A/N: Hello all! This story has gone through many revisions, but I think I'm finally on the right track. To older readers, I have made the minor correction from "Sunny" to "Sun", but you'll see the original name in later chapters again as a special nickname.

Some sensitive themes that will be explored in this story include disability and mental health. By the time the characters are in second year, I expect things to be very divergent from canon. This first chapter is backstory-heavy. Let me know your thoughts; please be an active reader!

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and plot ideas. Cover art is by bearbrickjia.

"You dance differently when you know you won't live forever."

―Leigh Bardugo, Wonder Woman: Warbringer

I. Somewhere Beyond the Sea

Larkana, Pakistan. Present day.

Overlooked in the Ursa Major constellation, Suha shines at the tip of the bear's snout and guides the weary traveler home even in the darkest of nights. On Earth, the girl named Suha can barely maintain her own light, much less bring peace to other people.

In her big family, and every family around theirs, girls do not count. Suha learns this the hard way, the unspoken law etched into her skin like permanent mehndi. She is eight years old when she first mimics her brothers at their uncle's tire shop. Pounding nails into a frame is just like rolling Roti; the smells of metal and bread are the best of both worlds.

A week later, her youngest brother watches on in mild horror, mild humor as father beats Suha, the wood coming down with a hard thwack!

"Your father was harsh," mother tells her later while applying ointment, "but he did it for your own good. You cannot enter this world like a man, only as a bride. We will have to decide your husband from the second list now. Someone who will accept scars."

Suha never forgets―never forgives―these words. She may resent the punishment to her back like an active volcano, but even more so, she hates her female maker for buying into the system. In time, their relationship fades as Suha avoids her and learns to hide in the places her outdated relatives never visit.

"Have you become the family archeologist? You spend more time with skeletons than you do with me!"

"Amir!"

She can spot her second oldest brother from a mile away, whiskey-colored skin and eyes as green as their national flag. He has to bend down when he enters the secret-base in the abandoned excavation site. Mother often gossips about his good looks and future, how he will become a "civil engineer" and restore the family's honor through mass construction.

She cannot be further from the truth; Amir is not like the others. The youth does not care for big business, instead occupying himself with poetry and banned memoirs, the latest one called Reading Lolita in Tehran. His hands are kind, wrapping up Suha's bruises in a wool blanket. At night, when he tucks her in, he tells his sister about the rainbow lights in the north and the angels that visit people as butterflies and doves. Little stories he has told no other soul, taken from fairy tale collections and magazines collected from the local school.

"I want to leave this place," Amir says. "Leave and find out who I really am. What I am meant to do for the world. Maybe in America or Switzerland. Even the Philippines."

He kisses Suha on the forehead, never failing to include her in his dreams. "I cannot spend the rest of my life calculating machines and numbers. You cannot spend the rest of yours waiting for someone to take care of you. If we stay here, Suha, we will fade into the dunes."

"But how do we escape?" the girl asks.

"I will save up money in the army," Amir decides. His words fall over the girl in ripples of warmth like cinnamon tea. "An American friend gave me his stock of imported goods. We will be out of here in no time, and our first stop will be—"

"The Northern Lights!"

"Of course, little star. Anything for you."

These promises do not see the sun ever again. The men in black hats bring Amir's body back in their shared wool blanket, shot down before the age of seventeen. He is the only brother in one piece; the others are reduced to legs and arms after their run-in with the Taliban. This is almost worst for everyone, for Amir only looks asleep.

Girl and casket. Casket and noise. Noise and girl. Suha is ten and throws a tantrum because Amir is not waking up. He is buried by sunset in a place where grass refuses to grow. In the next few years, their father drowns himself in alcohol and they lose the house. This nearly finishes mother off, if not for the child still kicking in her belly.

The youngest and final daughter, Fatima, is born in a dingy apartment with peeling walls and a single window overlooking a fumigation facility. In those glittering charcoal eyes, Suha finds her redemption and fills the hole in her heart. The moonless curtain of night revels in their harmony, as the pair play peek-a-boo in the darkness and memorize each other's movements.

"I will save you," Suha says to the baby, the bars of the crib shadowing her face. "I will save us all."

When a tiny fist reaches out between the spaces, the older girl has her answer. Thirteen and resolved, Suha trades in her hijab and skirts for Amir's old cap and a chest-binder. She almost looks like her brother now, hair cropped to the base of her neck and eyes greener than ever. At first, she takes on odd jobs—sorting through files, lifting rice sacks, clipping weeds—until she finds talent for gambling. With a body quilted by male clothes, she becomes her family's sole source of income and deals hands to drunk men more powerful than any slap to the face.

The coins at her hip are heavy as sin but sweet as virtue; the dreams she crushes into powder make the best baby formula. All legal transactions, so long as no one can identify her face or gender. They meet her iron fist first regardless, knuckles and chains furbished by her now crippled uncle. The gambling business requires aggression, and sometimes, her heart does too.

Most days, Suha no longer recognizes herself: lean, hard-faced, and crass. A "boy" who can go anywhere, be anyone. Her bacha posh metamorphosis is complete; not even the neighbors question it anymore.

Her only return to girlhood is through her baby sister. With Fatima, the little things in life—often interspersed with blood and pain from a night at the pub—are a reprieve. Hours spent borrowing their older sisters' make-up, sewing old hijabs into blankets, and sipping tea like the British women in the tabloids, pinkies raised.

By far, the best activity is picking up old, poorly translated comic books at the newspaper stand. They find a cool spot in the alleyway to flip through them, wide-eyed and appreciative of every kick and flip.

Their favorite superhero? The one and only Wonder Woman!

"I want to be her when I grow up." Fatima points to a panel of the goddess helping a civilian up from the rubble.

"The reason?" Suha asks.

"She never gives up, even when people disappoint her." The little one turns to her big sister with a gap-toothed grin. "You don't give up either!"

They close up the book and fall into each other's sleepy embrace. Secretly, Suha wishes for a radioactive spider, a magical shield, or star-blessed might. Anything to be more than some poor girl playing make-believe in a city full of sand.

Anything to be a better person, like Diana Prince.

Nothing good lasts forever. The last guy Suha conned was connected to a big crime lord, intent on coming for her and everything she holds dear. She makes sure the apartment is empty for the dangerous company that day, bribing a teacher to give Fatima an extra hour of lessons and urging her other sisters to visit the marketplace.

The men are quick with their business, holding her at gun point and demanding the one thing she cannot—could never—give up.

"You touch Fatima," Suha begins, "you die a thousand times over."

"You don't give her up, your whole family dies!" The one guy spits in her face. "Payment for disrespecting the boss, bacha posh. You will not be asked nicely again."

After they set a deadline and leave, Suha contemplates her options. Maybe Allah thinks she deserves this; maybe she is just tired of burning other people to keep herself warm. In any case, she cannot pretend to be a man forever, not when she bleeds every month and feels her body spill out over the binder.

But she still makes sure that the next worthless girl will never again trade her identity for a few rupees. Suha may be a thief, but she is also a star; stars do not burn out when travelers depend on them. Her last trick is a simple but overdue one: send her baby sister to the land of the free, to the land of their superheroes. Their final act of sisterhood is pirating the new Wonder Woman at a neighbor's house. Fatima says nothing as her older sibling cries a little too hard at the ending.

As Suha makes the final preparations, throwing clothes haphazardly into a suitcase and writing letters to old friends, her mother hovers in the doorway. She looks as old as the apartment feels.

"We should have married you off sooner," the woman says, tears filling in the grooves of her face. "You might have outlived all of us, then. I never wanted you to live like this―like the men do. And now you will die like them too."

Suha crosses the room in two steps, not to offer a hug but the remainder of her belongings. Before she leaves the room, she takes a real look at the withered woman. Could she blame her mother for the lack of support, the years of neglect and withdrawal? Certainly, but in the end, they were both victims paying their dues.

"Life is strife," Suha begins, "but I would have it no other way, if it means one of us gets out. Unlike us, mother, she will be free."

Fatima can be anyone she wants to be now. She will not have to steal from others to live, standing tall with her chin up like Wonder Woman; Amir would be proud. Waving her sister down the Indus River, Suha hears before she feels the knife through her heart. At the very least, she takes the scumbag with her, aiming straight through the head.

She never expected the afterlife to be like this: a long poker table and two calm but vicious faces, illuminated by a single lightbulb. She blinks and scans the emptiness, looking for some way out. The twins deal her a bad hand and she discards a four of hearts on instinct, unable to read their expressions.

"Allah?" Suha asks.

"If it comforts you," Player One replies. It does not. He throws a flush down and fans himself with the rest of his cards.

"Am I dead?"

"Aren't we all?" Player Two giggles. "You're just lucky to know you are, is all."

She does not think herself lucky in the least, but she plays their little game effortlessly. Three tens and a pair of fives rain upon the card pile.

"Let's have a looksie here." Player One puts down four mighty jacks and steals the round, starting it up again with a queen of spades. She is the spitting image of Suha: all cropped hair, bruises, and bitterness. The girl flushes at the invasion of privacy; they pry into her life like they own it.

"Cross-dresser."

"Bacha posh."

"Hero complex."

"Sister complex."

"Gambler."

"Thief."

"Murderer."

One by one, they shuffle through her memories, laughter rising to a fever pitch as each image exposes a part of her meaningless life to the darkness. Painful reminders of the humility she endured for all those years.

Fatima came out alive, she reassures herself. That's all that matters.

"That, she did!" Player One reads her mind. "We love a dedicated sibling."

"So what now?" The girl demands, tears refusing to fall from her eyes. "You lock me up? Send me to Jahannam? Our family was already there."

"Well, you did have an entertaining run." The second twin remarks, shuffling the deck between sooty palms. "Bonus points for killing the unlucky bastard who came at you with a knife. Such a sore loser!"

"I didn't like him very much," the other brother comments. "Wanted for every count of kidnapping and assault in the book. High-crime, he was. You killed him before his friends snagged your sister. Could've trafficked her."

"Since you did half of the job for us, we'll let you pull the trigger."

"What?" Suha narrows her eyes.

"A good girl like you knows exactly what to do."

They stand up from the table and snap their fingers, procuring the criminal. He yells through a gag, arms bound to his burly sides with golden rope. Everything poker disappears, and suddenly, Suha finds a fully-loaded pistol in her left hand, aimed point-blank at her killer. She suddenly remembers the way he drove the steel into her chest and the image of her sister's anguished face.

"Think of what he did to you! To your family!"

"Yes, all the pain and terror!"

"You would've left that city too!"

"You could've gone with your sister to America! Fulfilled Amir's dreams!"

Judge and prisoner exchange eye contact with one another, and she can't seem to breathe through her nose and her throat itches and her mind is on fire and I'm really dead and I'll never see Fatima again—

Suha shoots Player One in the stomach and Player Two in the collarbone without blinking. The gun steams as the man, the face of evil who killed her, melts away to reveal a blinding light.

"Judgment has been passed," the entity says, less like the compassionate god of scriptures and more of a menacing force. "Good girl."

"My sister is the good girl," Suha counters, dropping the gun and shutting her eyes. The nightmare closes in on itself. "I made sure to show her what a life without mercy will do to the soul."

"Then I will show you what a life with mercy can do for you."

Somewhere in the Yellow Sea. December 13th, 1980.

The next time Suha opens her eyes, a woman with hair the color of rich soil and a smile filled with love coos down at her. This person must be a mother; she knows this, even having only experienced an absent one.

The world is blurry and dream-like, bedazzled in blues and greens. Mobility is seemingly impossible—are they in some kind of watery enclosure?—but Suha has no particular qualms with her lack of freedom. Not when this angel of a woman, who holds her with such care, makes her feel like the most precious thing in the world.

I must really be in Jannah now.

Her fingers are small and webbed and useless, as if freshly molded from clay, grasping at the warm figure for attention. When the mother reciprocates, Suha hears herself laugh with pure delight.

I haven't done that in a while, she thinks absentmindedly, lulled to sleep by an ocean lullaby. Soon, "mother" will be "Murong" and "Suha" will be "Sungjin," fondly shortened to "Sun." It's an ironic change, going from one star in a constellation to the center of someone's universe.

It takes her about a year to register her death—this isn't a dream—and another one to figure out that she is inhaling water without drowning—I am not disappearing. Under the sea, her senses are both amplified and dulled, a limbo that reminds her that she is no longer in the desert.

To her ultimate surprise, Merpeople are nothing like their fairy tale counterparts.

One: no one is even remotely like "Ariel" here.

They do not have talking guppies and crab servants, or adventures in abandoned ships. The creatures of the deep have translucent complexions, shark teeth, long nails, and magnified pupils spanning across the whites of their eyes. Some are more refined than others. Sirens are probably the most attractive ones, speaking a sing-song form of Mermish. The language sounds like a strange marriage between Urdu and English.

Sun has not gotten a hold of a mirror yet. Frankly, she is not sure she wants one anymore.

Two: Merpeople are systematic and label their communities based on bones, mapping out the ocean like one great anatomical chart.

Skull, spine, rib—every group accounts for something or another, her new home representing the Eastern Tailbone. Their architecture consists of intricate salt formations cradled among the empty bellies of whales and barnacle husks, tall buildings bridged together in cross-like formation.

Sun has so-far managed to play off her discomfort as childhood shyness, but parenting works differently in this world. Merpeople would sooner throw their offspring into a volcano than let them get away with being soft-hearted. Her own mother, Murong, has launched her over the coral bed for not finishing her kelp. If Sun did not adapt to the currents, she would die in the sharp reefs below.

Upon accomplishing this, Murong gave her more advanced Mermish lessons, as if she did not get enough of that every day. At least Sun no longer helped with dinner; removing the hearts of octopi broke her own.

Three: Sirens adopted East Asian practices—or did the Asians learn from them?

This fascinated Sun the most, having lived in Pakistan for her entire life, with the occasional exposure to American media. These Merpeople run on the Lunar Calendar, making red lanterns from bioluminescent-algae and squid ink wash paintings. They even read the Analects of Confucius, a human whose beard ran longer than the sea.

Sun spends a great deal of time home-schooled on these ancient arts and texts, as there is no formal educational facility in their part of the world. But most Merpeople are interested in military pursuits over libraries. Both tridents and polearms are in use, sometimes chakrams and war scythes with fish bone-plated handles. Warrior training, especially to serve under the Siren royalty, often involves servitude in temples like Buddhist monks.

To what god they pray, the former Pakistani does not know. Not that she believed in her Islamic one anymore, anyway.

The rest of their time is dedicated to the upkeep of appearance, an activity that has effectively rendered Sun spiteful. Her past self had an identity crisis with clothing, having lived her childhood a girl and her adolescence like a man. It is no different for her current self, who decides against hair accessories or seashell clasps. They squeeze and scrape at her already small breasts the way the bras and binders did her old body.

No matter the culture, breasts always had to follow some kind of rule. Murong, unlike mother #1, though, actually encourages rule-breaking. Sun, unlike the other children of the sea, swims as bare as the day she was reborn.

Four: sometimes, trinkets from the surface world wind up at the bottom of the sea.

Plastic containers, dolls, music boxes, coins, bits and pieces of ship. These are the few things that make Sun feel like the real Little Mermaid. Murong neither approved nor disapproved of her collection, but once in a while, she threw in a warning.

"The more you touch things from the surface, the more you will be targeted. They reek of human."

Five: Merpeople are not fond of humans, particularly Wizards―whatever they are. Long ago, there had been a pact between the two races before the magic-users disrespected their underwater partners, effectively erasing their shared history.

Naturally, the Sirens are not too keen on Sun either. She neglects to mention often, in a kind of denial, that she lacks a tail. There are gills, fins, and scales all across her body, but what distinguishes a Mermaid from a human being is absent. She feels the many, many eyes on her scrawny, pale legs the moment she and Murong appear in town. It does not take long for this new world to pick on her the way the last one did; it also does not take long for her to understand what happens to those who dream of the surface.

"P-please! I was only trying to help him! He was drowning!"

At the epicenter of the city, a public execution takes place: a faceless Merman interacted with a fisherman near the coast. For once, Murong puts a hand over her daughter's face, shielding her from the carnage.

"Murong, why did they kill him?" Sun asks, long after the Merpeople have left the square. They left his body there for the sharks to feast upon. "He was only being a good fish."

"Because the hatred still runs deep," Murong replies. The look on her face ends the conversation, even if Sun wants to know more. More about the differences between Merpeople and humans, their history, and herself.

A week later, the older Siren moves their little family away from civilization and closer to the riptides, where nothing ventures close enough to bother them. If they do, Murong is two steps ahead and releases their flesh-eating seahorses. The nasty gardener got what was coming to him, the twat. They celebrate that victory with a couple of abalone. It is over this meal that Sun acutely feels her mutation, her intrusion into this world. For what has she been reborn, if only to be strange and displaced again?

"I am incomplete," she announces. A few moments bubble by before Murong wraps the end of her tail around her daughter's calves. Suddenly, she waves a hand over her own left cheek, and in seconds, the skin begins to cave in, revealing an old burn carved all the way up to the cheekbone.

Lastly: Merpeople can use magic. Curses, glamours, and even crying pearls. The latter gloat in soft spirals down Sun's face as she stares, heartbroken, at her mother's old wound.

"We are all incomplete, Sungjin," Murong finally answers. "Do not pity yourself. You just need to learn how to work around it. Even if the world does not accept your disadvantage, you must."

That only makes Sun cry harder, and for once, Murong lets her. "I don't deserve you," the daughter sniffs.

"Wrong: you deserve the best," the mother says. "Therefore, it is my mission to be the best."

The next hour is spent bullying a stranded mola mola around town in warm company. Momentarily, Sun forgets her flaw and fears no future.

July 31st, 1985.

Under a staircase somewhere, a motherless green-eyed boy celebrates his sixth birthday alone.

Sun laments him, waking frightfully from the dream. Who is he? Why did she want to reach for him? It is almost like she knew him—was him, living his nightmare, cradling a broken arm—and it confuses her. These thoughts are not hers, mad voices festering from solitude. The darkness of her old self, the one she had been nearly consumed by if not for Fatima.

The girl unleashes a scream, feeling a phantom knife wound in her back. There is no Fatima to heal this, but Murong is here now. The Siren appears like magic and talks in comforting circles to keep the bad dreams away. These days, she has been kinder, like a storm is fast approaching and they are each other's only anchors.

Sun welcomes a dreamless sleep, for both her and the lonely boy.

August 2nd, 1988.

Her curiosity for the surface never really dies, amplified by the strange dreams she has about the boy with the green eyes. Sun wonders what year it is now; what people have accomplished; what her place without humanity is; and how much has the human condition changed in her absence?

The brimming intrigue induces a melancholy in her chest that she fails to shake, even though she prizes this blue world over her past desert. In fact, when she learns more about her origins, the heartache only gets worse.

Murong speaks little of her human lover—and is that not a wild thing to claim?—but when she does, Sun feels like she, too, lost a best friend. Having gills and scales never bothered Sun so much as knowing next to nothing about the woman who participated in her rebirth.

It hurts all the more seeing the absence eat away at her mother's smiles as the years go on. Sometimes, Murong will swim about aimlessly at night, searching for a sign, as Sun watches sadly from around the corner. They need this family talk, whether Murong wants to avoid it for the rest of their lives or not.

"What was her name?" the girl asks, as she polishes Murong's daggers.

"Pandora," the Siren automatically replies from the kitchen. She cringes afterwards at the ease with which she reveals the identity.

"She was a witch?"

"That's right."

"They can do magic like us?"

"Yes, but they have many different spells to compensate for their lack of weaponry."

"If Merpeople avoid humans," Sun begins, "why didn't you?"

"Foolish rule to begin with," Murong says. "We aren't at war anymore." A pause. "Well, she fell out of her sailboat, conducting research on Manta rays. I was young and never liked the rules."

This is sounding an awful lot like an old Vegas film Sun watched with Amir. "So you save her and have a shotgun wedding?" Sun interrupts, switching excitedly to English.

"What did I tell you about speaking human?" her mother hisses. "And where did you learn this 'shotgun wedding' nonsense?!" The siren scoops up her little ray of sunshine and handles her with care; that is to say, puts her in an impressive headlock. Foiled again!

"N-no one ever visits them, and studies s-show that extensive use of M-Mermish leads to brain damage—"

"There you go again, speaking between your fins!"

The girl blows out bubbles from her nose. "Oh, I give! I give! I just wanted to talk about my other mother. I don't resemble anyone like I do her."

Silence descends upon the pair faster than the humans pillage tuna. Murong looks thoughtfully at Sun, searching for a reason not to confess.

"She animated me from mud and bone, right? With magic?" Sun pokes at her skin, as if her arm will pop off at any moment and reveal the ugly truth—that she is nothing more than a figment of imagination.

She wants to know things about her other mother, to make the witch more person than fairy tale. She wants to know her favorite color, what she liked and did not like to eat. Favorite animal, shape, holiday. What made her cry.

Murong could see this longing as clear as day; no point avoiding it now. Finally, in the pink light of their jellyfish lamps, she decides to cave in a little. "I was never very interested in the Mermen," the mother begins, "and out of nowhere, a human woman gave me a child for saving her life."

"So I was a gift?" Sun perks up.

"A gift with a rebel streak, just like her. Pandora could never go a day without cooking up some new idea about this or that."

"I like what I'm hearing. What did she do for a living?"

"She invented spells," Murong answers. "I gave her my sheddings for fireworks once. They burst into something called 'ladybugs' in the sky. It was quite sentimental."

That has to be the coolest thing Sun has ever heard; Mermaid scales could make fireworks? What else could they be used for?

"When she left me, she'd achieved her greatest feat yet: you."

"Will I ever get to meet her?" the child asks.

"My Sun, do not make me miss someone I cannot have." The words collapse in Sun's ears like deep-sea fissures. "She chose her people and I chose ours. I chose you. I will not regret that."

"But you do!" Sun protests, resorting to the miserable human language with which she started this conversation. "I look like her, I talk like her. You even said I think like her. You don't smile the way you used to. I will surely be your unhappiness."

"Sungjin," Murong murmurs, tucking a stray strand of hair away. "We may have parted, but Pandora and I made you out of love. To this day, you remind me of what life must be lived for."

And like every dignified mother, heavy-hearted but light-tailed, she ends the conversation with a kiss, returning to her anemone wall arrangement. In a fit, Sun does what she always has: hide. Without fully understanding the situation, she darts out on her mother, who calls to her over and over again.

On the edge of the purple reef, where the ocean beyond is nothing but ink and unknown, something sad and terrifying brews inside her mind. Sun watches as one by one, her pearl tears drop like pins into the abyss; and from the darkness, an impulse is born.

August 27th, 1988.

Finding a sea witch proves to be much easier than people let on. It has nothing to do with following two eels into the lair of a lipstick-wearing octopus, and everything to do with looking for the outlier in a kingdom full of beauty: the abandoned human pipeline.

The sea witch is a slight mermaid, whittled to the color of decomposed whales, with deep-set eyes and a weary swim. She peers forebodingly into her cauldron, never once looking up at her young visitor. The most curious thing about the hag is the moving—truly, moving—image hung over her breast by a silver wire. A woman that highly resembles the witch is laughing uncontrollably into the shoulder of a well-groomed man, enchanted to repeat the movement over and over again.

For a moment, Sun wonders about her circumstances. Who was she before this? Who was that man with a loving smile?

The witch seems to sense these thoughts and disperses them immediately, as if psychic.

"Mirabella, I presume?" Sun asks.

"I know what you want, kelpling," comes the raspy response. The girl has never heard such a voice before, like the creature had inhaled nails and was forced to breathe through the remaining space.

"How are you doing that? Knowing what I want to say before I say it."

"Legilimency," the witch answers. "Not that you would know anything about wizard magic. Does your mother know you are here?"

"No," Sun says, never missing a beat. "I came alone, and I intend to fulfill this alone."

"So you think that suffering ennobles you?" Mirabella circles her prey, producing a rotten smile. "Did that work for you last time?"

Sun narrows her eyes. "You looked into my memories?"

The cackle crackles like thunder. "I know everything about you, little star. You are far away from home."

"Murong is my home. Not Pakistan."

"Bold, bold statement," the witch says. "Have you forgotten that baby sister of yours already?"

Sun ignores the question, her heart distantly aching at the thought. "Why have you fallen so low?"

Mirabella grows silent, claws wrapped around the edges of her cauldron. "I chose wrong," the sea witch finally says. "To our kind, love is once. We have but one soulmate, someone we can never replace, whereas with humans, love means every empty bed that can be filled. You still wish to proceed, knowing that the woman might have moved on from your mother?"

"She may have," Sun begins, "but Murong never will. Name your price."

"Well, I simply adore speechless Sirens..."

"Don't let her escape!"

The royal guards are already upon her the moment she re-enters the city. But they are too late; Sun has already made her pact with the Devil.

That night, she and Murong were coming home from the autumn festival. While her mother animatedly chatted about the dancing, her daughter threw a drought of deepest sleep into her face and the magic word.

"Verto."

From there, the concoction grew the Siren supple legs that would carry her into a better life. Against the rippling shadows of night, her daughter stowed away with the sleeping Murong to the surface. The crisp air was foreign and alarming, but Sun was determined, pushing her mother onto the shoreline.

Like the preparations made for Fatima so long ago, the girl set aside human clothes, maps, gold trinkets, and pearls she had cried the day before—at the loss of the best parent she had ever known.

I hope you find her. Sun thinks, kissing Murong's forehead, which lights up briefly under the moon. But more than that, I hope that you are happier, that no one judges you for your differences or for being the single mother of a monster. I love you.

In returning, Sun had not accounted for the starfish that watched the beach closely. They alerted the Merpeople of her absence, and now, Sun floats before the court, face bruised and burning. Her trial is a rush of sounds and curses. She has never seen the royal family before—funny that this will be their first, and likely last, meeting.

"What have you done, turning to the sea witch?"

"Murong sacrificed everything for you!"

"Traitor!"

"You are only here by the good grace of your mother."

"Infidel!"

I saved the mother I always needed, Sun muses in reply to the accusations. But her tongue is barely a tongue anymore, silenced once and for all as Mirabella's single condition. She faces straight ahead, locking with the King's cold eyes. He is swathed from head to toe in gold, like a character out of the Aquaman series.

"For taking one of our own to the surface world," his voice booms, "you, too, will perish on the lands you desired to see."

When he hits his trident against the ground, the awful ring moves across the marble floor and through Sun's soul. Exile, blood, a social death for the half-breed creation. Another fitting ending to the greatest gambler.

"Goodbye, child of the sea."

Camber Sands, East Sussex. September 1st, 1988.

September, much like the act of praying, begins with abandonment and discovery.

A low, ominous breathing escapes the notice of beach-goers, drawing closer to the distinct smell of an open wound. Dark wings flutter and press into equally black ribs. The shadow is misplaced, far from home for a bumbling calf. The infant beast senses loss in the air and sinks across the sand one timid hoof at a time. It only ceases its course when its gray, opaque eyes find the source of unspoken pain.

In a bed of putrid kelp, a child lays on her side, hands gripped around a slowly but surely bleeding gut. She looks to be about seven or eight, all pale skin and sand deposits. Gills line the length of her neck but suddenly retract, the fin-like appendages across her limbs following suit. The breeze does her no favors, drying out an otherwise smooth complexion. She fades in and out of consciousness, only mildly aware that three people have walked past her without batting a lash.

A dog stays a moment longer to lick her face. The old owner throws his towel over her, like a good arm's-length samaritan. "You t-take care now," he nervously says. "Not v-very good with blood, I'm afraid. The police will be here shortly."

When he runs away, the girl peers up at her newest company warily. Oddly enough, they share the same eye color, and in response, she smiles at the angel of death. The beast tilts its head, observing the strange child. It has never seen such a small thing before, and they watch each other quietly with equal fascination.

Finally, the "human" opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out. This draws sudden tears that pool into pearls. The creature may not understand fear, but it knows what she has sacrificed. Hanging its head, the bat-horse tucks its knees in and rests its beak across her chest. The girl no longer feels pain, only the vaguely warm ribs against her forearm. She reaches out and pats the animal in time to her own heartbeat.

In this moment, they want nothing but each other, not hearing the heavy footsteps or rustling of robes approaching them.

Kingsley Shacklebolt has seen a great many things, but this? They did not prepare him for this. His tawny owl companion, perched on his great right shoulder, makes an unhappy hoot.

"Bentley, you better get going," he announces. "We're going to need Newt Scamander at once."