Hundreds of feet below the surface, the girl lay peacefully in a bed of kelp. Caressed by the gentle underwater currents stirring around her, her long hair swayed gently about her head like a veil, hiding her face from view. By all appearances, the girl seemed sound asleep…
And indeed, asleep she was.
Against all odds, despite her airways and her lungs being filled to the brim with the lake's icy waters, the girl was as alive as she'd been, when she'd drifted off to sleep in her warm and cosy bed an unknowable length of time ago. Had anyone else been in her place, they would have surely drowned a thousand times over… but not her.
The girl stirred in her sleep, her eyelids fluttering.
Tormented by her usual nightmares, the girl was just about ready to flee into the waking world, but she was about to wish she had never woken up in the first place…
All of a sudden, the girl's eyes snapped open.
Staring up into the inky depths of the lake, at the bottom of which she now found herself, she did not understand what she was seeing at first. She was used to waking up to a familiar ceiling above her head, but this most certainly was not it.
These brackish, dark waters… it was almost as if…
Oleandra— for it was she— opened her mouth to shout for help, but not even a single bubble escaped her throat as her cry echoed through the deep, attracting the attention of the lake's denizens. Within moments, pale yellow eyes began appearing among the columns of kelp, and soon, Oleandra found herself encircled by a contingent of Merpeople, armed to the teeth with sharp spears.
They seemed wary of her, but none dared to be the first to approach her. To begin with, it was questionable at best if Merpeople even possessed any magic of their own, but their kind certainly knew to avoid magic when they could help it, fearing it almost instinctively.
However, Oleandra did not have her wand on her, and neither did she have her Translating Earrings equipped— in fact, the only garments she had on her person were her flannel pyjamas, which wouldn't offer any protection against the Merpeople's wickedly sharp blades. Oleandra's pyjamas only served to protect her from the cold— though not when soaking wet.
Still, Oleandra was not defenceless— she instinctively knew she was at the bottom of a large body of fresh water, where her powers would be at their apex. Eager to put some distance between the Merpeople's spears and herself, she summoned a current and propelled herself upwards.
At first, the Merpeople were taken aback by Oleandra's sudden burst of speed, but they quickly realised that if the strange human had chosen to escape, it was because she could not harm them. Having endured much persecution at the hands of humanity in general, their chief chittered excitedly, eager to get a shot at revenge.
Surely nobody would ever notice if this strange girl went missing at the bottom of their lake!
Feeling a ripple in the waters below her, Oleandra glanced over her shoulder and hastily contorted her body, narrowly avoiding getting skewered by a harpoon. An entire host of Merpeople were chasing after her!
Redoubling her efforts, Oleandra sliced through the dark waters like a swordfish, but she quickly ran into a problem— the surface of the lake had frozen over, leaving her trapped underwater! Whoever had played this sick joke on her had to have transported her somewhere far to the north, where the temperature dropped below zero in September…
"Thursaz!" Oleandra shouted, twisting her fingers and pointing at the ice above her head.
However, nothing happened.
"Isaz!" Oleandra screamed, this time trying to manipulate the ice itself.
Once again, nothing happened.
Oleandra couldn't make head nor tail of her predicament. As far as she knew, Merpeople only existed on Earth, but her runic magic wasn't functioning properly. In her experience, there were only two reasons why the magic of the stars would refuse to work: either she was underground, which she clearly wasn't, or… she was no longer on Earth.
Spears and harpoons whizzed past her, burying themselves in the icy wall above. Oleandra whirled around to blast her assailants with a compressed jet of water, sending them spiralling back into the depths. However, she was still surrounded on all sides by the vicious creatures, slowly advancing with their spears in hand. Worse still, Oleandra's water-based attacks didn't seem to be incredibly effective against them…
The Merchief barked out an order, and a dozen mermaids surged past the frontliners' spears. Like the retiarii gladiators of ancient times, each held a net woven from seaweed fibres in one hand. However, instead of holding a trident in the other, they gripped a lead. And at the end of each lead— a Grindylow.
"SKREE!"
Upon being given the order, the Mermaids let loose their pets. The Grindylows threw themselves at Oleandra, propelling themselves through the water like tentacled torpedoes. Oleandra flipped upside down in the water and kicked off the icy surface of the lake towards her foes, sending a ripple of compressed water towards them with one hand, while reaching for the Sword of the Lake with the other— but for some reason, her hand failed to close around her sword's hilt.
"What the—"
Oleandra had no time to wonder why she had failed to summon her soul-bound sword, even though she was literally submerged in lake water. Her attack had managed to repel a few Grindylows, but the rest agilely swam around the pressurised wave and latched onto her. Their tentacles wrapped around her body, their suckers leaving angry red welts on her skin, while their bony fingers grabbed at her limbs and their pointy teeth sank into her defenceless skin, causing her to howl in agony.
BAM.
A sort of dull sound reached Oleandra's ears, and fissures formed in the ice above her head. Someone was trying to break through to her!
BAM!
The Mermaids recoiled at the sound, but the Merchief angrily waved his shell-encrusted harpoon at them. Looking at each other in fear, the Mermaids resumed their approach, holding their nets in front of them…
CRACK!
But just as the Mermaids were about to throw their nets, the ice finally gave in. A hand reached into the water and grabbed Oleandra by the scruff of her neck, before pulling her to safety, still covered in writhing Grindylows!