Sophie felt, feelings like a black wave risen from the middle of the ocean and then crashing down on her, crushing her, pounding the air from her lungs until all that she breathed, all that filled her was an infinity of pain. Each pain as exquisite, as singular, as a snowflake, or a human being. The pain of a mother, her child torn apart before her. The pain of the torn child, helpless, conscious of their brief horror. The pain of a village in flames, as seen by the one villager who ran, who turned back to see the orange and the black gusts of smoke, to smell the terrible smell of people burning. The pain of soldiers torturing a man, their hearts a manic sickness inside them, the pain of the tortured as he tries again and again to leave his body, to die, but only remains here, in the body he once adored, now its own chamber of punishment. The pain of the old and the pain of the young, the pain of the hurt and the pain of the violent, it blew through Sophie like a rough wind through a corridor, and Sophie felt such a wind would never die, that it had blown forever and forever now would batter her, wearing holes in her heart for it to whistle through.
Sophie was frozen still, paralyzed. The sensation in her body, if she still had a body, was like tumbling and being stuck at once. She thought of a carnival ride that spun and spun until you stuck to the wall and the floor fell down. She was falling with the feelings, the anguish of a creature as its beloved is slain, the devastation of the pulse of love in the midst of terror and war, so that the love turned upon itself and became a misery, a pinching crab where a heart once was. A child immobilized, a child pushed into the sea, a woman screaming in a dark place, all the women screaming in all the dark places. Sophie could not bear it. She could not bear even a single strand of the pain, but how they looped and wove together, how the pain tangled with other pain into tangled snarls, tumors, pulsing and snaring yet more cords of horror. Sophie could not bear any of it, and slowly she felt herself cease to be Sophie. Sophie was easing away. There were only the feelings, thick and cold and endless and alone, bleaker than death. Death, flickered the last wisp of Sophie’s intelligence, death was a pleasure, a welcome, a gateway. Death was kind, a flare in eternity. This, Sophie realized, this was eternity. And then there was nothing but pure and terrible sensation forever.
Feeling her lost now, the mermaid took the salt in her fingers and pressed it into the girl’s slackened mouth. She pinched Sophie’s lips with her twisted, elegant fingers, and on her tongue the crystal continued its slow dissolve. From a rock the size of a house to the bead the mermaid had clutched in her fist, now melting to nothing.
The ogresses had thundered across the ocean floor, to a bed of coral they’d never touched. With a twist of their wrists they’d snapped the coral from the sea like popping a top from a bottle of soda, sending a spray of tiny creatures scuttling. A special stash, one ogress had grunted as Syrena circled their heads in the water, pushing through their forests of hair, looping before their faces. Gorgeous as a woman carved into a marble cliff, golden eyes and the soft curve of their mouths. Special for Sophia. And they began to dig. To have seen the magnificent crystal, gestating so deep within the earth for so long; to watch it become small enough to slip through a crack in your fist—a pebble, a pearl, but still so powerful.
When the mermaid felt Sophie become lost, she experienced it as a flicker of peace. The pressure of hundreds upon hundreds of years—her age—lifted away in a single throb. For a pulse, she was ageless. Before her gills could complete a breath the peace was gone, and her time on this earth crashed back down upon her. Syrena was old. It was time to give the girl her pearl.