Mermay Whump
Surprise @deerslayer14 ! It was me...
That isn't how I usually write my whump since there's more gore this time, (yes, shocking) but I was inspired by your post so I ended up writing something for it. A few people have already read this when I posted it anonymously (thank you for not judging me)
. . . .
This can’t be happening.
The merman’s mind reeled as agony ripped through his nailed wrists. Iron nails punched clean through the delicate webbing of both hands, pinning him to the rough wooden post like a trophy. Every tiny twitch ground the metal against bone and cartilage.
His head was yanked cruelly backward, scalp burning where the heavy dumbbell bit into his long hair. It dragged him down without mercy, forcing his throat taut and his spine into a vicious arch. He couldn’t even lower his head. Couldn’t hide. Could only stare helplessly up at the face of his abuser while his body screamed.
Mother Sea, make it stop...
Glowing blood poured steadily from the puncture wounds. He felt it running hot down his arms, dripping off his elbows, streaking down the pillar in shining rivulets. More of it bubbled up his throat and leaked from the corner of his mouth, warm and metallic. His own sacred blood glowing mockingly in the dark water.
They’ll see it from afar. Everyone will see how I was broken.
His gills fluttered frantically along his cheek, opening and closing in desperate, useless gasps. Air burned them. His powerful tail hung limp in the sea, only managing weak, pathetic twitches now and then. No strength left. No fight.
A heavy boot slammed down onto his impaled hands, grinding the nails deeper. White-hot pain exploded behind his eyes.
Stop— please—
“So it’s true,” the hunter’s voice sneered from above. “Your kind really bleed liquid light.”
No. Don’t look. Don’t—
The merman’s thoughts fractured as another wave of agony tore through him. Fresh glowing blood surged around the boot sole. He tried to bite back the broken whimper that escaped his lips, but it came out anyway — small, humiliated, pathetic.
“Not so cocky now, are you?” The boot twisted slowly, crushing the mangled webbing. “All that royal bullshit about being untouchable… about dragging men screaming into the deep. Big scary prince of the abyss.” He let out a harsh laugh. “Look at you now. Absolutely fucking pathetic."
The merman’s body shuddered violently. The glow dripped from his chin, before bleeding into the water below.
He'd taken a sailor once. Dragged him down slow, so slow the man had time to scream in bubbles that rose like little pearls toward a sun he'd never see. The merman had laughed around his gills, laughed, while the light in the human's eyes went out long before his heart stopped.
Now his own light was leaving. Drop by glowing drop. And the hunter was watching.
"Please," he whispered.
The word tasted like ash. Like every soft, loud thing he'd ever broken for sport. He thought of his mother's court—how she'd warned him the surface would make corpses of their kind. That air was just another word for ending. He'd sneered. He'd been so fucking bored.
"Please," he said again, because the abyss wasn't answering, because the deep had never felt so far, because his father's voice wasn't rising from the black to strike this mortal down for daring—
"That's the whole point, Your Highness." The hunter leaned in close, close enough that the merman could see himself in the man's eyes—pale, shattered, dimming. "You can't do shit."
Another twist of the boot. Another scream, smaller this time, worn down to nothing.
His head lolled back, hanging off the pier's edge, and through the blur he saw not stars but depths—phosphorescent gardens where he'd played as a spawnling, pressing his small body into anemones that pulsed light back at him. Safe. Known. The memory hurt worse than the impalement, worse than the air burning his gills, because he'd been happy there. Truly happy. In a way his cruelty had never come close to touching.
His tail gave one last twitch in the water, barely disturbing the surface. The glow beneath him faded to embers, then to nothing, and the last thing he felt was the cold settling in—not trench-cold, not clean, but human cold, surface cold, the endless dry dark that came after light.
Somewhere Below, something vast turned in its sleep.
It did not wake.
I might write a Part 2 for this?
Edit: Nope. I don't want to ruin the idea.
