Golden

Prologue: About Mermaids

My name is Isla. I'm a mermaid. No, not like the little mermaid, I'm not some silly cartoon. Now that I think of it, you can go ahead and also rule out the greek mythology mermaids as well. Or I'm sure there they were called siren's....whatever. I'm not a myth, or a cartoon princess. What I am is absolutely, one hundred percent real. The thing about me, is that although I'm nothing like the cartoon or the myths and urban legends you hear, I do sort of...tie into both of them. I do have a fish tail...in fact mine is described as the once-in-a-thousand-years tail, as mine is gold and currently no other mermaid possesses the color. I do swim around in the ocean, it's quite fun really. I do wear a shell bra...come on, they're stylish and I'd rather wear that than flash every merman you see. There's one more thing....I can turn into a human any time I want. In fact, we pretty much switch back and forth between ocean and land all the time.

Let me stop here for a second. You might be wondering "If you change into humans and mermaids, how come we don't see you?" Let me answer this for you. We're in a different country. Actually it's the Land of Eventyr, and then that's separated into Kingdoms. Ours is the most diverse, the Kingdom of Kalpana. It's a magical country most normal humans can't get to, you can only really travel there by portal. A portal only found if you can find a Warlock to take you there. In this kingdom, everything exists. Ghosts, goblins, ghouls. Fairies, brownies, sprites. Nymphs, demigods, and even elves. Our kingdom is pretty complex. So complex, we have a little system for organizing the dealings between each species. It's a court composed of a hundred different representatives for all things in existence. Even humans, though as few as there are in Kalpana. That's a whole different conversation....back to my species.

We tie into the whole "swim's in the ocean; half woman, half fish" thing...but we don't kill men. That's not something....my specific clan enjoy's. There are many different clans and types of merfolk. In fact as many species and breeds of fish there are, there is equally a counterpart mer-version. What I mean is the tail. We can vary with each different type of fish. Angelfish, cuttlefish, jellyfish, octopus. Any you can imagine. Each type has its own clan. I belong to the angelfish clan. The Ange Clan. That's actually the clan our government representative comes from. So we're what you would call a main clan. In our Mermaid community, down in the water where we live, we have seven main clans. The rest of the clans are...lesser to us.

The first family is the Blanc family. They're the first important to us and to everyone else. We're second all through. The Blanc family is a Great White mermaid. They're....intimidating. They like to drag men under water and kill them...well the women do. The men, not so much. The men in the family are incredibly obsessed with brute strength, so most of them look like bodybuilders. Too much muscle, in my taste. The women are....I don't want to say ugly, that's cruel. Let's just say they aren't as beautiful as the mermaids in fables. In the above ground world, they're involved mainly in the king's services; most of the family is enlisted into the military, in fact one of the clan members is Lieutenant General.

The second family is our family, the Ange. As I mentioned before, we're angelfish.The myth surrounding our family is that the sea has turned our hearts cold. That we don't care for anyone or anything but our own selves. This is very wrong. We just....have a cold exterior. Inside we're warm and kind to others, and we care so much our coldness keeps it in check. If we weren't cold? Our emotions of kindness and love would get in the way big time. The Ange family is full of extremely beautiful people. I'm not exaggerating at all. It's true. For the other families, they usually fall for the women of my clan VERY easily. Which is why I tend to avoid outside confrontations. The Ange are....pureblood. That means, none of our angelfish blood has mixed with anyone. NEVER. So when the other families fall for someone of our stature....we either send that woman to the shore for other use, or we exile them. Exiling only happens when they also fall for a non Angelfish. I know, I know, you're like "wouldn't that be incestuous?" Well. I'll explain that later. The Ange family is all politics. We've got most of our people in the government office positions. There's our representative for the mermaids, an advisor to the king, one of the King's concubine(if you think THAT isn't politics you're dead wrong, she manages his audience requests and ensures the safety of the merfolk), and an advisor to the first prince.