The Speechless Sea

Chapter 11

Arthur's head perk up like his ears. He leapt to his feet and scurried along the sand, clouds of it startling up in clouds behind him, as he raced towards the entrapturing tone that drifted across the waves of the air, above the waves of the sea and settled cat like into the desperate prince's ear drum.

"Alu ese mai iina, vai." could it be? NO, thought Arthur, he was so certain it was Merlin, the man with eyes that held the entire sea, but....he had never heard him speak. He couldn't speak, so it could not be him. He stepped closer carefully, foot step quite on the sand, and the mis clear before him. A darkly cloaked figured hunched before him in the sand.

"Alu ese mai iina, vai!" the voice said again - a woman with a voice like gentle waves, soothing and sad. Through the mists he could see her pale hands clasping a smooth rock, that began to glow as he watch. A shimmering green light surrounded it gently aat first the brighter undil it faded again. The rock was now a shell. He watchd in amazement as she placed it on the sandy ground where a hermit crab gratefully tucked inself inside and scurrled away from her into the chill ocean. She stood with a wide smile that dropped as soon as she saw him. Shock crowded on her face.

"You're highness! I-" She gasped. She was beautiful, with dark hair and alabastar skin and wide blue eyes like a icy north oceans, full of swirly storms, like a striking backgrund to ultra marine rondures. She curtsied croquettishly.

"What are you doing?" He asked her with barely contained excitement - he had to know what he had heard, both before, when he had been laid on the beach after the storm and seen the pale face and dark hair bent over him and heard the sounds of the ocean in words, and now, finding this woman on the beach making those same sounds. It couldn't be coincidence?

"I-nothing I....I saw a crab and I....it needed a shell so I found one!" She stammered, a graceful blush across her face as she glanced up at him through long eyelashes.

"You made that shell. With the magic of the merfolk." Arthur stated in a normal tone. If she had mermaid magic....she was the one! The one who had saved him before, a mermaid turned human, the one with such beauty, the one who saved him.

"I- no I-..." She looked frantic searchig for an excise, but none forthcame. She stepped forward and kneeled on the floor before him, her long dark curls cascading over her shoulder like silken tentacles. "Your majesty! Please forgive me, I didn't mean - I was jsut trying to help! A creatue in pain, who could ignore that? I only....Please, I prostate myself upon your mercy!" She cried, visibly shaking in fear. Here delicate indigo eyes rimed with peals of sadness. Arthur's heart pitched and lurched, like a catamaran in a gale of emotions. The irresitable pull of the strings of Merlin that sat around his internla organs constricted and then slackened at the incotrievable proof that Merlin had not been the one who saved him, instead it was this delicate woman.

ARthir's eye's expressed his sadness. He sighed again. He reached his gentle right hand towards her shaking should which fearfully quivered at the touch of skin on skin.

"It's alright, you're safe, I could never do one such as you harm." he mutter in a muted sound of a tone. Unnoticed by Arthur, her little snivels turned darker, oozing like a girmey slime into something black and cloying, a deep laughter that sat squatly in the back of Nimueh's throat and chilled the cockles of the listening birds adn fish. Arthur remained unpertured, even as he knelt in the sand next to the woman, her lither hand over his strong one as she whispered dark and secret words.

The tendrils of her magic smudged their way through the air like the ink of an octopus around the unsuspected prince. They surrounded him, holding him as closely as a lover, before they seeped into his tanned skin, darkly infecting their wa through his veins and capillaries, and around his body, until they reach his kind heart. There they continued, polluting the prince until it found the spot, deep in Arthur's chest, where Merlin sat, hibernated like a bear, and removed all trace of the man and replaced him with the imagine of nautical lovilessness that Nimueh now wore. And then with a residual glow, they were gone again, the prince not even noticing them , so taken as he was by the lady.

"What is your name?" He asked stridulously gazing into her storming eyes.

"Kara." She replied with a small and covert smile.

Overhead a circling seabird watched the interaction with a growing alarm, and with a cry wheeled through thte incongruant sky towards the castle of Camelot.