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exanimatus.livejournal.comOnce upon a time, there was a mermaid who lived in a beautiful underwater kingdom with her five older sisters, each born a year apart. The sea king allowed each of them to visit the surface on their fifteenth birthday, and for five years, the mermaid listened to each sister's tale of the world above, anticipating the day she would visit it and see for herself. She was fascinated by what her grandmother would tell her about humans--they lived very short lives compared to the merfolk, but while merfolk would turn into sea foam and cease to exist at the end of their days, humans had eternal souls that lived on in heaven after they died.
On her fifteenth birthday, she mermaid swam up to the surface, excited to finally see the human world. The first thing she found was a ship at sea, captained by a handsome prince, who she fell in love with at first sight. The ship was caught and destroyed in a dreadful storm, but the mermaid saved the prince and brought him to shore near a temple. As she waited on the beach, hoping someone would find him, she wished that she, too, had an immortal soul so that she could spend eternity happily ever after with her prince. She fled back into the ocean when a young girl from the temple approached them, and neither the girl nor the prince ever saw her.
Days passed, and the mermaid thought of the surface world more and more, desperate to return and be with the prince. Eventually she made a deal with the Sea Witch, agreeing to cut out her tongue in exchange for a potion that would give her human legs. When she drank the potion, it felt as though she was sliced through with a sword, yet she was given the ability to dance like no human could ever dance before. But that too had a price, because whenever she walked it felt like she was walking on sharp blades and her feet bled most terribly. What's more, she would only get her soul if the prince loved her and married her, for then a part of his soul would flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the fist day after he married another woman, she would die of a broken heart and turn into sea foam.
She wandered into the human world and found her prince again, who took a liking to her even though she was mute. Most of all, he liked to see her dance, and she danced for him even though it caused her excruciating pain to do so. One day, the prince's father ordered him to marry a princess, but the prince claimed that he could only love and marry the young girl from the temple who saved his life. In private, though, he admitted to the mermaid that she was beginning to take the place of the temple girl in his heart.
One day, the prince learned that the temple girl was really the princess he was supposed to marry, who had been sent there to be educated. They were married the very next day, and the mermaid's heart was broken. She thought of all she'd given up, and all she'd suffered, and she despaired, thinking that only death awaited her. However, just before dawn, her sisters came up to the surface and brought her a knife that the Sea Witch had given them in exchange for their long hair. If the mermaid could kill the prince with the knife and let his blood drip on her feet, she would become one of the merfolk again, her suffering would end, and she could live out her full life.
But as she walked into the prince's room and saw him sleeping peacefully next to his bride, she couldn't bring herself to do it. She still loved him with all of her being. As dawn broke, she threw herself into the sea and her body dissolved into sea foam. She became a part of the ocean once more, never to live or love again.
Find me a moral to this story, if any of you still possess the intellectual capacity to do so.
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