.

Instead, he just got up early and decided that he better work on some breakfast for his sister, Zuna. Sure, he was only eighteen years old, but he was the one who was raising his little sister. His parents had just up and left them during the night a long time ago, and he was left alone to protect his sister. He tried not to think of his parents too often; as far as he was concerned, Zuna was like a child to him. The only problem with that was that he didn’t have much to support them with…

As it stood in the Mer-Folk culture, it was normally the woman who was supposed to go out and find the food to support the family. Since Keen was left with his younger sister and not a young bachelor Merman on his own, their culture deemed them a ‘family’ and it was frowned upon that Keen was the one going out to get the food. As the “head of the house” he was supposed to have married a proper Mermaid so that they could have a family and keep the traditional values; otherwise his life was just improper.

Still, he didn’t want that. He was only eighteen and he wasn’t quite sure how he felt about settling down quite yet – hell, he wasn’t even sure if he would ever be ready. No Mermaid seemed worth it to him when he felt like such an outsider from his own people.

He swam into Zuna’s room and found her cuddled into his friend, Karida – who sometimes stayed the night in order to help him out. Even that had made criticisms from the neighbors worse as he was sometimes living with a girl that he wasn’t married to. No one seemed to take into consideration that she was homosexual, but it just got worse.

“Karida,” he called gently, “I’m going to go out and find some food!”

She sleepily nodded her head and continued rocking Zuna, who was frequented by a recurring nightmare of her parents leaving and needed attention while he wasn’t around. He took his leave of the cave and went out into the blue waters, staying close to the ground as it was safest there.

There were plenty of Mermaids that noticed him there too, swishing their tails of different sparkly colors. They were drawn in by his light blue tail, but then they noticed his hair and eyes – quite the different look from the normal blonde and green-eyed Mer-Folk – and most that were familiar with the concentrated city recognized him as shied away.

He sighed a little as he quickly swam to the surface for a breath of fresh air. He was facing the shore of the beach that he lived nearby and he smiled to himself. He just had some plans of testing out his walking legs up there. He had never walked before, obviously, but he certainly wanted to learn. He wondered if he would feel as much of an outsider on land as in water, but he still couldn’t wait to try it out.

Keen remembered his task though and made his way down to the fish stands. There were multiple merchants who liked to sell things and he seemed to go to a different one every day; they all sold the same fish and he didn’t like getting too familiar with people – it often got in trouble. Often, he saw some fishing lines from above and he saw the merchants who would snip them. Fish was their venue, they all knew, and he, like all the rest, despised the Mortals who tried to take away what was rightfully theirs.

Keen didn’t have much say in the way things were run since he was generally a nobody in society, so he just kept to himself and did what he had to. He picked up some seafood from a younger-looking Mermaid who seemed to be beautifully entitled – so much so that it made him blush to keep his eyes on her for more than a few seconds. He hated those weird encounters, but he had them quite often since Mermaids looked to him with minuscule ideas of the potential for marriage. He still wasn’t sure what he wanted yet, so he tried to avoid things as much as he could.

It was while he was out on the town like this that he heard of the prophecy from the Oracle. The news wasn’t given directly to him, but it started from a distance and then spread like a wildfire around to the others; he was bound to hear about it at some point…

Kaula foretold the death of the Kings. But in the love of Blue and Red the world will be saved.
He hated prophecies more than anything… They just seemed to be more of a riddle than letting things happen – “going with the flow” so to speak… And what did it mean by the “red” and the “blue”?! He couldn’t be quite sure – and he sure as hell didn’t want to find out!