The Mare People and the Elves

The light of the sun reflecting through the blue of the water, the endless colors of coral, the fields of kelp and the schools of fish… Our home was beautiful.

But this wasn’t how the elves saw it. No, no. To them, the seas were dangerous waters that were filled with vicious creatures. Such as us, the Mare People.

We weren’t dangerous. In fact, we were quite the opposite. We didn’t believe in hate, or rather, we didn’t believe in acting with hate. Negative emotions, those are what make us violent and dangerous. The elves still see us as such. Though, we didn’t mind at first, as we should not hate them for it. We did not understand, either. But we lived in peace, the elves had the land; we had the water, and there was not much reason for unrest. 

The unrest was there. Because the Mare People did not eat live food from the sea, so they had to go onto the land for meat. Our tails did not limit us from this; we merely grew legs, ugly things, scaly and slimy, but we covered them. I supposed this made the elves uneasy if they ever saw beneath the cloth. Certain elves down by the docks, where we liked to come up, liked to ridicule and humiliate us by ripping our robes and pulling back our hair to show off our unusual ears. This was only one of the reasons why I did not go to the surface until I was twelve years old.

My first time on land, I went with my father, by the name of Lykos, as it was tradition to first surface with your biological father. It was not painful, but the sensation of growing legs made me feel sick. Instead of one tail, it was if I had two. As I touched the land above the water -a mossy boulder lining the edge of a beach- my tail split into two and I started to sink. I did not know how to swim without my tail, so I thrashed around in the water as my father tried to help me move my legs in a way that would keep me afloat. By the time I had calmed down and I could swim again, a group of elves had gathered on the rocky beach and started to laugh. I realized then why we were not allowed above the water before we were thirteen years; if I had been any younger, I may have burst into a fit of crying. My cheeks reddened considerably, seeing as my pale skin had little color before.

Lykos guided me around to where the sand met the water. I walked out onto the land, wobbly and unbalanced. Lykos held my hands as I took my first steps. I was lucky to catch on easily after a few minutes of practicing; not many younglings did that within the first hour onland. After laughing and pointing as I fell and stumbled, the elves lost interest as I started to walk excellently for somebody who had never walked before.

I grinned and cheered myself as I started jumping up and down. It was exhilarating, being in the air for only moments and crashing back down. Then, I felt a hand around my forearm and a voice telling me that we had to go. My face fell and I stared past Lykos, focusing on two elves dressed in dark robes and smiling evilly. It was their smiles that worried me as they came rushing forward. I jumped back into the water, or more so fell, because Lykos still had my arm and he had pulled me under. My legs were twisted into one, long, blue tail and I was back in a familiar place. I was surrounded by cheerful smiles and shouts, but I did not want to hear them. Lykos pulled me to the side, waving away the others.

“Did they want to hurt us?” I asked him as we slowly swam above a bed of coral. Lykos took his time to think, his black and gray hair floating around his shoulders. He was a strong man weakened by age, but his blue eyes stayed yet so young.

“No,” he decided to say after I had poked him on the arm. “They would be reprimanded if they physically hurt you or me. They wanted to laugh at us.”

This statement confused me. “Didn’t they already do that?”

“Well, yes. But those who did so only laughed at the fact that you could not walk. Those elves would have taken off your robes and shown your legs to their friends. They would have ridiculed you, Mica.”

“But, why?”

“Because,” he started. His face grew dark. “Because we are different from them. The elves think us ugly. They think of us as animals; fish, that belong in the sea for the whales and sharks to eat. But, do not forget this, I believe that they may also fear us. We are powerful, more so than you might think, and we could possibly be a threat to them. But we are not, so they provoke us. This is why we cannot have our younglings amongst them.”

I did not go out of the water many times after that. I preferred our community, as opposed to the laughing elves. We lived in harmony. We were one large family. That is why we do not give ourselves family names, another thing the elves ridiculed us about.

“They think they are all related,” I once heard an elf whisper as we walked through the market.

“I wonder if they breed with their brothers and sisters,” another said with her face all scrunched up. “That is quite disgusting.”

I turned to them with a frown on my face, but before I could open my mouth, Lykos pushed me on. I understood why they thought that, but it is not disgusting. And it does not happen often. If only they knew us, I found myself once thinking. Perhaps they would understand our ways.

We bought our meat and some supplies, then headed back to the water. I didn’t complain. But that is when I realized that the elves treated us like animals; that they would not cease to, unless I did something.