Hydrus Harvester
The prophecy reads of a prince wrapped up in seaweed...
Five princes lived in a peaceful kingdom that had not known war in all the years of their father’s rule. The eldest spent his time in lessons, studying everything the king thought necessary to take the throne someday. The second son fenced with the fourth, and the middle son was rarely seen except on the back of a horse.
The youngest loved the sea. The fairest in complexion and slightest in build of all the brothers, the youngest prince of the kingdom neither fenced nor rode horses. He preferred the tranquility of the ocean. He took his lessons on the beach. He read royal decrees while sunbathing on the rocks above the shoreline. He always smelled of saltwater.
When a foreign nation’s army appeared over the horizon one early spring morning, the youngest prince was the first to spot them. Having grown up in a country at peace, he thought little of it, and returned to the palace at dusk, as was his custom. Once there, the guards ushered him up to the throne room. His brothers and father were already there, grim expressions on their faces.
“We are at war,” said his eldest brother.
The youngest prince stood stunned. “What? Why?”
His father’s eyebrows pulled together in annoyance. “It doesn’t matter.” His voice was gruff. “They have given us twenty-four hours to comply with their demands. We have already decided not to, and will use the remaining eighteen hours to plan our attack.”
The youngest prince balled his smooth hands into fists. “But war! Doesn’t that mean… Doesn’t that mean fighting? Death? I’ve read about it; it would bring nothing but terror to our people!”
His father glared. “What do you know?” he said. His voice was low and gravely, strained like his youngest son had never heard it. “You idle your time away by the sea.” His hands tightened on the armrests of his throne. His knuckles whitened and dark blue veins surfaced. “You’ve never studied the arts of war! You can’t even join your brothers!”
The youngest prince’s throat seemed suddenly too tight. He pressed his hands to his chest as he looked around the throne room at his siblings. The two eldest avoided his gaze. The middle prince stood listlessly swinging a riding crop in one hand. The fourth prince looked angry, but his brother didn’t know whether that anger was for him, because he wasn’t going to war with the rest, or for the war in general, or for their father’s expectations.
He decided that he had to convince his father. How could he stay at home, sit on the shore, while his brothers put their lives on the line? He steadied himself and steeled his nerve.
“Let me accompany you!” he begged.
“Out of the question,” his father said. “I had the guards bring you here to keep you safe from enemy kidnapping. Beyond that, I have no use for you.”
“Papa, please!” He was adamant. “How can I let you all risk everything while I stay here and wait?”
The king looked over his head and motioned to the guards. “Bring him to his rooms and ensure he doesn’t leave.”
That night, the youngest prince sat on the edge of his bed and planned his escape. He couldn’t stand to think that his brothers would go into battle alone. His peaceful life in his father’s kingdom… it was already ruined. Already in the past. Even if they won this war, there would be more. Their country must have something that others wanted, and a successful defense of their nation wouldn’t delay future attacks. It would only convince others that they had something worth stealing.
But what could he do? His father was right. He hadn’t studied the art of war enough. He’d never even picked up a foil, let alone a sword or a gun. He didn’t know how to ride a horse. All he knew how to do was swim. Spot dolphins. Sunbathe. Crack coconuts. Hold his breath underwater for…
It struck him suddenly, like a tidal wave from behind. He leapt to his feet and ran to the full length windows in his sitting room. Throwing them open, he stepped out onto his balcony. His room faced the ocean. Moonlight hit the water and highlighted whitecaps. Deep under the surface of the sea lived his only chance… not just at fighting with his brothers, but at saving them. With her help, he could save his kingdom.
Hopping onto another balcony was just like jumping along the rocks by the water. He let himself through his big brother’s bedroom, empty and unguarded, and then snuck out through the back door of the castle. From there it took him the better part of an hour to run the distance from the palace to the beach. As he darted down the shore, he stripped off his shoes and regal regalia until all he had on were his boxers and a tank top.
His bare feet scraped the rocks as he ran. Just as he’d done on so many other occasions, but rarely in the middle of the night, he hurled himself off the edge of the rocky outcropping and dove into the ocean.
His body slid expertly into the water, making no noise and barely a ripple. The cold sank into his bones, seemed to bite at his joints. He felt like he’d fallen while skating and his face had hit the ice. He kept swimming, deeper into the ocean. The light around him faded. The noise of the surface grew quieter and quieter. More creatures started swimming around him; fish darted out of his way and seaweed caught at his ankles.
“So you’ve come back for a visit, boy?”
Once he heard her voice, the pressure on his lungs seemed to lift. He slowed, twisting around in the water to look for her form.
“But you seem desperate. Perhaps you have something to ask of me.”
She sounded much closer this time, and after a moment she emerged from the darkness before him. A mermaid. Pale blue skin, green scales, horns protruding through thick black hair that seemed never to stop moving around her. She smiled at him, though he knew not to trust her completely. She reached out a hand and touched his shoulder, and he immediately let out a gasp of air.
A simple touch let him breathe underwater, as though someone had put a barrier between the ocean and his mouth and nose. He took a few deep breaths before speaking.
“When I met you all those years ago, you spared my life, even though the legends say you drag children to their deaths here,” he said. “You helped me back to the surface when I thought I would drown.”
Her smile widened. Her thin, dark eyebrows curled more grotesquely upwards. “Yessss,” she said, drawing out the letter as though prompting him to continue.
“And you told me,” he went on, pressing his hands to his chest, “you told me that if ever I needed something, I could ask for your blessing.”
“Yes, boy,” she said, her tone like honey but her lips like venom. “My blessing is so powerful that you might think of it as a wish. Anything you want, you may have… should your offerings be to my liking.”
“My offerings?” He wasn’t surprised. He knew she was a sea witch, that any wish came with a price. At least he would know what he was giving her beforehand.
“Well,” she said slowly. “First tell me what it is you want, and then we’ll discuss what I would require.”
The prince didn’t hesitate. With pictures of his brothers and father, memories of townspeople and days spent on the beach, strong in his heart, he said, “I’d ask your blessing to end this war before it even begins. A foreign nation plans to invade. I want to quell their approach, or more, their intent! I want to protect my people… my family!”
The sea witch’s eyes seemed to glow with mirth. “Is that what you want?”
“It is, but I ask you first if such a blessing is within your power?”
For a moment he thought he saw her mouth twitch. Clearly his question irked her.
“Of course, boy.” She put on her sweetest face, but he wasn’t fooled. “Do not underestimate me. Stopping a war between humans is anything but hard.”
“And what do you want in return?”
She looked him over. Her eyes fell from his blond hair to his fair face. They passed down his shoulders, his chest, his stomach. She seemed to appraise every inch of him.
“You love the sea, don’t you, boy?” she mused.
She sounded as though she were talking to herself; he wasn’t sure if he should answer. “Yes,” he said after a moment.
“Then why don’t you trade in his vessel…” She paused and ran a hand, colder than the water around them, as cold as ice, and covered in slime, down his chest. “…for one of my minions’?”
He could hardly believe his ears. “You mean you’ll turn me into a sea creature?”
Her eyes met his and he shuddered. “I thought you loved the sea?” she purred.
Without looking, he knew he was hideous. He could feel it even in the number of limbs he had. He could feel it when he tried to curl his toes and instead heard the sound of suckers popping off rocks. He didn’t need his reflection. Lifting his hands—thank goodness, though they only held four fingers each, at least he still had hands!—he could see how much he’d changed. They were sickly pale, a fleshy, sandy white that resembled nothing human.
When he tried to sit up, he felt extra weight holding him down. Seaweeds stuck to his torso. Fat tendrils of it itched his skin and curled around his arms. He was entangled in the stuff. One at a time, he peeled the seaweeds off, dropping the drooping green plants back into the sea below. Now totally bare, the sight of his own skin made him nauseous. His body was long and narrow, like an eel’s, but he had tentacles like a squid's that clung stubbornly to the rocks beneath him. He let out a groan and covered his face with his hands.
Instantly he wished he hadn’t. His fingers flew across his face. No nose! He had no nose! His mouth was long and flat, and his eyes were narrow. He grabbed the sides of his head. No ears! But how could he hear the pounding of the sea? His ears must be elsewhere—or else mere holes on his head.
He’d never been obsessed with his looks before, but a change to this extent… he couldn’t bear it! It was too much. The prince folded himself in half and let his grief overtake him. He cried and moaned and screamed over the sound of the pounding waves for what must have been hours. But he could not tell where his tears ended and the ocean spray began. His whole body was damp. Eventually, he lost consciousness.
It was the sound of human voices that roused him next. He recognized the country accents of his own townspeople, and the topic at hand told him the speakers were palace guards.
“I thought for sure Prince Godney’d be out here,” said a gruff voice.
Faintly the prince heard the sound of armor clinking.
“Maybe he’s found a new place to relax,” came another voice, this one younger. “I do hope he comes home soon, though.”
“The king’ll have our heads if anything happened to him,” said the first voice. He sounded nervous, but the prince believed it was out of worry for him rather than his own head.
“Strange, though,” the second mused. “The prince goes missing, and a few hours later, the declaration of war against us gets rescinded with full apologies.”
“Crazy, isn’t it? Who ever heard of a country retracting their threats of war?”
“Must’ve had a change of heart.”
“Well,” said the gruff voice, “to be honest I wonder if the prince had anything to do with it.” There was more clinking of armor and the voices seemed to move off a little.
The second voice laughed. “You thought that too, eh? I mean, out of the whole royal family, who else would think to try peace talks?”
From the outcropping of rock that hid him from the two guards, Prince Godney thought he might faint again. His gamble had worked. The sea witch had taken everything from him—his looks, his body, his family, as surely he couldn’t return to the palace like this—but she had fulfilled her promise. For everything he’d given up, he had saved his people. He had saved his family, and indeed, the entire kingdom!
And she had left him with one thing. He turned his gaze back towards the sea. Its waters glittered in the midday sun. Waves lapped the rocks below him. Strangely enough, he found that he could see even at a distance small fish swimming just beneath the surface. Now, he thought, in such a strange sea creature’s body, he could probably breathe freely underwater. Should he ever get up the nerve to really look for them, he was sure that he’d find gills somewhere on him. But curiously, he could also breathe the air around him. Further, his body didn’t seem to be drying out. Perhaps his situation was better than he’d thought.
He used his tentacles to scale the rocks and made his way to the sands. He wouldn’t go into these waters. He didn’t want to meet that sea witch—they had each made good on their deal, and he hoped never to see her again. That would suit him best.
He crawled—or whatever he ought to call moving on dry land with tentacles—down the beach until the waves washed over his lower body with every roll up the shore. After a few hours, the sun began its slow descent, and the water darkened. All that time he spent thinking, thinking about what he would do with his life from that point onward. About how he could get to another sea. How he could travel looking the way he did. By the time the sun had set completely, the only thing that he had decided definitely was that he needed a robe. If he hid himself in a robe, he could get by a little more easily. It would take a closer inspection to alert people to his strange figure.
Or so he thought, until he reached up and realized that like the sea witch herself, he had horns. Five inches long, they grew parallel to his head and then curled upwards, like storybook depictions of devil horns. With a groan, he realized that he couldn’t hide these with a hood.
The air around him felt colder, and the water around his tentacles warmer, than before. Even though he could survive on land, it occurred to him that he was probably more suited to water after all. His body adjusted better to the sea than to the night air. And another discovery: while he’d thought briefly about what he might be able to eat as a fishman, or whatever he might be, he hadn’t actually been hungry up until now. But now his stomach, wherever it was, demanded attention.
He craved cookies.
This struck him as even more absurd than any of his other realizations. He’d thought he’d want fish, but the idea of eating sea creatures actually repulsed him. It sounded like cannibalism to him now. Human foods, real foods like meats and pastas and vegetables, didn’t sound appetizing either. Somehow he knew that those weren’t meant for a body like his. But then why was he craving cookies, of all things?
What possible use could a fish have for carbohydrates?
“Hey, excuse me!”
The voice nearly scared him to death. Prince Godney felt all of his tentacles jerk up. He whirled his head around to find the source of the voice that spoke to him in the dead of night, and found that he had to look up.
Hovering a good six feet above him was a fluorescent blue figure that, if he didn’t know better, he would swear was a ghost. A ghost with an extraordinarily large, toothy grin. And a tattered ascot.
“Y-Yes?” he said.
“Sorry to bother you, but I’m lost. I’m looking for the Patagonian Ice Fields.”
The prince hesitated. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. Those are quite south of here. I’d imagine a several days’ journey for most. Are you…?”
“Oh!” The ghost descended a few feet and presented the prince with his hand—three fingers, Prince Godney noted. “My name’s Karukhi. A pleasure to meet you!”
“The pleasure is mine…” He hesitated. Would this weird creature recognize his name? Well, it didn’t matter even if he did. No one would believe he’d been a prince less than a day ago. “I’m Godney.”
“Great!” His grin seemed too large for his face, and he bobbed his head in a repetitive nod. As he did so, the prince realized two things.
One, that his new acquaintance had a skull tattoo on the roof of his head, and two, that he had no eyes.
“Do you… live around here?” Prince Godney wondered if his new form allowed him to see mystical creatures, for that was what both of them must be.
“Oh, no,” said the ghost, but then he stopped. “Or, err, well… I don’t think I do, anyway. You wouldn’t happen to know any giant, ocean-side manors, would you?”
“Other than the palace to the west of here, no.” He attempted a laugh. “Though I’d like to.”
“Oh?” Karukhi seemed to wriggle in space. “Well how about this? You help me find my way home again, and I’ll introduce you to the human who lets me live with him! I’m sure he’ll take you in, too.”
Prince Godney’s eyes widened. Luck must have been on his side—a home by the sea? And from the sounds of it, a different sea. Living with this strange ghostly creature didn’t bother him. In fact, it made him feel better about the whole thing. Karukhi had not balked at his visage, or even mentioned it.
“This human,” Prince Godney started, rubbing at his abnormally soft and round jaw line. “How does he feel about cookies?”
Karukhi beamed. “Loves ‘em!”
The prince smiled. He pushed himself up so that he could walk more easily. “Well then, let’s get looking!”
Profile By: 
Slavic
