The promise

Saphira agrees to stay with him. He is kind and ½ mer. Time passes and she gives birth to a girl at the shore of the sea. She tells him that she will stay until the baby can sing the songs of the sea. Then she must return if she is to stay strong and well.



Saphira has baby girl with turquoise eyes. Saphira sings to her the songs of the sea, especially the one that will turn her baby legs into a tail. At the dark of the moon each month she swims with her daughter, mer mother and child in the darkness, singing to the creatures of the sea.


Prince wants to know if she will visit him and watch over her daughter. She tells him to build an underground grotto in the cave with a tunnel to the castle. She will meet him there on the new moon.


He goes deep in to the castle to begin this project and finds a door in the part of the dungeon that he had always been forbidden to enter. He remembers that his father left him a key in a case, a key he was told to guard with his life. He rushes upstairs, finds the key and returns. The key opens the door. Behind it is a tunnel, and at the end is a grotto. He realizes that his father must have built this, and that his mother must have been mer.

walking on the beach

Saphira and the prince are walking along the shore. He is telling her about trying to protect the whales and how difficult this is for him. The custom of herding and killing sea creatures runs deep and is difficult to change. He is a poor prince, and has few resources, but he will not give into allowing killing in his cove.



Saphira looks at him and sees turquoise flecks in his eyes . He is half mer, a secret he does not know. Mermaids can only stay on land for a certain amount of time, or they start to age and lose the ability to return to the sea. His mother had to leave him when he was young.


But she did not leave him without protection. His nanny was ½ mer, and the prince’s mother recognized this. The nanny was a young women at the time, and learned Mer secrets, including the songs of the sea, from the prince’s mother. When she chooses, she can become a mer and disappear into the sea. But she can never return. She has not left, and watches Saphira closely.

Scene two

The woman is in bed, propped up on pillows with blanket wrapped around her. The prince comes in with food and drink. She is awake now and not sobbing but tears are still running down her face. He asks her what has distressed her.


She tells him about the Danish whale hunt that happens every year in a nearby fjord. The whales are rounded up, herded into a cove and then killed until the sea is red. The cry and scream as they panic and try to escape or help each other. She managed to save a few but most died. In her exhaustion and grief she was washed ashore.


The prince looks at her in disbelief. How, he asks, could you have helped? She looks into his eyes and tells him that that he has captured a mermaid, a guardian of the sea. She looks deeper into his eyes and he feels his true self revealed to her. Mermaids can see the truth, and their eyes act as a truth potion. Any human who looks into a mermaid's eyes will have to tell  the truth

She asks if he hunts whales. He tells her that he has banned the practice from his small princedom. While he has done this for years, until now he did not feel the pain that the whales and dolphins must experience as their pod it being destroyed.


The prince tells the mermaid to sleep and heal. He tucks the blankets around her and whispers that she is safe, as she falls into an exhausted sleep.

Here is the true story



A solitary man is walking slowly down a Danish beach. He is a poor “prince” who owns land with miles of shore. This prince is unique among the Danish princes. He is against the hunting of whales and keeps the whaling vessels away from his coves and off his shore. With little money, it is difficult to guard the animals he loves so dearly, but he continues to prevent the hunting in his coves. He sees a something tangled in a fishing net and hears quite sobs. He runs over the there is a beautiful young woman tangled in the fishing net crying. She is wearing a sarong of some beautiful shimmery material that is tattered and dirty.


She is crying about the dolphins killed in the Danish hunt, sobbing that she could not save them. She is barely coherent and bleeding from several wounds, so he wraps her in his cloak and carries her home.

I am still young in mermaid years, only 250, but I was much younger when the princes told the stories of capturing a mermaid’s heart. The stories echoed in the rocks and the water and we heard them deep within the sea. All sounds come to us that way. We can hear the sounds of rocks being moved, or water being diverted, of people building or tearing down, as well as the songs and stories of the sons and daughters of the land. We know when babies are born and when elders die. The rocks and the water tell us.



Of course it does not hurt that we also speak the language of the sea and can converse with all that live within the waters. Though is it true that each mermaid has a certain alignment with specific creatures. I am more likely to talk with an octopus than a shark, but that is because I enjoy the octopus sense of humor. This is why I heard the story as a young mermaid…octopi like to chat.


Perhaps it began when the princesses decided to impress the princes, or perhaps it was the other way around, but by the time the story traveled to us the competition was already in place and competitors were on their way. Some were princesses wanting to be mer-people for a day so they could tell the tale, but most were princes wanting to capture the heart of someone they could then brag about. There were even stories that mermaids were immortal, which inspired a few Kings searching for us to restore their lost youth.


We can live forever, but we are not immortal, and we certainly do not hand out the gift of immortality in a random fashion. Oh yes, the stories are true, loving a mermaid, or rather having one love you, can bring a bit of that gift, but our hearts are not easily won and cannot be bought or stolen. But the princes of man did not know this, or did not care to believe it. And so they came to the sea looking for us the way they searched for gold and silver in the earth mines, thinking they could hunt us they way they had learned to hunt whales. But we listened to the words of the rocks and water and we were prepared.

You don't really know the real story

There is that famous story about a mermaid who gave up her tail to marry a prince, who gave up the sea to live the life of a princess. It is lie. It never happened. The real story is a bit darker, a bit richer, and shows the true nature of the prince....and mermaids.

Being led by the sea

There is a bit of magic that happens when we, mermaids specifically, stop making our decisions based on what experts tell us to do. Where would I be if I had followed the advice of that test in high school that said I would be a great flight attendant?

Believe it or not, we do not have to choose to do the things that we are good at. I know a struggling mer-man who is wonderful with numbers and finds accounting easy...and hates it. Everyone tells him that he should continue to make a living this way because he is good at it.
This is no different than being told that we should "compete" at something we are good at. Everytime I try something for the pure joy of doing it, and then find that I can do it well, someone tells me to study it, compete in it, teach it, build my life around it. The message is that because I can I must.

The sea teaches us a different way. Where does the water current lead? Where is your heart filled? What have you out-grown and what calls to you now. Life is a verb, it is about swimming in new waters led by a every changing sea.