The Mermaid's Egg

8 -- The Metamorphosis

"I can't..." Kiandra gasped, looking like he was suffocating "...breathe!"

Meara knelt there beside Kiandra as her eyes watched as the blue veins seemed to crisscross all over the young man's body. His skin looked to be inflamed, swelling with enema. And from his chest, she could hear the faint gasping sound as his lungs seemed constricted and tight.

The blue veins reached his face as the young human's eyes seemed to shimmer with blue hues around the iris. In fact, the blue coloring was slowly devouring the brown coloring of his original eye color, turning it blue in color...like a Merrow!

A new instinct seemed to erupt inside Kiandra's brain, begging him to get to the water as quickly as possible. He raised his hand and looked in horror as his skin looked like it was burning down to the bone! It was all swollen and inflamed.

'What is happening to me!?' he felt weak, close to death.

It took a moment for Meara to accept the remote possibility that Kiandra might be transforming into a Merrow. She cried out, grabbing the young man and lifting him into her arms, unsure of what to do.

"I can't breathe!" he croaked again, looking faint.

"Hang in there, Kiandra! Hang in there for just a little longer" she begged of him as she took him over to the pool and glanced down at him. His body seemed to be shimmering as if all of the Merrow Lights inside his body were about to be released all at once. If that were to happen, it would prove to be fatal!

"Take a deep breath, now!" she told him, and without any further warning, she dropped him into the deep saltwater pool, praying that this was the correct solution.

For Kiandra, he watched as Meara released him all of a sudden. His falling backwards towards the deep water was like falling through time and spaces as his body began to release all of its Merrow Lights. He watched as his lifeforce seemed to swirl all around him as before he could even scream, his body hit the surface of the water, and broke through the plane of human existence.

Plunging deep into the crystal-clear water, the image of Meara was distorted, just as the water sealed him inside its reality. It was at that moment that he wished that he had taken a deeper breath.

The escaping Merrow Lights could no longer just fade away, so they returned back inside his body to stay. He floated there underwater, trapped between time and reality as soon time decided to speed up and a new pain tore through his delicate mortal body.

Unwisely, he screamed out in agony as the Merrow Lights seemed to spread out across his skin. The blue veins caused his flesh to change as silvery scales began to grow all over his chest and face, whereas the blue scales grew on his dorsal side, covering his back and legs and most of his face.

He tightly gripped his body with his webbed hands, the growing claw-like fingernails threatening to pierce his flesh. With a painful inhalation, he felt the water flowing into his chest cavity, and out through a set of five gill slits on the either side of his chest.

With an audible snap, his legs were forced together as the tailbone shifted everything forward and zipped his legs into a new appendage with a fish-like skeletal system. His old human bones dissolved inside the fleshly muscular tuber, and the expended calcium relocated to the backbone, and flexible cartilage forming the spines.

His feet were reduced to two large dorsal fins with his ten carpels changing into a set of flexible rays that supported the fin for powerful swimming. They, together merged with the metacarpals to form the classical 'mermaid-tail'

The bones that made up his ankle were repurposed into a pair of bony hilt-fins. Whereas, the acetabulum cartilage that was in his pelvis, emerged with specialized glands to form a pair of anal fins that protected the tightly compressed vent that housed his reproductive organ and the single opening that was designed to expel waste.