The sea was blue in a way that felt aggressively poetic. Not metaphorically blue. Not “wow, nature is beautiful” blue. It was the kind of blue that screamed this is a fairy tale and you are doomed. Deep, clear, endless—so deep that even anchors gave up halfway down and reconsidered their life choices. From the ocean floor to the surface, you’d need a chain of cathedral spires stacked tip to tip just to measure it. And at the very bottom of that depth lived us. Merfolk. Which, I feel obligated to clarify, does not mean we all floated around singing with perfect posture and zero trauma. My name is Ariel. Yes, that Ariel. Mermaid. Princess. Unemployed. My current job title, according to the royal registry, was “Youngest Daughter, Pending Narrative Tragedy.” I wore bikinis. Lots of them. Mostly seashell-based. I had a tail. A very nice one, if I may say so—golden-green, strong enough to break coral, flexible enough to slap idiots unconscious. And according to every bedtime story ever written about me, I was exactly one birthday away from making a series of catastrophically poor life decisions involving: A shipwreck A human prince with too much hair gel A witch My voice My life expectancy No thank you. I had spent the last fourteen years doing everything in my power to avoid becoming canon. At seven, I tried to prevent being “the youngest sister” by rescuing a baby fish and convincing my father to