A rather long chapter for my dear (new) subscribers and friends ^.~, Enjoy!

“Don’t drink on the water’s edge.

Throw yourself in.

Become the water.

Only then

Will your thirst be quenched.”

Jeanette Berson

Air!

My eyes flew open, not minding the stinging feeling that came when I opened them. The only thing I needed was air. My mouth opened itself and my lungs welcomed what they hoped to be air but instead water filled my lungs.

I began coughing, trying to get the water out of my system but it wouldn’t go out of it. Frantically, I looked up, my sight blurry. It wasn’t blurry because of the tears that had gotten in my eyes when I started coughing, nor did it came from the fact that I couldn’t see well in the water, where it came from however, I did not know.

I knew that there had to be air above me so I wanted to begin moving my legs but they seemed to be strapped together from my knees down, so I used my arms to swim up. I had to use big , my body seemed heavier than normal for one reason or another but I couldn’t be troubled with that until I had air in my lungs.

My body seemed to contract in desperate need for air, especially my chest felt tight and some black spots invaded my vision, making me think about horrible memories.

With my last strength, I managed to resurface. I coughed hard, water spurted out of my mouth and with air finally settling itself in my lungs, I reduced my coughing to slight spluttering. My vision returned to normal and I took deep breaths to calm myself down.

I looked into the water, to find out what had kept my legs from moving. I almost sank down into the water again in surprise when I saw what restricted me, or the lack of it. Indeed there was nothing restraining me but instead there was something that I had never had before and never wanted before.

A tail.

Panic rushed through my entire body, what the hell had happened to me? How could I ever escape if I had a tail? I searched for something to lift me out of the water – since mermen who got out of the water would get legs, well according to fairytales – but the tank in which I was almost entirely filled with water, only fifty centimeters  of the tank was filled with air, just enough to put my head out of the water without bumping my head against the ceiling.

I forced myself to calm down and looked again at my tail… It felt weird to refer to it as my tail but it was almost like I had been born with it. There were no scars around the part where it connected with my middle and the tail had the same brown color as my hair did. The scales on my tail were dull and it made me think of rust. The fins connected to my tail had an opaque, dark yellowish color and I was even able to move them, not only the one under my tail but also the one on where once the back of my thighs were and the sides of my hips.

The rusty looking scales reached all the way up to my bellybutton though there weren’t as many as there were on my hips. They rarefied from my hips to my bellybutton. I was scared to touch them but my (morbid) curiosity won and my fingers traced my scales. They felt like fingernails. It was a hard and rough surface but I thought that if you would polish it, that it could be a smooth and shiny.

Not quite satisfied, I let my finger go around the scales edge, even the edge felt as a fingernail. I took one scale between my finger and thumb and pulled at it, it stung so I let go but couldn’t help but try again with another and that one let go without a sting. ‘Just like hair…’ I noticed. My fingers went up to my abdomen, but where once my s were, I felt noting, only hard scales that were going from a rusty color to the original color of my skin that I still had on the upper body of my skin. I sniffed and tried to keep myself from crying again, it wouldn’t help if I cried…

To distract myself I let my fingers go and trace my body further up. Around my chest and s, everything felt the same as always, my skin felt soft, the way it had always been and it calmed me down a bit more. My arms were normal too, even my hands though my fingernails weren’t. They had gotten the same color as my scales, rusty, and they had become long and pointy, slightly harder and less flexible.

I could live with that though, it wasn’t such a big change as my tail was. So I left my nails for what they were and trailed further up along my collarbones to my neck. I immediately removed my hands when I felt scales and a set of gills.

Finding my new discovery rather disturbing, I decided to ignore it and to move up a little more to my face. Close to my ears I felt another set of scales. With a dreadful feeling, my fingers began to trace my ears and indeed my feeling was right when I noticed that my ear cups weren’t round anymore but pointy.

I slowly dropped my hands. I had no idea what to do now. My tank wasn’t big, it was shaped in a cubicle form and I could move two meters to the right and two meters to my left. I sighed in tiredness, my two arms had practically kept me above water all the time – when I was tracing my body just one arm – and they were getting tired. Maybe, I should…

I thought that if I moved my tail just a little bit I would be able to keep my head above the water