The Siren Queen

Chapter Fifteen

In the next several streaming images, Tempest was quite jealous of the future King Poseidon's whirlpool romance with a human girl. She couldn't understand why he would choose to love Melinda over someone he had known since childhood and had so much in common with.

Next, there were a few moving pictures that showed Tempest secretly studying magic from various old books and scrolls. In Pacifica, magic was used extremely sparingly, as it was considered a very dangerous and unpredictable force that should not be taken lightly. Most Pacifican merfolk and Civilized sea creatures never used magic, and Nerissa could count the times she was aware of her father invoking the power of his Enchanted Royal Aquamarine, a magical gemstone that was passed down in the royal family, on one hand.

The following moving image was the most disturbing one yet. It depicted Nerissa's parents' wedding reception. She watched intently, full of complex emotions, as Tempest floated up to Melinda, and began singing to her in Archaic Pacifican in an all-too-familiar voice, the very same voice that kept on intoning "Turn back, little mermaid...! Go home, little princess...!' from presumably some nearby room in her palace. Tempest was the Siren Queen. Like the book in the library of the Pugetian palace had stated, she had become a Siren when "her heart had turned cold as ice, as a result of heartbreak or trauma", as well as "extensively dabbling in dark magic".

For a second, Nerissa wondered why Tempest did not just enchant her father to fall madly in love with her, but then she recalled King Poseidon saying that the two most fundamental laws of magic were that you couldn't bring someone back from the dead(despite who Greta believed her to be...), and that one could not force somebody to fall in love with them. At least not true, lasting love, as a powerful Siren could certainly brainwash a hapless human sailor into being so infatuated with her that he follows her down into the sea and drowns.

From what Nerissa could comprehend, Tempest cursed her mother to struggle with infertility for years before finally having a child "with human weaknesses", despite Melinda having been successfully transformed into a mermaid with the Enchanted Royal Aquamarine. This explains a lot, thought Nerissa, feeling a little betrayed that her typically honest parents had kept the curse a secret from her. All her life, she had grappled with the afflictions of being a much weaker swimmer and singer than every single other mermaid in Pacifica.

However, she was proud of herself for how far she had come, both literally and figuratively. With some much-appreciated help along the way, she managed to make it to the Far North, in defiance of her limitations. Nerissa didn't know why she could communicate telepathically with Wild sea creatures, or if she truly was a mermaid princess "with a heart purer than a pearl", as the ancient Pacifican myth had said, but it sure the heck was a very convenient ability to have when traveling out in the Wilderness.

In the next moving picture, King Poseidon used his Enchanted Royal Aquamarine to Banish Tempest to the Far North. Banishment was the most severe punishment in Pacifica. In addition to sending them far away to a remote location, all memories of criminals sentenced to Banishment were magically wiped away from all citizens of Pacifica. Queen Melinda most likely did not even remember that she had been cursed on her wedding day.

A metaphorical electric eel lamp suddenly went off in Crown Princess Nerissa's head. Could the reason why everybody in Pacifica had forgotten Lord Zale had been because the amnesia spell of Tempest's Banishment had in some way, for lack of a better term, "rubbed off" on him...? Magic could be incredibly complicated and unstable, after all.

Nerissa then watched a streaming image of Tempest singing while magically "building" her palace out of ice and snow, her very own kingdom of isolation that she could be the queen of. There were also grotesque moving pictures of the Siren Queen luring in local fish with her enchanting song, and then eating them, something which would horrify any self-respecting Pacifican mermaid or merman. The Princess of Pacifica sure hoped that Tempest's whale bone chariot was made out of the remains of a cetacean who had passed away due to natural causes, but the pod of Belugas' apparent fear of the Siren Queen absolutely suggested that was not the case.

One moving picture showed Tempest in what appeared to be her private bedchamber, with a magic mirror in her hand. Nerissa had heard legends about magical mirrors that one could use to essentially spy on others, and perhaps watch events that had already occurred. It dawned on the Crown Princess of Pacifica that this hallway, maybe even the entire palace, was basically a gigantic magic mirror. One might say that the Siren Queen literally dwelled in the past.

"No..." said Tempest to herself in the image, shaking her head. "I cannot allow my own nephew to eventually marry into the royal family of Pacifica...when I was denied the opportunity to do so...If history doesn't repeat itself on its own, I shall make history repeat itself..."

Zale must be Tempest's nephew, realized Nerissa, blushing at the mention of a potential future marriage. She recollected that before she left on her quest, Stormer had assured her that Lord Zale still loved her, which had sort of implied that he was not actually romantically interested in the Siren Queen, despite being vulnerable to her alluring song. Considering that they were related, she was highly unlikely to view Zale in a romantic light. The final streaming image before the hallway forked into two shorter corridors depicted Tempest enchanting and abducting her nephew.

Nerissa turned the corner, and gulped when she caught sight of her beloved Lord Zale, unconscious in an open doorway, which lead to a small room. His normally tan skin had a bluish tint, and he looked like he had unhealthily lost quite a bit of weight in a relatively short amount of time.