Gentle Nerandi

Names are powerful things.

Take my name, for instance. Nerandi is a very unusual name, and a rather powerful one. It is an ocean name, which may influence my pensive nature, characteristic of water, and quickly changing moods, characteristic of the sea. Such influences are strong, although it is not the name that I was born with. I took it from a malevolent sea-fairy.

During my travels I came across a coastal town, one I had travelled through before. It was more of a village than a town, really, and rather wealthy due to the abundance of fish and oysters in the nearby water. I was on generally good terms with the locals and accustomed to the luxuries that staying in a small but affluent town provides.

However, on this particular visit, I noticed a change. The normally carefree locals were stressed, luxuries were scarce and there seemed barely enough food to go around. The dinner provided for me at the inn consisted not of generous portions of freshly-caught fish with sides of exotic vegetables, but of salted meat. The innkeeper’s children pestered me for stories as usual, but their usual enthusiasm was replaced by desperate smiles and it was obvious that they did not want interesting stories so much as something to distract them from their own monotonous lives for a few minutes.

I asked the innkeeper about this – I do not refer to him by his job description due to a lack of familiarity, you understand, but out of respect, since this town deals frequently with otherworldly forces and is familiar with the power and danger of the unnecessary use of names – and he explained to me that the town was being harassed by a particularly aggressive sea-fairy. She would wait for fishermen or pearl-divers to enter the water, and then drown them. The usual warding rituals did not deter her. Even if watergoers travelled in groups large enough to afford protection, she would lure people away from the group and kill them. Without access to the bounty of the sea, the town had nothing to export and produced hardly any food. People would surely starve come winter. Worse, tourists and travellers seemed undeterred by the “myth” of the fairy and rarely left the town alive – as soon as word of the disappearances got out, nobody would come near the town.

The fairy’s name was Nerandi, which I immediately recognised as a powerful name for a sea creature. The townsfolk, with a sense of irony characteristic of people such as they, called her Gentle Nerandi, and made warding signs as they spoke of her. From what people were willing to tell me, I deduced that Gentle Nerandi was a selkie. Such creatures are strong and quite wily, and tend to be aggressive to humans. I had only planned to stay in town for a few days, but that night I paid the innkeeper for a week’s stay and turned my mind to the problem.

I am a reasonably good swimmer, but felt it best that I did not test my prowess against a being of the ocean. I would need to trick Nerandi into coming on land. The traditional way to capture a selkie is to trick them into assuming their human form and then hiding their ocean skin, preventing them from returning to the sea. Naturally, Gentle Nerandi would be reluctant to come ashore for this very reason, but I had to try.

On the second night of my stay, I waited for the moon to rise – a crescent moon, I had checked in advance – and headed out to the ocean. Once there, I walked along the beach with my feet in the water, tantalisingly close but not close enough for a sea fairy to reach while swimming. I gained Nerandi’s attention by the traditional method of shedding seven tears into the ocean, a feat easily accomplished by rubbing salt water into my eyes.

She did not take long to arrive. Contrary to popular belief, a selkie’s ocean form is still quite humanlike, and she watched me with a shrewd, calculating look on her face for several minutes while I pretended to see right through her as most tourists would. Gaining courage from my apparent ignorance of her presence, she swam closer and closer to me, but remained in water deep enough for her to swim.

It seemed that my only option was to move a bit deeper and hope that she would abandon caution for an easy kill. Much like one could drop crumbs progressively closer to oneself in order to lure a duck, perhaps I could get closer to her and remain just out of her reach as I backed up, luring her to the shore. Keeping up the pretense of a tourist out for a midnight swim, I waded in up to my waist. Gentle Nerandi did indeed come a bit closer, and it took all my willpower not to react to the eager maliciousness in her expression as I gazed idly about myself, affecting deep thought.

And then the singing started.

Gentle Nerandi’s song was a deep, crooning lullaby, one that could almost make one take the “gentle” in her name seriously. The enchantment abilities of selkies are insignificant next to creatures such as Sirens, known to be able to bewitch entire ship crews, but Nerandi’s power was more than sufficient to convince a lone woman to wander into the ocean. Lost in the rhythmic, soothing waves of her song, I couldn’t keep track of what I was doing or why it was so important to stay in water as shallow as possible. It would be wonderful to get lost in that sound… abandoning all interest in remaining in shallow water, I struck out toward the source.

Nerandi was a glorious creature, and at the time, I found nothing unnerving about the predatory glare in her black eyes or the malevolent expression on her slightly furry face. When she grabbed my wrist in one hand, I barely noticed the iron grip that should have caused severe pain. Mercifully, it was at that moment that a horrible grating sound tore across Nerandi’s song and cut through the spell. As soon as I was free from the enchantment, I noticed it for what it was – a screaming child. I kicked out, hard as I could, before Nerandi could realise that her control was broken, and struck her delicate tail fin. She released me in shock, and I immediately made for the shore. Mortal terror is an excellent motivator, but still I did not seriously expect to outswim Gentle Nerandi.

I had not counted on her own caution, though – as soon as I made it to water shallow enough to impede her swimming, which was about waist-high for me, she stopped pursuit. It would have been incredibly easy for her to shift forms in order to grab and drown me – I was still dizzy from the enchantment and in no condition to fight, and there was nobody else around to capture her – but apparently even this was too much of a risk for her. When I got to shore I found the innkeeper’s youngest son, who had apparently witnessed Nerandi capturing me, screaming his head off. I quickly calmed him, but the household was already roused, and I ended up having to explain my story to the whole family. The innkeeper’s wife chided me to be more cautious as she prepared some tea; a warning I did not particularly need, feeling as foolish as I did for allowing myself to be enchanted and having to be rescued by a child.

It was two days before I tried again. I knew that it was quite possible that I was outmatched by Gentle Nerandi, but simply leaving the town to be slowly killed off was not an option. Many of the townsfolk were bound to their location by some geas or other; they could not simply move away. Their lives depended on the safety and livelihood of the town itself. So if my only option was to attempt to beat Nerandi, I would simply have to make sure that the odds were as much in my favour as possible. The reason I waited two days was not because the plan required much in the way of organisation, but because that would be the night of a new moon, and that would be the night that water fairies were weakest. Gentle Nerandi was arrogant in the water, but extremely wary of land; it did not seem like battling her outside of her element was going to be an option. Trickery is the only option when dealing with fairies. I had nearly died when I underestimated her. Perhaps I could get her to underestimate me.

I knew the shape of the beach, where the rocks and sandbars were, from my previous trips through the town. Nerandi would know where such things were, of course, but she would not know that I knew, and thus I would still have the element of surprise should I wish to take advantage of them. Taking a strategy from Siren mythology, I begged some beeswax off the innkeeper’s wife. I also managed to acquire a scrap of iron off a friend who owns a souvenir shop.

Within the two days, my wrist had become covered in dark purple marks from where Nerandi had grabbed me. I had the doctor look at it, but he confirmed that it was merely severe bruising and carried no curses or permanent injuries. This evidence of Nerandi’s strength served only to unnerve me further.

On the night of the new moon, mere hours before dawn, I walked again on the beach. The wax in my ears muffled the normally soothing sound of the ocean, leaving me only with the abnormally loud beating of my own heart. Most people would have used proper earplugs, which are much safer in the long term, but I hadn’t found any that would be unnoticeable enough for my purposes.

I swam out to a favourite spot of mine, an area where there were large rocks just below the surface of the ocean. They couldn’t be seen under the dark waves on the moonless night, and I had known many people who had injured themselves on them. For the sake of realism, I scraped an ankle across one of the hidden boulders as if I hadn’t known of them, and proceeded to swim more cautiously.

I heard Nerandi before I saw her. Her gentle croon was muffled by the time it got past my makeshift earplugs, its power lost. I swam slowly towards the source of the sound, as if enchanted.

As I had hoped, she did not draw me too far from the rocks, but instead swam out to meet me. She seemed to accept my clueless tourist facade easily. I knew, though, that she would not again make the mistake of drawing out the capture and put herself at risk should I break the spell; as soon as she grabbed me she would pull me under. When she was within arm’s reach of me but before she had time to grab me, I ducked under the water of my own accord. Her surprise did not afford me the pause I had hoped for, and she merely dove and grabbed my hair. Fortunately I wear my hair very short, knowing that it is a favourite grabbing area of many water-fairies, so I slipped out of her grip and up behind her, grabbing a handful of her rather longer hair. She spun and grabbed my bruised wrist, causing distracting bolts of pain to shoot up my arm. I bit her shoulder.

I would like to leave the story for a moment to remind readers to never, ever put old bits of sharp iron in your mouth. Such accessories cut up the inside of your mouth and are prone to transmitting infections. I am accustomed to such things, but even I only wear them if there is a good chance I’ll die without them.

Gentle Nerandi, of course, had not expected the sharpened iron plate behind my teeth, and her screech was one of surprise as well as pain. She let go of my wrist and made a grab for my throat, giving me another opportunity to bite her.

By this point, our struggles had brought us very close to one of the giant oversea boulders, and I was able to drag her onto it. Although she could not swim up there, she was still a formidable foe, and it took everything I had to hold my own against her. As dawn drew closer, though, she began to weaken, and soon lay gasping on the rock as I held my metal plate at her throat.

“Well, sister,” she said, “you are stronger than I suspected. Congratulations.”

“You tried to kill me, sea-witch. Why shouldn’t I kill you?”

“No matter what you do to me, I shan’t give you my skin,” she said severely. As I had suspected, she was afraid of being tied to land.

“What interest would I have in a pelt? No, Gentle Nerandi – I want your name.”

It is a mark of Nerandi’s attachment to her name that she considered this for quite a while. Finally, she said slowly, “I have two names. In exchange for my freedom, you may have my first.”

“Agreed, Gentle,” I replied, and swam for shore. The fairy tried to follow, but the sun was rising at this point and the combination of that and the recent loss of her powerful sea-name had left her weak in the water. I was able to outstrip her and make it to shore.

The innkeeper treated me to a free beer as I explained the situation to his family. Gentle had of course not wished to lose her sea-name, agreeing to trade her relatively worthless first name, “Gentle”. Like all fairies, she had been reluctant to actually say the name, which was her undoing; I took her “first” name, the one she had had the longest, the one that had been hers long before the townsfolk gave her the Gentle part. I advised the townsfolk to stay out of the sea for another week or so while Gentle adjusted to her new name.

I left the town the next day, and found myself with an unforeseen dilemma. When I had planned my trip I had not expected to collect a sea-name along the way, and as I headed inland I found myself longing for the ocean. I was hesitant to give up the name, as it was substantially more powerful and interesting than my other one. Fortunately I met a trader in my travels, and as I didn’t need my previous name any more, traded it to him for an enchanted bottle of seawater to keep the name Nerandi in.

As for Gentle… well, Gentle is not a sea name. Furthermore, without the powerful Nerandi, the irony is lost. Gentle found herself drawn to the land and found the nature of her name impressed upon her, making her more considerate and less prone to violence. The last time I passed through the town, she had assumed human form and was working as a nursing assistant for the town’s resident doctor. The townsfolk say that she hid her own sea-skin so that nobody could take it from her, presumably with the hope of someday finding a way to be happy in the sea once more. She bears considerable resentment towards me and I plan never to be treated for anything in that clinic ever again. At least, not as long as she is there, and who knows how long selkies live?