Iisevel reached up to ran his hand over the carved face of the figurehead, captivated by the life the artist had captured in her gleaming eyes. “She’s a mermaid,” he breathed, his gaze travelling down to the delicately-carved tail splayed out over the ship’s prow.
This far from the coast, the ocean around them was not quite the crystal waters of their cove, but even in the murkiness he could still make out the individual scales, carved and painted in iridescent blue.
The hesitance of wonder that had fallen over the companions at first site of the wreck broke with Iisevel’s moment of bravery; the others swam up beside him, reaching up to touch the pale wood.
Honora came closer, coming up behind Iisevel to peer up at the figurehead. She scoffed. “Some mermaid,” she said, with a disdainful flick of her tail. With flowing fins of orange and gold, she was more equipped to telegraph disdain than any other mermaid Iisevel had ever met. He bit back a giggle as she swam past him, running her hand along the side of the ship. She could be as disdainful as she wanted; her curiosity was written plainly across her face.
“It’s impossible,” Lariel murmured, swimming up to the ship’s deck, and grabbing ahold of the railing to pull herself closer. She brushed waves of hair like seaweed and spun gold from her face, and peered up at the ropes stretching out above her head. “Impossible.”
The last of the OC fic requests, this time with my friend @adreamcalledeternity‘s merboy Iisevel! He’s such a gorgeous character and he was so much fun to write, you should check out her art of him here.
As with the other requests, I went a little overboard and it’s far longer than I said it would be, but that’s good right? :D
If you’re interested in commissioning a similar writing piece with your oc(s), shoot me a message!
Iisevel reached up to ran his hand over the carved face of the figurehead, captivated by the life the artist had captured in her gleaming eyes. “She’s a mermaid,” he breathed, his gaze travelling down to the delicately-carved tail splayed out over the ship’s prow.
This far from the coast, the ocean around them was not quite the crystal waters of their cove, but even in the murkiness he could still make out the individual scales, carved and painted in iridescent blue.
The hesitance of wonder that had fallen over the companions at first site of the wreck broke with Iisevel’s moment of bravery; the others swam up beside him, reaching up to touch the pale wood.
Honora came closer, coming up behind Iisevel to peer up at the figurehead. She scoffed. “Some mermaid,” she said, with a disdainful flick of her tail. With flowing fins of orange and gold, she was more equipped to telegraph disdain than any other mermaid Iisevel had ever met. He bit back a giggle as she swam past him, running her hand along the side of the ship. She could be as disdainful as she wanted; her curiosity was written plainly across her face.
“It’s impossible,” Lariel murmured, swimming up to the ship’s deck, and grabbing ahold of the railing to pull herself closer. She brushed waves of hair like seaweed and spun gold from her face, and peered up at the ropes stretching out above her head. “Impossible.”
“Clearly not,” Honora said. She leaned a shoulder against the ship’s side, glancing away from it, as if such sights were commonplace to a mermaid of her travels. “It’s here, after all.”
“Maybe the rocks sheltered it?” Iisevel said, running his hand over the figurehead’s delicately-carved mane. It was more accurate to say she was something like a mermaid. A human’s idea of a mermaid, maybe. Her ears were rounded, her eyes small, her flukes and fins dull and plain compared to the sheer variety of mermaids inhabiting the cove. But the figurehead was all the more charming for it; who had carved it? Had they perhaps glimpsed a mermaid once, out of the corner of a spyglass on a misty morning, just an impression of scales and skin? He couldn’t conceal his smile.
The wreck lay half-hidden, caught in a canyon formed by two great ledges of silvery rock rising towards the ocean’s surface. It had been pure coincidence Iisevel found it. He had been swimming along one of the ledges, admiring the little colorful seastars clustered on the shelves of rock, and running his hand over the rock, when something glimmering caught his eye in the crack between the two rocks.
It was a ship of old; the sort old, old mermaids murmured of to their great-great grandchildren. Hundreds of years before, these sorts of delicate galleys and brigantines, with their sleek bows and proud masts, had sailed by the coasts. They were as beautiful as their creators were dangerous; even mermaids as young as Iiseval and his companions had suffered through warnings of white sails and colorful pennants fluttering in the wind, and the cold iron and gunpowder lurking behind those beautiful facades.
This wasn’t quite as incredible as the great sleek sky ships that migrated across the skies above their cove, but it was here, where he could swim out and touch it.
And it shouldn’t be. Iisevel swam upwards, past Lariel still examining the ship’s decks and along the lines of ropes that stretched from the prow to the masts, until he reached the sails. The enormous squares of canvas billowed in the current, as if moved by some nonexistant wind. In the murky ocean, they looked almost ghostly, transparent, as if the ship had rotted to its timbers long before and this was just a memory.
Iisevel swam in place for a moment, captivated and a little frightened by the thought. There were a great number of strange things in his cove, but none so strange as ghosts. But when he finally reached out to put a hand on the canvas, it felt real to the touch. The fabric was rough under his fingers, not sleek and soft as he might have imagined it.
“This all should have rotted away,” someone said, from behind Iisevel. Iisevel started, his tail swishing in alarm before he realized it was only Lariel. She swam past him, and around the waterlogged canvas. “Humans don’t know how to make things that last underwater. Wrecks like these… the ropes and cloth should have been gone in months. The paint, too.”
“Have you ever seen a wreck this old?” Honora called, from the deck beneath them. Iisevel looked down, and realized just how tall the mast they were resting aainst was; Honora was only a blur of orange and gold beneath them, on the pale expanse of the deck. He looped an arm around the mast, and peered off into the sea. How would it have felt to be up here when the ship sailed the world above, feeling the wind and sea spray on your face? It must have felt almost like flying. A familiar little ache filled his heart.
“... of course not,” Lariel’s voice drifted up from below. Iisevel blinked. She was already halfway down the mast towards Honora. He swam down after her, suddenly not wanting to be alone on the ship, however fascinating it was.
“Than maybe they don’t all rot away,” Honora said. She was examining a door of some sort. “What can you know, if you’ve never seen one yourself?”
“Most human things rot away down here, except things that are very new,” Lariel said, folding her arms. “If this ship is so old, it should be nothing more than barnacle-encrusted wood. That’s just how things work.”
“She’s right,” Iisevel said, glancing around him with a new realization. “There’s… there’s no sea life here at all! Where is it?” Even the little fish that liked to hide in the cracks and crannies of the rock shelves around them and the sea stars he had been looking at earlier hadn’t made their way onto the ship.
Lariel followed his gaze uneasily. “There’s something strange about it,” she said, her voice sharpening with a note of fear. “We should go back, and tell the others. We can’t deal with this ourselves.”
“What are you talking about? You said it yourself, there’s nothing here. It’s abandoned,” Honora said, pulling at the metal handle of the cabin again. The door rattled on its hinges, but held fast; it must be locked. “You’re just spooking yourself.”
Lariel hunched her shoulders. “Nothing being around means more danger, usually. Use your head, Honora.”
“I am. And my head says this is way too good of a find to go running off and telling everyone else. At least, right away,” she said with a grin, exposing sharp little teeth. “Right, Iisevel?”
Iisevel glanced between them, his fingers worrying away at one of the seastar clips adorning his hair. “I… want to take a look inside, at least,” he said, after a moment of thought. Maybe Lariel was right, and it was dangerous, but… he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t at least look. This might be his only chance to get a look at a human ship like this.
Lariel looked unconvinced.
“Really, I think it will be fine,” he said, glancing around the deck. There was nothing logical too it, it was just a feeling. There was something about the mermaid figurehead, and the little carved decorations of shells and winged figures over the cabin doorway that made him feel… at ease. At home, almost.
But he gave Lariel his most convincing smile, and she relented.
“Fine. Fine. I trust your judgment,” she said. “But I don’t think we can get that doorway open.”
Honora gave it another rattle. The sound of the metal against wood put IIsevel’s teeth on edge. “Stop, we can find another way in,” he said. “It’s rude to rattle it about like that.”
She blinked, and gave him an arch look. “I don’t think any of the former owners would mind,” she said. “They probably drowned about three hundred years ago. Do you believe in ghosts?” Her tone was fond, teasing, but Iisevel didn’t answer. He just smiled and shrugged, brushing past her to swim over the ship’s side again.
His friends followed; he could see the flashes of green and orange out of the corner of his eyes. He was focused on a crack he had seen along the ship’s side earlier, but Honora’s call made him stop, and look up.
“Look at this!” She was hovering by the side of the boat, her tail turning little eddies in the water as she ran a hand over the wood. The side of the boat was covered in large, silver writing.
“It’s human script,” Lariel said, swimming up beside her. “One kind, at least.”
Honora eyed it. “What does it say?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Iisevel?”
He pushed himself off the side of the ship and swam up to join them. The words were as big as his forearm, and he had to swim a little back to see the whole word. His grasp on human writing was far from perfect, but he had spent so much time with human books and newspapers scavenged from the beaches and any other manner of things he found that he had picked up a bit of knowledge. “It says… um… The… Co… Corm… Cormorant,” he said, sounding the word out.
“The Cormorant?” Honora ran a hand over the writing, leaning in to examine it. “What does it mean?”
“That’s what they call those big black birds, I think,” Iisevel said, swimming back down in the direction he had been heading. “It must be the ship’s name.”
From the first glimpse of the ship Iisevel had gotten, the reason it rested at the bottom of the ocean was obvious. A large hole had been torn in its bottom, from the upper stern to the hull beneath. The wound gaped at the bottom of the rock canyon, shadowed by fronds of seaweed growing along the stone.
The flicker of their movement, and the shadow of the canyon almost gave the illusion of something lurking in the hole; as he approached, Iisevel froze once or twice, his tail and fins going very still, just in case a predator lunged from the hole.
But it was nothing more dangerous than seaweed. He edged closer slower, until he was peering into the hole.
Broken boxes littered the bottom of the hull. Honora reached for the nearest one; her fingers came away covered in some sort of soft, pale goop, and she frowned and shook it away from her fingers.
Iisevel had eyes only for the glimmer he saw above. There was a hole torn in the ceiling of the hold, and through it something was shining.
Before either of his friends could say anything, Iisevel had slipped through hole and up towards the glimmer.
The hole at the top of the hold was smaller. The broken edges of boards caught on his hair and scraped his scales, but he pressed his fins to his body and managed to wriggle through.
He found himself in a room. It was large, twice the length of his body across, with plenty of room to swim around. And it was full of treasures.
The ground was coated in thick blue material. He swished his tail over it, and then reached down to run his fingers over it. It felt like fur- a rug, he thought it was called. The brilliant blue was cut with designs of gold, and it was far softer than many of the human fabrics he had felt before.
He could have spent an hour just examining the rug, but the rest of the room called to him. At the far end, large windows opened up to the sea; he could see the stone of the canyon beyond. He swam up to them, pressing his face to the glass for a moment; this room must be at the very back of the ship.
There wasn’t much to see out them, so he turned back to the room. The corners of the low ceiling were decorated with more silver carvings, showing birds flying across the sky. Stretched across the ceiling was a… a painting. He pushed off the floor with his tail, to examine its details. He had never seen one so close before. It showed a man, lounging on the rocks, looking with a haunting, haggard gaze out to the sea. The barest dabs of paint indicated a storm brewing on the horizon, little bursts of lightning showing through the clouds. The dark tail curled over the rocks indicated this, too, was suppose to portray a mermaid. He laughed- this one was farther off, but the painting was still beautiful. There was something in the lovingly-painted features of the man that made his chest ache.
A glimmer from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he tore himself away from the painting reluctantly, to find its source. A large frame stood to one side of the room; the metal was ornate and beautiful, worked into the shape of roses and thorns, but it stood empty. Below it, glimmering shards of mirror caught the dim light shining through the windows and the murky sea, and threw them across the room in little points of radiance.
It was the first sign Iisevel had seen, other than the gash ripped in the ship’s side, that anything terrible had befallen the ship. Age had not seemed to touch its sails, but violence clearly had. He swam down to the mirror, hovering above the shards, suddenly feeling uneasy.
A bed rested against the far side of the room. The blankets billowing in the water obscured the frame, but Iisevel couldn’t miss the dark reddish stains on the fabric. He froze, staring, wondering, afraid to swim closer and peer beyond the blankets.
“Wow,” a voice from the other side of the room made Iisevel shiver in his scales. But it was only Lariel, slipping through the hole. She glanced around the room, her dark eyes glimmering in the fragments of light. “This is incredible.”
Honora followed after her, having a harder time getting through with her broad shoulders. But finally she was through, and joined Lariel. She looked almost as impressed for a moment, but she noticed Iisevel’s expression.
“What’s wrong, Iise?” she asked, swimming closer. “You look sharkbit.” In a swish of her tail, she was at his shoulder. Her tail curled protectively around his for a moment.
Her bulk made his fear seem silly. But, still… He gestured at the side of the room with the bed. “Do you think there’s a…”
Honora’s eyes widened, showing more of the black beyond her pupils as she saw the blood. “A corpse? A human corpse?”
“It would be bones by now, if anything,” Lariel murmured.
“I wouldn’t count on that here,” Honora said, swimming forward. Iisevel wanted to reach out and grab her, to stop her, but she was too fast. Before he could do anything, she was pulling the sheets away from the bed.
There was nothing there. It was as empty as the rest of the ship.
The three mermaids contemplated the bed for a moment.
“What happened here?” Lariel murmured at last. “Where did everyone go?”
“Maybe they just rotted away. As you said,” Honora muttered, glancing around the cabin uneasily.
“No… no, I don’t think they did,” Iisevel said, swimming back over to the shards of mirror. “I mean… look at the rest of the ship. It just doesn’t… feel right. The rest of it is so… new, still, despite the time.” He ran his fingers over the mirror’s frame, and then spotted a little box resting on the little dresser beside it.
It was plain, compared to the rest of the room, roughly made, as if constructed by someone who didn’t quite know how to do it. He picked it up anyway, weighing it in his hands. Something rattled around the inside.
He opened it, and gasped.
Resting on a tangle of gold bracelets and chains was a large, beautiful pearl on a silver chain. He picked it up gently. It was half the size of one of his seashell ornaments, and seemed to glow slightly, as if it had a light of his own.
He swam over to the shards of mirror. He was vaguely aware of Honora and Lariel talking behind him, but he had eyes only for the pearl. What sort of human would carry around such a treasure? The silver clasp that held the pearl to the chain was beautiful, but somewhat poorly worked, just like the box itself. Perhaps it had been a gift to whoever had slept in this room- the captain, it must have been the captain. Had he had a beau who sat on the beach each night, gazing up at the stars and counting the days until his captain returning? Or perhaps the captain had been a she, and her beau was a sea-witch, who had enchanted the pearl to glow and keep her captain safe.
Iisevel looped the necklace around his neck, and gazed down at his reflection in the shards of mirror. The gentle glow of the pearl painted his features in soft light, turning his fluffy lavender hair silver, and bringing out the gleam of his dark skin. His gem-like eyes and his flashing fins picked up the light and reflected it back, twice as bright, turning him into an ethereal figure in the fragments of mirror.
His fingers fumbled, and then clasped the necklace around his neck.
Suddenly, the room hummed with life around him. He could hear the murmur of voices, and the whisper of wind high above.
Iisevel glanced down, and started back from the mirror fragments in surprise. In the mirror, a figure stood behind him, outlined in so much soft light he could make out none of the features aside from the jaunty cut of a long coat, and long hair that did not move in the water.
He reached his hand up to touch the pearl, and it was warm beneath his hands. He should have felt afraid, terrified. But he… didn’t. He felt safe, somehow.
The moment he unclasped the necklace, the voices faded, and when he looked up around him it was only Honora and Lariel, still too caught up in some debate to have noticed. The sea around him was cold, suddenly, as if he had slipped from warm waters into frigid ones. He shivered.
The pearl still gleamed, warm and bright in his hands. Tears slipped from the corners of his eyes, falling as pearls to the shattered glass on the floor below.
That’s tough! I’m a big fan of nougat or anything with cherry/raspberry filling! My favorite sweet is probably a prinsesstarta
7 - do you prefer poems or love letters?
Love letters!! Either one is very sweet but I think love letters feel more sincere because you don’t need to worry about the flow and line breaks and such. Plus, getting letters in the mail is always so great! I need to get stationary so I have an excuse to send more letters and to use my wav envelope seals :D
8 - favorite fanfic trope?
Hhhhhh theres so many good ones!!! I’m always a huge sucker for mutual pining. It’s so tender and wholesome 🥺 Single parent aus are also a weakness of mine because it combines domestic tropes with found family. I am a huge sucker for anything affectionate and tender uwu
