Dreamer of the Sea

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"Dreamer of the Sea"

Raine thought of her mother as she slowly died, drowning in the sea that was as much her creator as her killer.

Her lungs burned in a silent plea for air. Raine gave them no heed. She would rather leave this world behind than attempt to be a part of it anymore. She had never been belonged to this world.

She had never found acceptance because of what she was.

Let me die. It is better this way.

Her dreams were all that she had ever had. Dreams of what life would have been if she had been a part of her father’s world: a world of infinite mysteries and boundless experiences. The world beneath the waves, the world of unseen to the eyes of landbound mortals. How she longed to become like her father and swim in the invisible currents, the “sea winds”, allowing them to take her wherever their whims desired. How she wished to see her father’s coral kingdoms and to worship with them, give praise to the very gods she called her own.

Her dreams gave her the strength to survive and go on, despite being chained to the realms of earth and not of the sea.

But it was her dreams that her father had shattered with but a few words.

“Raine, you do not belong here. You are landbound and nothing more.” Her father’s damning voice resonated throughout her cloudy mind.

Raine struggled to understand those words. Why had her father told her to leave? Why was she nothing more to him than a landbound half-breed? Landbound…

She knew what that term meant to her father’s people. She was gill less, a half-breed creation of a broken taboo. She was a pariah in both societies, a miserable afterthought created by a moment of passion between her parents. Raine was alone, forever and utterly alone.

Her aquamarine eyes stared out into the cloudy blue depths, gazing out at the world that she so yearned to be a part of. Her ebony hair billowed out lazily, like the oncoming cloud of that darkness that she knew would soon take over her being.

She felt no fear, though. She knew she would at last feel no more pain, no more sorrow, no more bitter resentment for a dream that would never come true.

She would know peace.

Peace. It was such a foreign concept. Her mother had known peace. She was a disciple of the principals of pacifism and natural tranquility. Yet these ideals had granted her no peace when her mother, her only true guidance and companion in life, had died. The gods had taken her mother away, calling her to their side without thought of its repercussions, without the thought of what might happen to a creature such as her who was damned from the first moment she drew breath.

It was the gods’ creed that a child of the land and of the sea never be joined and she was the result of such a union, the metis of the gods’ laws.

Raine had turned to her father then, a man who she had never known.

A man who had turned his back on her.

How cruel was this world when one’s own father turned his back on his daughter in her greatest time of need?

Raine would leave the world of the flesh behind and seek release in the cold embrace of death. An embrace that was as cold as her father’s own.

It’s only a matter of time…

She prayed the end would come quicker.

Raine had chosen the Sea of the Goddess’s Tears as her place of release. It was here that she had known some semblance of tranquility, regardless of how illusionary and minute it may have been. Her small wooden boat had cut across the waters at dawn, the wooden oars being pulled by a woman who had nothing to lose and all the determination in the world.

She had chosen her fate to be given by the world she longed to be a part of. The early morning waves had lapped so calmly, almost invitingly, against her small boat’s hull, calling to her. Calling for her to join with them, to forever be set free of a loveless existence. She had heeded that call, leaving all of it behind her.

Mother...

The beautiful woman who had fallen in love with the sea and with her father, a creature of the Sea of the Goddess’s Tears. Her mother and father had been happy for a short time. It was in that blissful time that Raine had been conceived.

It was her very existence that had driven her mother and father apart.

Her birth was damning to them both. Raine felt sorrow for her mother, a woman whose quest of peace had driven her to leave behind the world of mortal consequences and seek out her peace in death.

Like mother, like daughter.

Her mother’s beautiful face stared out at her now, beckoning for her to join her in the depths.

To know peace. To know death.

Raine did not hesitate to follow.

~~

Morning came the misty shores of the Sea of the Goddess’s Tears. A lone fisherman came upon a derelict wooden fishing boat and found no one on board. Nothing denoting ownership of the boat was found so the fisherman set about pulling the boat into shore.

Later, he discovered something of interest under a folded-up cotton chemise. It was a pair of coral wedding rings, hidden in a golden locket in which were inscribed the words:

“For my beloved child, let the sea be your sanctuary as it was what brought us together”.