Waves Breaking Over Ys (paperback)

Men have always had a great many names for our kind, or so my grandmother told me. In the Inner Sea, around Pontus, in waters I have never laid eyes upon, they call us sirens. They fear our songs even as they long to hear such music as would touch their souls. In the eastern ocean, so far that tales of those waters are but legends even to us, they name us in-eo. In the lands nigh to where I was born, they whisper of the fearsome Fomorii of old, who dwell beneath the waves and rise during storms to devour the unwary. But in Cantref Gwaelod, our city beneath the West Sea, we called ourselves merrows.
Though we would have named the shelf upon which our city rests the shallows—for in the shallows merrows find plentiful fish and kelp—our city lies deeper than any human could dive. Even on the clearest day, the water remains dark and turbulent, and no mortal eye will ever chance upon the amber towers of our home, nor linger on the shifting hues of the Coral Palace. Phytoplankton growing within the coral makes the palace gleam such that at night, when merrows become active, my home shines like a beacon calling back any hunters who ventured into distant water for game.
Within the palace, my sisters and I each had our own grottos and our father, King Garanhir, permitted us to decorate them as we saw fit. It pleased him little, I know, that I chose to bedeck my chambers with baubles from the world above. I had gathered jewellery and ornamentation wrought by mortal hands and lost to the sea through violent storms. I had shelves of wooden carvings, which I thought the finest things I had ever laid eyes upon, despite their details having been abraded by the sea. I had arms of bronze cast into the deeps as offerings for the favour of my grandfather, Manawydan, though he was gone from here. I even had found some few iron objects, though like any fae, I found the touch of that metal burned, and regardless, such treasures filled the waters with rust particles. These iron treasures I kept within chests, unwilling to let them go, even as I knew them toxic.
Sometimes, the most precious things are the most harmful to us and we love them all the more for it.
My father blamed his mother, I know, for my perverse—that was a word he used—fascination with the affairs of Men. Since I was young, I recall hearing his fervid lectures decrying the dangers of Man. Men, he claimed, worked iron and would happily turn their foul craft against merrows given the chance. They hated and feared the fae, perhaps not without cause. Our worlds ought not to mix. Men sailed beside Nudd when he came to shatter our Tower of Glass and make us less than once we were. So, Father claimed, we ought have no more love for Men than we did for our landbound fae kindred, the Tylwyth Teg.
This he told his daughters, time and again, though it did not stop my sisters from singing to sailors. Our songs can entrance the mind and leave it pliant as wet sand, and so, like so many merrows before them, the others would draw Men to them. Their hapless victims would vault over the sides of their ships, even in the most turbulent of storm-tossed seas, and drown themselves, all to spend a single instant in the arms of a merrow.
Some of the dead we offered to the Kelpie beneath the great maelstrom of Corryvreckan, for the whirlpool served as the greatest passage between Earth and Faerie, and the Kelpie, the nature spirit who ruled it, was a being ancient and powerful beyond our ken. I do not know what it wished with the dead, or the souls tethered to those bodies, and I think I do not truly wish to know. Some things in the World are best left in the grey places, where we need not dwell on implications that would taste all too bitter.
Most of the dead, however, my sisters would carry home to Cantref Gwaelod. There, in the town square, my fellow merrows would feast upon Man-flesh, would consume the power therein. Flesh holds anáil, the energy of life, even when life has fled it. Sometimes one of my sisters—Mererid, usually, for she was closest to my age—would bid me join in the gorging myself. I never did.
The blood frenzy would come on me, too, as it does all merrows, but I found my gut would churn at the thought of tasting Man-flesh, and I would swim far afield, hunting prey of my own. I could kill an octopus or a seal or even a small shark. I liked prey that would fight back, for the struggle served to soothe the abrasions on my nerves that followed when I denied myself. None of my hunts would quite fill the ache in my belly or the need for the anáil my body craved. So I would wander, alone and at war with my instincts, sometimes for days at a time. My father misliked that even more, especially after he learnt I oft visited the sunken ruins of a fallen human city. But then, that was where I had found the best treasures adorning my grotto, and I would not be swayed from my course.