CHAPTER~07
Happy Birthday, Michael
Whooosh, each time the waves surged toward her ears, the warmth carved into her memories like scars came crashing back with them.
‘Once we settle in a warm place where the light comes in, let’s nap every day while basking in the sunlight like this.’
A warmth like the gentle light of a mother’s voice that had faded away long ago.
Her mother, who had been as kind as the pouring sunlight, went above the water to try communicating with humans to resolve a territorial dispute and never returned.
Airi and her family, worried, had followed her there as well.
The moment her mother climbed atop a large rock and opened her mouth, and her eldest brother’s hand instantly covered Airi’s eyes, she heard an inexplicable roar within pitch-black darkness.
It was only long afterward that she learned that ear-splitting sound had been gunfire.
She had been so young and fragile then.
Before she could even grasp what was happening, fierce waves crashed and a massive quake shook the sea.
That day, her father and brothers were gravely injured, and her eldest brother was swept away by the raging currents and never returned.
From that day on, Airi became afraid of loud noises.
She startled and shrank at even the smallest disturbance, avoiding and guarding against anything unfamiliar.
Everything outside the water, humans, and the chaotic memories that swirled relentlessly through her mind no matter how tightly she shut her eyes, frightened her.
To the Siren clan, those things beyond the water were endless terror and the enemies who had stolen away their family.
And yet.
— We must not fight humans any longer.
Her eldest brother, who had been swept away by the waves and returned only after a long time, said that.
He defended humans while trying to restrain their father and siblings, who were enraged and vowed to destroy every ship that crossed the sea.
— Father, please. Stop the war.
But the eldest son, who returned barely clinging to life and spoke incomprehensible words, was treated as a sick man by their father and brothers.
After lingering in illness, he eventually closed his eyes alone in a corner of the palace a few days later.
Only Airi, who stayed by his side until the very end, engraved his final words, which he murmured like a madman, into her heart.
— Airi, you must not hate humans…….
They are the same as us.
Airi only came to understand the meaning of those words, which had crumbled past her ears that day, after she had grown a little older.
It was one afternoon when stinging light pushed deep into the dark sea.
Looking up at the sunlit surface and secretly longing for her departed mother and brother, Airi one day spotted the shadow of a ship passing overhead and flinched, swimming downward in haste.
Another human ship.
Fear clung thickly to her busily moving tail.
The bombing sounds she had once heard, the swirling tempests and waves, the screams of her family tearing through the air…….
Fleeing as if chased by all of it, Airi suddenly startled at the splash she heard behind her.
Something had been thrown into the water.
If I get caught in a net, it’s over!
As she reflexively glanced back while fleeing, Airi’s eyes widened.
What she saw beyond her abruptly halted tail was not a net, not a fishing hook, not a frightening weapon, but a human.
A boy, tightly bound with ropes, was sinking into the sea.
Darting behind seaweed, Airi stared helplessly at the sinking boy.
The ship seemed to have no further purpose and was already leaving overhead.
Bubbles spilled from the boy’s parted lips.
Don’t go closer.
He’s human.
She repeated to herself that she didn’t know what might happen, yet Airi could not tear her gaze away from the boy struggling to loosen the ropes and remained there.
The moment the bubbles slipping from the boy’s mouth grew smaller and shattered into nothing, Airi came to her senses at the sensation of her tail brushing the seaweed.
By then, she was already swimming toward him.
Even as she held the unconscious boy in her arms and rose toward the light, her mind brimmed with fear.
The intensifying sunlight, the whitening blur before her eyes, the cold touch of his feet against the tip of her tail.
There was nothing that was not frightening, yet what terrified her most was the boy in her arms, limp like a corpse.
The girl swam with all her might until her tail ached, trembling as she prayed.
Please, no more.
I don’t want to see someone’s breath stop again.
The violently shaking moment, like the day she lost her mother, ceased all at once the instant she burst out of the water.
At noon, when sunlight poured down like dizziness from above.
In that moment, when even the waves that rose and shattered with halted breath lay silent, her heart stopped for an instant at the sight of the boy she looked down upon.
If light were to take human form, would it look like this.
On the beach glittering like star-sand, shallow waves washed over her tail again and again.
For a long while, Airi forgot even to breathe as she etched the dazzling boy into her vision.
A violent pulse thudded through her oxygen-starved mind.
Something hotter than skin baking under the blazing sun coursed through her entire body.
Sensing movement from somewhere, Airi hastily fled back into the water, yet even after returning beneath the sea, she could not forget the boy she had seen above the surface.
In the space where fear had flown away, the light and warmth she had felt on her skin that day took root.
The sea was endlessly vast, yet always dark and cold.
Whenever she returned after seeing her brothers off to war, Airi would lie in the shallows and look up at the sunlight filtering through the surface.
The more she tried to grasp it, the more the light shattered like an illusion.
No matter how far she reached, only untouchable warmth flickered pale in her palms.
From that day on, Airi began surfacing alongside whales that rose above the water to breathe.
Though she could not even inhale air, on deep nights when human ships drifted about, she would secretly hide behind rocks and watch the spreading lights.
With the water still covering the tip of her nose, Airi breathed in the shimmering lights and recalled the prince she had met that day.
Though she had never learned its name, she felt she understood what that distant, unfamiliar emotion, as if her whole body were floating white, was called.
Each time she dreamed of the nameless boy, the girl spent every night writhing as if struck by a fever.
The boy whose eye color she did not even know always had a blurred face, like frosted glass.
Even in the fleeting dreamscape where she finally met him, Airi hesitated for a long while, and when she reached out a beat too late, the boy shattered like light.
When she woke from the dream, she was always in the pitch-dark sea.
At such times, Airi would secretly slip out of the cold, dark palace where no light entered and, whenever she found an opening, ask N to teach her the human language.
Though she lacked even the courage to go out and meet them, she foolishly dreamed of learning their culture, blending in among them, laughing and chatting.
Yet it was neither shallow curiosity nor the absurd recklessness of love at first sight.
Chasing light was the instinct of all living beings.
Like the many childhood days when she ventured outside the water to breathe in cascading lights she could not even breathe, like the warm embrace of her long-gone mother.
She wanted to be wrapped in that sunlight and draw warm air deep into her body.
She wanted to lie on sun-warmed sand and sleep in comfort.
Escaping the cold, dark world, standing upon land flooded with brilliant light, she wanted to grope at the unknown world with her fingertips.
She wanted to take clumsy steps, one after another, and move toward a future she could not see even an inch ahead.
And in that place, after wandering and wandering, she wanted to meet you just once more and look into your eyes.
On the day she first attended the ball, when she saw the Emperor seated upon the lofty throne, receiving the line of young ladies, she felt as though she might truly burst into tears.
At the ball held to choose his bride, the Emperor gazed down the stairs with the most bored expression in the world.
The ladies standing before him were all terribly tense, and when it was finally her turn, Airi could hardly breathe.
At his glance, cast casually downward as he propped his chin with regal ease, she was robbed even of her soul by that elegant bearing.
She engraved the colors of the one she had dreamed of and imagined all her life.
The color of his eyes, which she had never known even in her dreams.
Ah.
They were blue.
Eyes like the sea she loved most in the world.
Creak.
At the sound of the door opening, Airi turned her head.
The Emperor’s gaze, which had narrowed at the burning smell the moment he entered, froze as though pinned to Airi clutching the gun.
“Empress.”
Airi quietly looked at her husband standing by the doorway.
His hair, imbued with moonlight, shone brilliantly as always.
So radiant that merely looking at him made it hard to breathe.
“What do you think you are doing right now.”
She had suffered this dazzling light like a fever for a very long time.
Striding toward her, the Emperor stopped only after a sharp click sounded from the gun Airi adjusted in her arms, his face paling.
“……My lady.”
“…….”
“……Please, put the gun down.”
To the Emperor, stiffened unlike himself, Airi replied softly.
“I think I finally understand what it is you want from me.”
As a few words passed between them, the lantern flame flickered and went out in the wind.
“I will fulfill your wish now, Michael.”
Whooosh, Airi’s roughly cut hair flailed in disarray.
Together with papers scattering through the air, the smell of burning gunpowder spread throughout the room.
Airi’s gaze, with the gun aimed at her chin, stopped on the embroidered letters of the handkerchief tied to the barrel.
Crooked, messy embroidery stitched in Histania script.
Tying embroidered cloth to the weapons of one heading to the battlefield was an old tradition of this land.
Praying for the person to safely return home after a perilous journey, one stitched a name and the place of return onto the fabric.
This winter, for the first time, Airi embroidered a handkerchief for herself.
— Aire de Atlántida.
I will return to the sea.
To my dark and gentle homeland, Atlántida…….
“Happy birthday, Michael.”
Failing to notice the desperate hand reaching out a beat too late, Airi closed her eyes.
From the blue necklace hanging at her slender neck came a faint clink.
Bang.
A single gunshot filled the Emperor’s office.
