“I’ve caught one,” the fisherman screams, grinning at his hook stuck in the girl’s cheek. “I caught myself a mermaid!”

Her hair is green, algae curled around it. The fisherman’s grip is greed, is lust, when he rips at it to get her closer. Her mouth glints like a pearl and oh, he could sell her after he’s – well, once he’s done with that beauty of hers. “Aren’t you a pretty one,” he licks his lips, “and all mine. I caught you, so you’re mine.”

All at once, her song ends. No sound comes out of her mouth that stays open, teeth tiny and many, sharp in the slick night. She tugs the hook out of her cheek. The fisherman watches, his heart burning from how fast it runs against his flesh, as her wound closes up and a bit of blood drips from her little mouth.

“Yours,” the mermaid says. The sea echoes her voice, an accent he can’t define, oh who cares, she’s just – just prey – and her pupils snap into slits. “Yours?”

The ocean ripples.

The waves tremble.

The wind whispers, smiles, then stills to not disturb the song that rises once more.
“No,” whisper a thousand voices, whisper a million teeth, whispers ten thousands of stares in the water. “We caught you. You are ours.”

One day, the wise woman of the village called all the children to her house.

She sat with them in a circle, and they ate and sang together until the moon was high in the sky. The children had never been allowed to stay up as late. They were excited. Their tongues prickled with the spicy soup that the wise woman had given them.

When the fire was just a low glimmer of ash and wood anymore, the woman lifted her hand.

The children that had been laughing and chattering fell quiet.

The woman said: “Show me the palm of your hand, and tell me only the truth. Swear on it.”

“I swear,” said the children. Some whispered it, some barely got out the words, but all of them were shivering because they felt something old and large reach for their hearts. They didn’t know if it was the soup, the woman’s power, the moon, or just their own awe before the world and the night that made them speak truthfully.

The wise woman lowered her hand. She looked at one after the other. Her eyes were warm as the fire, dark as the moon’s shawl above.

“Speak what you wish to raise in your life.”

Everyone was silent for a long time.

The woman turned her head towards the first boy.

“Family,” the boy mumbled. Then, a bit louder, clutching his empty soup bowl, he looked at everyone with honey golden eyes, wide with kindness. “Mine and others.”

The old woman said nothing. Only her head moved from then on, and it pointed to the next, the next, one after the other.

And the children spoke.

“Health.”

“Knowledge.”

“Happiness.”

“Imagination.”

“Adventure.”

“Fun.”

“Strength.”

“Animals.”

While the children said their words, the old woman drank them in. She let then settle into her memory, anchored them where they were safe.

One day, when the children were of age, she would ask them again.

Some would have changed. If they had lost their path, she would remind them of their old words, of the dreams their hearts had forgotten about. That there was a way forward, in whatever direction it may run. If they had found another way for themselves, she would gift them their once-adored word still, so that they had something to always return to and would know that once feeling something did not mean that you wouldn’t ever feel something else.

And if the children still chose the same way, then it would be their time to raise something.

So the children spoke their words. Only two were left now and before the woman could turn her head, they spoke at the same time.

“Hell.”

“Myself.”

The other children shivered. For a long time, nothing moved. Even the fire seemed frozen in the moment. Finally, the woman tilted her head.

“What do you mean?” she asked the two. She hadn’t asked anyone else.

The first child stood up, hands curled into fists, eyes burning. “If anyone gets in my way, I’ll bring all of the world down on them!”

“I’m scared,” whispered one of the children.

The woman looked at the other child, whose eyes were calm as the dark sky above. “And you?”

“Myself,” said the child once more. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

The first child laughed. “That’s stupid. Just yourself? What can you do with that! When I’m older, the world won’t stand a chance against me.”

Before the second child could speak, the old woman stirred. She reached out for the child’s fingers and took them into her own. The other children watched, wary and confused.

“Before you raise any of your dreams,” said the old woman, a smile on her fire-warmed lips, “I want all of you to remember this.” And when the child who stood glared at her, she took its hand as well until it sat and put its head against her shoulder.

“Raise yourself, children, and you will stand against anything. Raise yourself, and the whole world will rise with you. Hell and heaven and every fear will fall if you hold yourself upright and look to the stars. And if you cannot rise anymore, stand. Stand. The horizon has been born for thousands of years, every morning and every night. Admire its strength, when you are weak, but do not forget:

You are the dawn. You are the dusk.

The world will follow. Raise all that you are, before anything else.”

A story is a story is just a story.

True. And more false than anything.

Our fairy tales and legends, our myths and harbingers and endings, all the ink-whispering hope against our eyes and ears, they cannot be broken into anything less than proud, wild stories.

And, more than anything, a story is never ‘just’ this or ‘just’ that.

It is everything, and it allows us to become.

Don’t be scared that you’ll have nothing left. You know, child, the universe used to have nothing and it disliked that so very much that it decided to exist. And to make sure that nothing would ever be nothing again, it said:

Above all, there will always be something left.

Don’t fear the winter, little one, her mother whispers, because spring will come back to us one day.

But the girl’s eyes are wide and black as the night above, and her muscles thrum with heat under the fingers that push open the door.

I’m not afraid, she tells her mother, teeth white and tongue wet with crimson hunger. There is no season, she speaks against the howling wind, without something to hunt for.

When she turned sixteen, the princess wished for a needle. “I want to sew a bit,” she wrote on a note and put it into the basket that went down her tower for food and books. “Just so I have something to do.”

When she received it, tucked under berries and cheese, the princess took the needle between two fingers. She went down the tower and to the door where the dragon lay.

“Beast,” the princess said.

The dragon said nothing. The chain around its neck was golden and terrible. Its wings were folded. It lay still and looked at the princess.

She lifted her hand. The needle gleamed silver in the dragon fire under the beast’s belly. “I can unleash you.”

For a while, the dragon only looked. It looked and looked, and then it opened its jaws. “And what do you want in return?”

The princess smiled. She went over to the dragon and pushed the needle into the lock sealing its neck.

“What do you want?” the dragon asked again. But the princess said nothing.

While she worked, the beast slowly shifted to its feet, and the princess did not flinch when hot breath flooded over the scars on her naked shoulder blades. She did not tremble when the dragon nudged her where her wings used to be, neither when it sniffed where horns used to adore her bald head, nor when it nosed at the burns that torches had left on her four arms.

The chain fell. A shudder went through the dragon’s body. It took a deep breath, its throat bulged, and magic erupted from its freed lungs. The door on the bottom of the tower burnt to ashes.

The princess smiled.

“Well,” the dragon said when they stood outside and looked at the sky. “Now you must tell me.”

And still, the princess smiled, a slow and horrifying little smile that stuck to her tiny mouth. The dragon stumbled away from her, terror shooting through his veins. He was up in the sky within seconds, but the princess only looked at him.

When she spoke, it echoed across the clearing deep in the forest, and the dragon in the sky shuddered from her soft voice that sang gently:

“I want to ask them why they did not lock me up a bit better.”

There are countless stories about lovers being separated by magic, but what if instead of falling apart, they grew too close?

Imagine.

A wizard that traveled the lands, selling their art to those who need it for just enough to make a living with it. Their power without comparison. Nobody knew how they did it, what their secret it. It was too much strength for one, and the rumours spoke of dark contracts or monsters inside.

Only when their apprentice, a young one that was still learning and endlessly curious in their character, asked the one question: “Master, how are you so strong?” Then, the wizard said:

“It is a story that you have heard a million times. My magic came through lost love and the power that it gave.”

“Oh,” said the apprentice, shocked how their admired master could do such a thing. “You sacrificed someone to gain something.”

“Not quite.” And the wizard began to spread out a story of a human so beloved that nothing they shared felt close enough. No breath could be taken too near, no hand held for enough hours to feel two pulses as one. The apprentice sat still and with a wildly beating heart when the wizard stood and bared their back, shoulders to waist, and cruel eldritch lines slither across skin that was filled with old scars.

“We wished to be closer than anyone.”

The wizard’s face was white in the night, and their eyes carried the same darkness that curled in the shape of a human figure over their back. A whimper rose in the apprentice’s throat. The shape on their master’s back shifted, black tearing open until skin twisted in the hollow mouth of a thing that could have been human millenia ago.

“Oh, our wish was granted. Closer than anyone, that we are. Nothing is closer than making one out of two.”

“You can’t fight a dragon by running away,” said the companion to the hero when he saw her flinch before the beast.

“I am not running,” the hero said. She walked backwards, ducking below the monster’s fire, and then dropped her sword. Her companion called after her when she started to climb up the mountain’s side, away from the valley where the beast roared for blood. “You won’t defeat it like that! Only cowards run, only cowards drop their sword and go for the easy way!”

The hero had found a ledge in the wall. Pulling herself up on it, she stared down at the monster, and told her companion: “Move out of my way.”

“You’re giving up,” her companion whispered, disappointment bright in his eyes.

And the hero tucked an arrow from her quiver, raised her bow, and shot the beast right in its mighty neck, where a sliver of flesh had shown itself between the raised spines.

The companion was silent. As the beast fell, its scales crumbled apart, a last roar shaking from the body before it thundered to the ground. All that was left after the dust had settled was silver ash that spread through the air, and a gleaming pile of gold underneath.

“I didn’t run,” the hero said when she was back on the ground, helping her companion back on his shaky feet. She smiled when he threw his arms around her and began sobbing. “Why,” her companion whispered.

The hero put her bow on her back and brushed some ash off her shoulder.

“I didn’t run, I changed my angle. And I didn’t give up either.

I just took a run-up, and I took aim.”

A human sat down at night and raised their face to the moon.

“Tell me,” they asked, voice heavy from the dark in it, “is there hope?”

The moon was silent for a long time. It let a cloud pass by, let new stars come and watched old ones dim out. Then, it said:

“Dear human, what are you?”

The human hung their head. “Nothing. I am nothing but alive, not anything.”

And because the moon could not smile, it went full and round and silver instead, and shone down. “That, brave one, is your answer. There is hope, my child, because you are still here.”

an atlantis tale.

Nobody really remembers how, but some mythology professor ended up bringing the topic to a conference concerning the matter of Atlantis.

Fairy rings. The professor had been laughed at, in the beginning at least, until he’d began speaking. A circular formation of mushrooms, substance of legends and myths all over the world. The circle and the sphere held important meaning in magic as well as science, and some scientist couldn’t help but wonder, again and again, how a simple arrangement of plants could produce such stories…

Maybe we’re missing something, humanity told itself. Maybe our science hasn’t come far enough yet to detect what we call magic, to measure the form of energy it exudes.

Ancient cities that have vanished appear in stories and tales from almost any culture. Any story was inspired by something, a grain of truth at its core.

How come they couldn’t find Atlantis if there were so many myths about it, humanity wondered. What could possibly hide an entire city with thousands of people from the glance of the world across centuries? How could a whole city change place?

And so they thought, consulted, imagined – and found. A fairy ring, a circular formation below the ocean to thrum with energy we cannot yet measure. A pulse of something close to electricity, to teleportation, that is powerful enough to send buildings and people unharmed from one place to another. A formation in a round shape, grown naturally.

A portal on the bottom of the ocean, just like the so-called fairy rings on land –

Maybe the children of Atlantis love to play in the city’s beautiful coral reefs that surround the outer borders, where an unnamed energy vibrates in thousands of colours as the city shivers between worlds, dimensions, space and time.