Refuge by the Sea

They said she could see the future in the bones of fish.

Esmeralda lived in the shadow of cliffs that sang when the tide was high, in a shack built from driftwood and old sails, hung with talismans that clicked in the wind. She was a fortune teller, a witch, a woman both feared and desired - neither of which she encouraged.

But he came anyway.

He arrived at dusk, limping, a worn cloak clutched around his shoulders and blood on his collar. He wasn't what she expected. No swagger, no bravado. Just exhaustion and those eyes - startlingly blue, like the sea on a clear morning. His hair was damp and tangled, and he smelled of brine and desperation.

"They said you could help me," he said.

Esmeralda watched him from behind her tousled fringe. "They say many things." Her earrings softly jingled as she tilted her head to one side.

"I don't want gold. I want to disappear."

She stepped into the light, out of her shed. Her skirts brushed against the door frame. "Disappearing isn't free."

He blinked, not in fear, but awe. "I'd heard stories... but you're real."

She smiled in amusement, soft lines around her eyes. "Are you?"

He gave a hoarse, weary laugh. "Not sure anymore."

His name was Luc. Once a privateer, then a fugitive. A price on his head in every port north of the Strait. But he spoke gently, listened when she talked, and didn't touch her things without asking when she allowed him to enter her shack.

Esmeralda didn't trust soft men. They were too often hiding something sharper beneath. But it turned out Luc only hid sorrow.

Over three days, she nursed his wounds. He watched her work her craft: how her hands stirred the potion, how she sang to the ingredients in a tongue older than the Empire. She didn't really offer comfort in conversation, but he found it in her silences.

On the fourth day, she brought him to the hidden tidepool grove beneath the cliffs.

"Take off your clothes. And sit down on the rocks. As promised there's a way to stay hidden," she said. "But it's not painless."

He looked at the ocean. "I've never been afraid of pain."

She saw the lie. He was afraid.

She kneeled town, touched his bare chest, marked him with ash and a dark, viscous paste. Her hands lingered a moment longer than needed. His breath caught.

"Stretch out your legs. Now this is where it may hurt. However there is one thing that makes it less painful. Do you mind?" He looked at her in confusion and fear.

Esmeralda lifted her skirts and in one fluid motion she sat down on Luc's lap. She was not wearing any undergarments, her soft, warm skin touched his thighs and despite the cold, hard rock underneath him, he couldn't help but feel heat built up inside of him.

"So, here comes your last chance to pull back from this. Do you still want to disappear from the face of the earth?"

"Everything that spares me from being imprisoned, tortured and executed is worth going through."

"Then, drink this and draw a deep breath."

She pulled a small red flask from her gurtle and handed it to him. The liquid smelled of seaweed and rotting fish but as soon as it touched his tongue it felt fizzy, almost electric. Then, his attention war drawn somewhere else.

His manhood was, in fact, very much erect when Esmeralda suddenly put her hand around his shaft. "This helps with what's about to come."

Esmeralda knew what she was doing, but still she was afraid. She had grown fond of Luc, even if she couldn't admit it to herself. And although she intended to remain emotionally detached, easing him through the transformation through physical pleasure caused her to get aroused herself, there was no use in fighting it.

She stroked him in soft rhythmic motions and gently pressed his legs together with her thighs. While she did so, a drop of her dew fell down onto him. They locked eyes. A split second that felt like an eternity. Then they simultaneously leaned in for a long, tender kiss.

Suddenly, Luc moaned, not in pleasure but in discomfort. He withdrew from the embrace, ever so slightly.

"They burn and yet they are cold as ice, my, my legs. What's happening to them..."

Esmeralda burshed his cheek with her thumb and then, suddenly, she fully lowered herself onto his manhood. Her warmth would soothe him, counteract the outerworldly sensation of transformation.

Slowly she started rocking up and down. And then a moan escaped her lips as Luc felt too overwhelmingly pleasant inside of her.

He seemed to momentarily forget his agony and started to move with her. Then, with trembling hands, he undid her blouse, exposing breasts that where even more beautiful that he had imagined when he'd been lying awake in the previous nights in the shack.

When he lifted his torso to touch her areolas with his lips, he suddenly noticed that his body didn't respond as it should have. Everything from the waist down was numb and yet it tingled - but the waves of pleasure that came from his groin soon took over again.

Esmeralda tried to not lose herself in the pleasure and Luc's exquisite, musky smell that now surrounded her. While they were entangled in an act of pure lust, Luc's body was undergoing an outerworldly transformation. Esmeralda arched her back and with one hand reached behind her. Where his thighs and knees should have been, there was now a single, muscular mass that seemed to slightly taper the further she reached down. Her hand trembled.

Then an intense wave of pleasure rolled over Esmeralda. She shifted back forward and lowered herself down, hungry for a kiss. Luc moaned. Both their bodies where rhythmically pulsing, in anticipation of a shared climax.

And it came, crashing, like a tidal wave it rolled over them. With a final intense moan, she collapsed onto him.

When the fog had lifted before Esmeralda's eyes, she peeked down at Luc's hips and caught a glimpse of faint speckles of silver peaking out from underneath her hips. She lifted herself up, reached back and felt it, unmistakably: The smooth, cold touch of fish scales.

Torn in her emotions, she glanced at Luc. He still had his eyes closed, his head resting on the rock.

"I feel different." He said with a hoarse voice, and Esmeralda hesitantly took his hand to move it to where his human flesh gave way to the scales.

"No-one can hurt you now or ever more. You will be out of reach."

Esmeralda removed herself from Luc's groin and lay down by his side. His manhood, now flacid, had retracted into his new lower body, now only being indicated by a faint slit beneath the scales. They both stared at the magnificent fish tail, half in shock and half fascinated by its beauty.

On land Luc was now utterly helpless, even more than before. But in the ocean he would be off limits for his prosecutors.

They lay on the rock side by side, spent and shaking. "I didn't think it would feel so... intimate" Luc said. Esmeraldas fingers brushed his cheek. "All true magic is."

They waited for nightfall. As Luc recovered, Esmeralda softly hummed songs if her language.

"Esmeralda," Luc said suddenly. "Why do you live like this - alone?"

She didn't answer. Not directly. "When I was a girl, I tried to be ordinary. I nearly drowned in it."

Later, under the veil of fog and darkness, she showed him the best path to the sea. He was heavy, awkward on land. It was painful for her to watch him drag himself to shore, but his stature and now the weight of his muscular, 4 foot fish tail made Esmeralda unable to carry him in any way.

At the water's edge, he hesitated. "Will I see you again?"

She looked at him - at the curve of his shoulders, the plea in his gaze. She kissed him then, finally, not with hunger, but with sorrow. As if tasting something she would never have again.

"I'll be here," she whispered. "But you belong to the tide now."

He slid into the water like it had always known him. For a moment he hovered, shimmering beneath the surface.

Then he was gone.

Every new moon, Esmeralda walks to the shore. Some say she waits for a vision. Others, for a lover. She tells them nothing. But her fire burns longer on those nights, and the tide brings her shells that only grow in the deepest trenches of the sea.

And sometimes, when the tide shifts, a dark figure rises from the waves.