“Yuu, could I have a word?” Azul said quietly, as his mother began the brewing process.

  Madame Ashengrotto had promised a delivery of the memory potion to Mallory and Varrun as soon as it was done, but the actual brewing was going to take several hours. When given the option, Mallory had shot Yuu one of her ‘looks,’ and then left suspiciously quickly.

  She mouthed something to Yuu as they swam out of the cavern that looked an awful lot like: “stay close to him,” but if it was, then Yuu owed Mallory more than a few words later.

  That was how Yuu ended up swimming off with Azul to speak with him privately in his childhood bedroom, dragging behind his superior speed with her sluggish human limbs, and trying very hard to banish the crimson discomfort from her face.

  Unlike the grand halls where his mother funneled her clients through to the laboratory, Azul’s room was simple, and not designed to intimidate, for which she was grateful. The room itself was carved into the smooth stone of the ocean floor, with walls of warm-colored rock and softly glowing bioluminescent coral. A soft current ran through the room, keeping it oxygenated and smelling of the fresh ocean waters outside, instead of the cauldron fumes of the rooms above them.

  His bed, one of the only furnishings in the room, wasn’t a pot, or a shell like she’d imagined, but it wasn’t far off. The bed was a broad, concave basin lined with weighted kelp-fiber blankets, nestled between two towering shelves of books. Some were bound in waterproof enchantments, thick with knowledge of business, potion-making, and history, while others were well-worn and dog-eared and obviously well-worn.

  At the foot of his bed, a small tide pool glowed softly, filled with enchanted stones that warmed the water when the currents turned cold. The room was, above all, quiet.

  “Have a seat,” he gestured carelessly to the back of the room, already making for the small desk—the last of the furniture in the room—to read a small scroll that rested on its otherwise-empty surface.

  Awkwardly, she perched herself on the edge of the basin that was his old sleeping arrangement, kicking her feet in the current that meandered across the floor.

  “You read fiction?” she asked, peering up at the shelves.

  “Hm?” he asked, glancing up briefly from the scroll. “Ah, erm… not in quite some time.”

  Right, she supposed. It wasn’t as if dust could collect in a room like this to tell her how long it had been since he’d touched some of these things.

  “I see…” he muttered, sounding frustrated. “All that time, and the trade was so simple.”

  There was a hard bite of anger in his tone as he read further.

  “Are you alright?” she asked softly.

  He looked up at her from the scroll, regarding her as though she had the mental stability of a sardine on a unicycle—on fire.

  “Am I alright?” he scoffed. “Am I alright? Do I have a venomous bite in my shoulder that’s going to render me dead or insane in three days?”

  She rolled her eyes at him, not really having the energy to be angry again. She’d had days of that, already.

  “What, is that all this is? Here, I thought it was something serious.”

  “Don’t joke, Yuu. My mother might be alright with blood on her gills, but I never have been.”

  She sobered.

  “I didn’t think you would,” she met his steely gaze with one of her own. “But. For what it’s worth. I truly don’t blame you.”

  He spluttered hard enough to be choking on his own tongue.

  “You what?”

  “You’re here. You’re trying to fix things. You didn’t put the equivalent of arsenic and absinthe in my drink at the wedding. You tried very hard to stay away, and even harder to keep me from drowning. So… pretty please get this stuff out of my blood, and we’ll call it square.”

  “Pretty—” he was rendered speechless.

  “And if you ask nicely, I’ll help at the lounge on the days that you’re gone. I was never trying to become this much of… an obstacle.”

  “I’m going to give the credit to the venom going to your head that you’re not more level-headed about this. You should want to rip my heart out. Any cecaelian woman certainly would.”

  “Ah, but fortunately for you, I’m eight tentacles short of wanting to ‘rip out your heart,’” she laughed incredulously.

  Azul put two, long fingers gracefully to his temple.

  “Always the jokes,” he groaned. “Returning to what’s important,” he tapped the scroll on the desk, “I now know how to free you from the venom. Fortunately, the process is simple, and should be painless for you.”

  “Should be?” she questioned.

  “Should be,” he vowed. “Had I known before… well, let’s just say that a lot of pain could have been avoided on both of our parts.”

  “Right,” she said flatly, crossing and uncrossing her legs at the edge of the ‘bed,’ “That three day stint of no-sleep for you, and three days of being unable to find anyone with real answers for me.”

  “I had hoped that by the time we spoke again, I would have answers…. I was mistaken.”

  It was as close to an apology as he had given, and she understood why, now.

  He didn’t apologize, because he didn’t want to be forgiven.

  She let her gaze wander again around the room, wondering how much time he’d spent in here as a young boy, or if he’d really spent much time in here at all. Apart from the books, nothing really felt well-worn.

  He was always somewhat of a mystery, she thought, attention drifting back to him. He seemed to be waiting for an answer, but she wasn’t really sure what to say. When her attention drifted to his lower half, however, his discomfort at her seeing him like this, again, rose quickly to the surface.

  “I came here to learn how to undo the bite, and now that I know, we should really get you a better potion for being down here,” he said quickly, shying away from her gaze as though moving to a different part of the room would somehow undo her fascination with him.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Because, in his natural form, Azul was truly beautiful—distractingly so. He was all contrasting dark tentacles and patterning, and pale, violet-tinged skin. And in all of that lack of color, his eyes were shockingly blue. There was no part of him that was easy to look away from, and yet, he cringed away from just that.

  “Yuu?” he said, calling her attention again.

  “What sort of potion?” she asked, playing along.

  He only shook his head at her. “Oh, dear.”

  “Hey. If you’re wondering whether I’m addled from the bite, believe me, you would know if it was doing anything. It’s not exactly subtle—”

  He flinched.

  “—And I can promise you that right now, I am entirely myself. Mal gave me an antidote for the dust, and you’re big enough that it should be entirely metabolized by now. So, we’re both fine. Just… tired. I confess I haven’t been sleeping well, either. Anyway! Potion. What do you mean?”

  He sighed, not ‘satisfied,’ but willing to stay focused. “I mean we need to get you some fins. I have an extra somewhere on this shelf…”

  Sailing past her, he began to reach through the knick nacks on a back shelf, and looking at his size, it was now possible to see that this bed, large as it was, would definitely no longer fit him.

  “Do I get to pick what kind of tail I get?” she asked in a rush.

  “Not really. Why?” he muttered, searching.

  “Fine, just… anything but crab, okay?”

  “And why not crab?”

  She heaved a dramatic sigh. “Well for one, I hear they’re terrible gossips.”

  He snorted, despite himself, and then promptly knocked his head on a shelf.

  “You are a menace,” he said, producing a little vial of blue and pink liquid. “Drink up.”

  “More body-altering chemicals? Yay,” Yuu said, uncorking the thing. Then she noted his look of disapproval. “Oh, fine. When in Rome…”

  She tipped her head back, and swallowed.

  The effect was instantaneous.

  At first, it was just a tingling in her legs, a weightlessness that sent a shiver up her spine. Then, the world tilted. The water no longer felt like an outside force pressing against her—it welcomed her, folding around her skin like a second home. A strange pull twisted in her core, something ancient, something not quite hers but quickly becoming so.

  Then came the real shift.

  She yelped as the magic dissolved her uniform pants. Not too soon, Her legs locked together, and the fire started. She grit her teeth against the pain, the change coming too quick for it to fully register anyway—at the same time, she refused to scream in front of Azul.

  Her knees fused, her bones melting together and morphing from solid bone into a long, cartilaginous extension of her spine. Her feet elongated, skin cooling as it smoothed over into scales that glistened like freshly polished pearls. The color spread outward from the transformation’s core—deep blues and shimmering silvers, iridescent in the dim light, flowing over her like ink dispersing in water.

  Her tail formed before her eyes—long, translucent, with an opalescent shimmer and a near-gossamer fin. Yuu gave it a test flick, sending a ripple through the water. It wasn’t awkward or foreign. No, that was the worst part. It felt natural. As if this had always been waiting beneath her skin, just hidden beneath the surface.

  Her breath hitched as she shuddered into her new form—or it should have, but her lungs no longer seemed to care. Instead, she felt the cool water rush through new, unseen slits along her ribs—gills, beneath her shirt, flexing for the first time.

  Breath coming easier, now, the pain faded neatly away, as though bowing itself off a stage.

  “Most scream during the first transformation,” Azul remarked, as calmly as though he were making an observation on the currents.

  “You could have warned me,” she breathed, giving her attention reluctantly back to him, and wondering if he had watched her so intently throughout the whole transformation. She blushed again, remembering the part where her pants had dissolved.

  “Is it like this for you every time?” she asked, quickly changing the subject.

  He only gave her a disinterested flick of his wrist. “It’s possible, although as every person turns into something different, it is difficult to say.”

  “You’ve never tried getting a tail?”

  He made a face. “Of course I have. But I always seem to be stuck with…these things,” he flicked a tentacle for good measure.

  “They seem useful. And you can use them on land. Want to trade?”

  He rolled his eyes, something that was becoming more of a habit, it seemed.

  “I know how to remove the venom, Yuu. I also happen to know that the crab-kin whom I ran into at the wedding is in possession of a truth relic necessary to start the process. Are you ready to leave?”

  “What, now?”

  “Insanity or death, remember? I’d rather not put this off,” he said blandly.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Like you’ve been putting off sleep? You know, we could spare a couple of hours.”

  “I am already plenty well rested…” he argued, before an idea flashed across his features. “—And I deeply dread what will happen to me if I fall asleep again. Do you mind telling me how you ended up underneath me in that lab?”

  She held up her hands in the universal gesture of whoa-there-octopus-boy. “I’ll have you know, I was an innocent bystander in that.”

  “Right.”

  “Your useful appendages grabbed me when I walked up to give you my jacket. I don’t know how you fell asleep in the first place. It was freezing in there.”

  “A—ah…” he stammered, looking away. “In that case, I apologize.”

  “I’m not blaming you…completely,” she admitted. “I mean, it looks like this mark has been doing things to both of us.”

  He arched a silvery brow at her. “Things?”

  It was her turn to look away. “So! If you’re awake enough for a swim—does this happen to be the same crab-kin who fell for the krill merchant at the wedding?”

  “The very same,” Azul said suspiciously. “You noticed?”

  “They were right in front of me. And loud. And that crab was a very good kisser, apparently. Um, I mean, enthusiastic. I mean—well, it was noticeable. They probably could have picked somewhere more private? Not that I’m critiquing their locale—I—so you know where they live?—AH!”

  An awkward flip of her new tail sent her bouncing back onto his bedspread, and even underwater, it was hard to get out of the thing. It was essentially a giant bowl.

  “How did you sleep here? And then get out again!” She wriggled, struggling. “It’s like it sucks you in and doesn’t let go!”

  Azul was silent, letting her dig her social grave right in front of him.

  “It’s more comfortable when you have something to pool underneath you,” he explained breezily. “But, if you’re quite done critiquing my choice of bed, and our target’s romantic methods, then we can be off. Fortunately for us, Mr. Kalx lives in the middle of the city. He is highly desired by merchants and wardens.”

  “Wardens? As in prison wardens?” Yuu gasped. “What kind of crab is this guy?”

  “A bounty hunter; and I would recommend against calling him a crab to his face, mer-folk are somewhat sensitive about our origin species. It would be akin to calling you, simply, ‘primate.’”

  She nodded. “I promise to read Mer-folk Courtesy 101 when we get back.”

  “Marvelous,” he said, with another of those more-frequent eyerolls.

  There was a small ‘pop’ on the desk, and both of them turned to see another little crystal vial, the contents as shimmery as Yuu’s tail.

  “That would be my mother,” Azul explained, scooping up the vial and handing it to her. “I’d recommend against taking it until you’re ready to sleep. Anything that affects the mind is always….well, I suppose you’ll just have to see.”

  “Was that what we were waiting for?” questioned Yuu.

  “That, and the transformation, yes,” Azul confirmed. “Shall we then?”

  He surprised her, and offered her a hand to pull her out of his bed, which both excited and disappointed her—NOT something you’re going to think about, Yuu! That’s what you get when love venom starts eating your brain!

  She took his hand, cursing her heart-rate that tingled through her fingertips when she touched his skin again, and let him pull her up, and back into the winding halls.

  “As long as you promise not to fall asleep on me, let’s go.”

  “Believe me,” he said. “I would rather juggle rabid weasels than sleep on you again.”