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Every mer knows to avoid wreck graveyards. Obviously. Every decent mer that is. Why would anyone want to hang around something with the word ‘grave’ in the name? Something associated with death? Somewhere it's easy to trap oneself? Not me, with my black and white clownfish tail. Of the the Big Three tribes of Mer, only the members of Durmstrang make a habit of hanging around such forbidding places, and that's partly why the other two tribes, the decent ones, turn their noses up at the locale. But Durmstrang exclusively accepts predators, so what can anyone expect? Exclusively breeds predators, and a lot of stupid fish congregate amongst shipwrecks. Many stupid fish in flashy scales. Many stupid humans in stupid costumes.
It's taboo for Mer to murder and cannibilise each other, just as such an act is taboo amongst Man. But taboo in no way prevents it from occurring, and that's another reason not to venture amongst wrecks. There are too many nooks and crannies and dark places where evil can hide. But try telling foolhardy young mer that dashing in and out of holes in rusted man-made monsters doesn't make you cool. Try telling them and enjoy the gormless looks you'll receive back for your trouble.
“Oh, also, vampires. Vampires lurk amongst the steel shells of mannish vessels.” I say, to my class of teenage idiots. The blank looks they were giving me evolve into contemptuous ones. This is when I consider giving up the profession.
“Come on, Teach! There's no such thing as vampires! Now you sound like a humie.” Laughs one young twerp, the stupidest of the lot and also the class bully. He possesses the tail of a sunfish, and looks like one too. If you know you know.
“Draco, I hope you're eaten first.” I ejaculate, with feeling. I didn't mean to say such a thing out loud, but here we were.
My class packs out laughing, the hollow sound scaring a passing squid, which shoots us with ink. Sometimes I really hate my job, as opposed to the mere ordinary contempt I have for it. Today I’m tasked with escorting my class around a shipwreck graveyard, the largest one known, situated on the neutral plain between the territory of the three tribes. The Devil's Triangle is what I believe humans call the area. Why am I tasked with this most sinister of school trips? Because the headmaster hates me in particular.
“Potter, I hope you're eaten second. Really and truly.” I say to one Harry Potter, also laughing despite himself. I hate him because he sports his mother's dolphinfish tail, and because he emerged from an egg that was not fertilised by me, but by some fathead with an actual dolphin tail. Shitty small dolphin, but still, how he used to flaunt it.
Of course Parrotfish (as I privately call Granger because of her teeth and tail) raises her hand. One of Potter's friends, I would have hated the know-it-all regardless of that sordid fact. When I attended school I didn't need to raise my hand or say anything in class and people still knew I was the best. The true extent of my genius was between me and my teachers. I didn't feel the need to make it obvious to all and sundry. Parrotfish doesn't even wait for me to keep ignoring her, but simply states her moronic opinion.
“But, professor, there are no such things as vampires.”
Oh, here we go again.
“I hope you're eaten third, Granger.”
So off to the graveyard we swim. It isn't only my class attending this ill conceived trip, but more or less the entire school, all to provide a cover for the headmaster attempting to assassinate me and the three or four gnats who bothered me most (I failed to mention Weasley earlier because I tend to forget he exists. I hope he's eaten fourth). The oarfish calling itself ‘Dolores Umbridge’ leads this cavalcade of foolish youth while I stay at the back with some of the other less enthusiastic teachers.
Soon, dark and jagged shapes begin to break up the pale green monotony of the flat plain stretching in all directions around us. Soon, dark and jagged shapes fill our view in every direction. Hideous. Heinous. Horrible. Ships lying like carcasses the ocean refuses to consume. Spat out bones jutting from the rippling sand. Yes, many are covered in all manner of coral, but that hardly helps the impression one receives of being surrounded by corporeal ghosts just waiting to launch themselves at the unwary.
Five minutes later the group ceases swimming when Dolores raises a hand and we all pause to hover above the plain, gawking to various degrees, even the adults. Horrible as it is, the sight could not be described as anything other than impressive and profound. So much wreckage, representing so much death and loss. Why could humans not discover this place? Thousands of their lost and destroyed vessels lie here, sometimes piled high. Vessels from every era, even those from the ages of wood. Even their flying machines, their airplanes, lie amongst the misshapen corpses.
“How quaint.” Minerva says, from beside me. Yes, quaint is certainly a word. Not one I would have used, but if something must be said…
Dolores also wanted them dead, because children began to dive, groups of two or three picking a wreck and aiming for it, squealing, shrieking, and screaming all the way. Cthulhu. Dagon. Help me. I’m going to follow the brats I’ve marked for death, just to see what sort of trouble they'll get into, because they always get into trouble. Even when there is no possible way they could. Maybe I'll receive the privilege of seeing a vampire, creatures I've secretly always been interested in. Maybe I'll get away with just a little bite from one, just nasty enough to confer immortality on me. Certain things are shifting in my boring little world, certain events occurring, and I am beginning to suspect that I'll be in need of immortality rather soon.
🧜♀️🦈🧜♀️
Elsewhere amongst the field of wrecks, down a dark crevice, a pair of Durmstrang affiliated mersharks sleep peacefully in their lair deep within the bowels of an old Spanish galleon, a warship and treasure vault combined. Gold lies in bright piles around and on top of the pair. Gold, and bones. Many many bones. Bleached or covered with coral to form bright decorations and homes for tolerated fish. True vampires they are, they only drink blood, but tiny nanny fish keep their living environment clean for them. A mershark’s teeth and ferocity rarely leaves survivors, and corpses tend to pile up.
For years the pair have rested, enjoying the gentle caress of tonnes of water as it shifts back and forth, enjoying the cool dark and the weight of glorious centuries. No fish, aside from their cleaning staff, dare invade their lair, driven away by the overwhelming scent of death and evil, and the blood that taints the sea around the galleon, which by itself looks very ominous.
But that sort of common sense and awareness applies only to fish, not to merfolk, and there's a reason why clutches of eggs are laid by mermothers, rather than them birthing only one child at a time. Out of the thousands of dead ships littering the Bermuda plain, the school trip has chosen the area of the old warship for its fun and games.
Laughter, giggles, and chatter drift closer to the huge old ship, slipping through tiny gaps in its engorged wood, swimming down the rusted mouths and dark throats of cannon, bravely entering the hole in the bottom of the hulk where the vampire sharks come and go. The laughter pings against gold coins and several fall, but the vampires do not wake. No, what wakes them are the edgy try-hard statements coming from the mouth of one Draco Malfoy.
“My father says all halfbreeds and humieborn mer should be fed to the seafood industry. Can you believe we have to tolerate living around them? By Dagon, why couldn't Father send me to Durmstrang?! They don't tolerate muddy blood amongst their ranks.”
A pile of gold coins collapses, the side caving in to reveal a long, highly asymmetrical tail with a sharply elongated caudal fin. Black stripes interrupt its grey in continuous bands. Reddish bubbles rise towards the ceiling of the lower deck from a gold pile many feet opposite the knife-like tail.
“And what's all this blather about vampires? Snape must be losing it thanks to Potter and his ilk, I swear.”
Another pile of gold collapses, exposing an almost perfectly symmetrical tail larger than its companion and lacking stripes. The fin twitches, once, twice, and then the entire heavy pile of metal slides off the back of its owner as he lifts himself up on his well defined forearms. Turning his head to cast into silhouette an aggressively predatory profile, he blinks his dark red eyes, the pupils expanding massively so that they overcome all the rest.
Meanwhile, his smaller and more stealthy friend has already slid out from under his expensive blanket, and is listening, and sniffing, at the hole in the ship's belly, his lips slightly parted to reveal rows of razor teeth.
🧜♀️🦈🧜♀️
I am so bored. So bored. What is my salary again? Not nearly enough. Even the hated trio of merchildren have failed to get into any sort of exciting trouble. No, all they do is awkwardly attempt to court each other, adolescent style, and chirp about their shitty families. More than once one or the other swims off to pluck coral and collect sea slugs and pearls, or otherwise investigate a mildly interesting rock or piece of a ship, and nothing happens. They always return. Now they're wafting along an artificial valley formed of wrecks, Spanish galleons and Viking dragonships sitting bow and stern with yachts, cruise liners, and oil tankers. It's an experience, I will admit, the scuppered dead lying still with an almost living stillness, fish darting in and out of the empty eye sockets of their portholes. We've yet to be made even slightly nervous by the pointed nose of a shark jutting from around the side of a wreck or hunk of coral.
But that changes abruptly.
The trio of brats, the so-called ‘golden trio’ float about near an old warship built dark and turned more so by the black and red coral growing along its flank, the one pointing at the distant surface. Its triple masts project like pointing fingers towards the wall of the crevice it fell in. Incredibly, it's main sail is still intact, and flutters slowly with the current, now collapsing inwards, now ballooning full, its crimson avian simultaneously staring both East and West. Some sort of humie conceit, the proclamation that they rule everything. On the other side of the undead hulk, Draco's smarmy voice pieces the calm. Great, a clash shall soon result between the trios. I'm so focused on peering through a stand of giant kelp, that a swift moving shadow to my right makes me yelp, embarrassingly.
“Ah!”
Kelp waves back and forth handsomely. Sand trickles down the side of a jagged rock. No fish gape at me. The urchins have all retreated. I’m in time to catch a burst of black stripes pass by through the slimy green fronds, then nothing. It's deathly quiet.
“Is that Potter I hear?....Crabbe, Goyle, how about we-” Draco's pretentious voice is abruptly cut off with a sudden bark of alarm.
A bloodcurdling scream yanks my attention back towards the wreck, but all that awaits there is Parrotfish and Weasley dashing towards my hidey-hole, faces white with fear.
“Harry!” They scream, stopping in the middle of No Mer's Land and staring upwards. So I do the same, my body feeling like it's on strings, the strings of adrenaline. But looking up is a mistake.
Far above swims a massive, sleek form moving as fast as a torpedo, propelled by a crescent shaped tail. Its white underbelly is soon lost in the light imbuing the water, leaving only a gigantic ribbon of blood behind, the wavy waterfall of gore cascading downwards, drawing every shark for miles. Or it would, but no sharks will approach the table of a vampire.
“Weasley! Granger! Get over here!” I call, only to immediately regret my action when they scramble into my secret blind only for another flash of stripes to batter my peripheral vision.
“Help!” screams Parrotfish, an instant before she's yanked backwards into the forest of kelp and an explosion of blood crashes over Weasley and myself.
“Hermione!” Weasley screams. Clawed hands encircle stands of algae, and the mershark lurking amongst the fronds, despite having got himself a meal, thrusts his head between a pair of kelp tendrils, biting the boy's throat out in one atrociously swift movement, rows of razor teeth slicing through flesh as easily as humans slice up jelly. For a monstrous moment the creature's jet black eyes fix on mine, and the ghastly beast grins around a mouthful of scarlet blood, but then a plume of crimson gets in the way of the wicked sight, crimson rapidly pulled towards its fluttering gills.
Time to go. I'm not proud of myself, but I flee from that forest of horror, screaming like a little girl.
I am not the only teacher to have lost a class, as I discover, upon making it to the meeting point. McGonagall has lost five children to a single stonefish, and Trelawney got hers entangled in jellyfish stingers, while Hooch had a sperm whale appear from nowhere and Flitwick bothered a giant squid. I feel pretty good actually, because I can show three survivors out of a group of six. That's an excellent ratio for merschool.
“I'm complaining to my father. Just you wait till he hears about this!” Draco (plus pals) is already floating nearby when I arrive, where he's being ignored by most people aside from Moody, who looks like he wants to let the vampires finish the job. The pale boy swims rather more awkwardly than before, (not that he ever swam particularly elegantly) and the reason soon becomes apparent when he turns, revealing a massive half moon chunk missing from his tail. Stupid fish that he is, lucky mer, he isn't bleeding, so the giant vampire moved on to a tastier target.