Whoa…
Luckily, I had a moment before water magic class to take in everything Vyns had said. And he’d said a lot!
You. Give. Me. Hope.
What was a girl to do with that? Sure, I wanted to help people, but the fervent light in Vyns’ eyes when he’d said it, as if I was his whole world… that was too much. And that had only been the beginning.
Your kindness, to someone who doesn’t deserve it…
Kindness shouldn’t be so rare. This world… Fuck! How could simple kindness be such a treasure?
That determination, that drive, that tenacity is who you are at your core…
I guess I understood now what Vyns had meant when he’d called me powerful. Because… Iwasall of those things: determined, driven, tenacious. But did that really make me stand out so much here? Apparently so.
You make me want to live…
I’d seen the man’s soul in those words. I’d seen his hidden desire to just… die and leave all this pain behind. What sort of messed up world did that to people? And yet he wanted to live… for me. Talk about putting a lot on a woman’s shoulders.
You’ve never once tried to hurt me, you’ve only ever been good to me…
Again, this shouldn’t be such a big deal. And the suggestion that his parentshadhurt him… wow!
Maybe together, we could change things…
God, how I wanted to change things, and I’d truly love some help, but I still couldn’t bring myself to trust Vyns. That whole speech had beenwayover the top. Had he just been putting on a show? If so, he was the most amazing actor I’d ever met because… a part of me believed every word he’d said.
I just didn’t know what to make of it all. I needed time to process it. So I stowed it all away and focused on the class ahead of me. Hopefully if I distracted myself for a while, my subconscious would make sense of it all and I’d know what to do about Vyns.
And as it turned out, water magic class was quite the distraction.
Since water was an affinity — something people had innately not something that could be learned — the class was full of others like me: nymphs and undines, even a few tritons. I quickly got a sense for each.
Tritons — also known as merfolk — had pale blue skin with iridescent scales over most of their body except their faces. Their hair spanned shades from black to dark purples and blues, even some lighter blues. Most of the ladies wore wrap dresses and even the guys wore lose wrap skirts. The reason for that became clear when they shed their garments to dive into the large pool, their bottom halves becoming fish-like tails! Also, when they shifted,their scales were a little more pronounced and even more colorful.
So beautiful!
This world had honest to goodness mermaids! And mermen. As the reality of that sunk in, I couldn’t help but smile. There was beauty here, if you could find it, mixed in with all the crappy politics and oppression.
The few tritons in class seemed to be the servants of undines, who seemed a bit more stuck up and superior, like elves. With their tall ears and ivory skin, I assumed undines shared some distant heritage with elves. Yet their appearance otherwise was quite different. Their hair was universally dark, from jet black to plum purple and navy blue. They were a bit more modest and sedate, remaining in silks to swim. Yet, they too changed shape, if not as overtly as tritons. Their skin became dark scales, over everything, including their faces and scalps, their hair vanishing. Small fins sprouted from arms and back and legs. Their hands and feet became webbed and elongated into delicate fins, which they used to glide through the water with great speed and agility.
Nymphs were a little harder to classify, except to say they were the remainder of the class who weren’t tritons or undines. Their looks were as varied as humans, though they universally had upward pointed ears and vibrant eyes. They didn’t shift at all to swim and preferred the fresh-water pool to the salt water one where the tritons and undines frolicked.
What I learned was: nymphs weren’t so much beingsofwater as beingsaroundwater. Tritons and undines lived in the oceans most of their lives, breathing water and swimming among the fish and other wildlife. Nymphs livednearwater, caretakers of pools and lakes, ponds and rivers.
But all three of our species shared an affinity toward water and could manipulate water to varying degrees.
I was relieved to see a few of the other nymphs couldn’t do much more than me, controlling the flow of water or — as I found I could do by the end of the class — lifting and shaping small globs of water.
The main difference was… they’d been doing this their whole lives and that seemed to be the limit of their abilities, while I was still learning and hoped to be able to do more eventually.
Since one of the undines was in Saldrea’s crew — a nasty and arrogant woman named Di Merial Neyalim — the rumor quickly spread that I was an outcast who’d lived in the human realm and had no clue what I was doing. Oddly that seemed to work in my favor when it came to making friends, well… makingafriend. One nymph seemed fascinated about the human realm and stuck close to me, asking me all sorts of questions. Her name was Sa Leizili Tala, a curious and kind young woman a few years younger than me, assumingageandyearsmeant roughly the same thing here as they did back home.
And the professor was a nymph too, a kind older woman named Sa Rheoran Essia. She taught and treated everyone equally, which infuriated a few of the undines. Not that the undines paid attention to her teachings, most ignored her.
But I drank in her instruction like… well… water, specifically someone who’d been parched in the desert for ages. Also, my new computer was completely water safe, which was cool, so I took a ton of notes.
After class I made plans to meet up with Tala on the weekend at the beach. Then Professor Rheoran pulled me aside.
