The City of Merman

Part I. The Nord Fang

Prologue

Ghost ship! Century-old vessel, Mermaid, reappears at our local quay, only to mysteriously vanish again

The North Tribune, January 18th, 1908

A full-rigged vessel, Mermaid, missing for nearly a century, has made a startling reappearance at our local quay here in North Fang. A century ago, October 1807, the Mermaid embarked on its maiden voyage from Göteborg in search of the lost city of Vineta. However, shortly after setting sail, strange events began to unfold aboard the ship, sparking eerie rumors whispered in the harbors where it anchored. The Mermaid was last sighted off the coast of Svalbard on All Saints’ Day, before being reported lost to a storm in the North Sea. Nearly all on board were presumed dead, including several of the ship’s owners from Sweden’s most prestigious families. The only known survivor was a young archaeologist, about whom we found no further records.

But last December 21st, under a heavy shroud of midnight fog, this ship drifted silently into our dock, Njord’s Rest, exactly a century after it vanished. For three days, the eerie vessel stood moored under its tattered sail, with no trace of crew or passengers aboard. Only grotesquely overgrown barnacles blanketed it, every inch from bow to stern, making it resemble a living sea monster, covered in pale, scale-like shells. No one dared to get close. The dockhands named it Naglfar, after the legendary Norse ship, said to be made from the fingernails of the dead from hell, and destined to sail only at the apocalypse.

On the third day, an elderly ship inspector was sent to examine the vessel. His investigation found no crew, no bodies, and no signs of life aboard. However, he reported hearing ghostly whispers and eerie singing all the time. Tragically, the inspector died under mysterious circumstances just a week after. On the fourth night, before the town could organize a salvage effort, the Mermaid vanished once again into the sea, leaving the community shaken and without answers. It has not been seen since.

Have you finished reading this newspaper from last year, my dear guest? Yes? Good. Because the vessel Mermaid marked both the beginning and the story I am going to tell you. I am very sorry for the unfortunate inspector, but he wasn’t the only one who boarded that so-called ghost ship. I was there, too; actually, I was one of the three passengers it ferried.

But before I tell you more, let me welcome you to North Fang—the remotest human settlement, the cape at the world’s end that jagged its teeth into the North Sea. Here, our gods and goddesses are cold, old deities who rule not by love and belief, but by fear. Yet even their existence is vulnerable, threatened by this hostile land of ice and fog, and they curse it in their sleeping whispers.

Once, they had many names, praised and feared in many ancient tongues, by many different people. But now, they are mostly forgotten, fallen with their era, and sealed away in the dreams only wisped from the abyss of the sea. In a way, I am like them. I have two names. One dead and cold, beneath a moss-dotted gravestone; the other is the one I use now.

I am Birger Gudmundsson, and as my family name, Gudmundsson—son of God’s protection—might suggest, I am an orphan, raised by this church. I notice you glancing at my eyes now and then, my dear friend. Oh, it’s all right—because, as you’ve probably noticed, I was born blind. People often imagine a blind person as being deprived of all light, and living amidst an eternal polar night. But it’s not true. Many of us can still perceive light. For me, I can still see something—your silhouette before me, for one, and the flickering candles over there.

And please, don’t feel sorry for me—yes, I can sense your politeness when you look at me. I am attuned to subtle emotions, as well as movements around me. There’s no need for pity. I see my blindness as the price I paid to the gods, for the secrets they’ve allowed me to keep. After all, he who knows too much should not be encouraged to see more. But this, like my story here, is something I’ve never shared with anyone but you.

And you probably already know, I am a priest. Yes, I understand it seems a bit confusing, speaking of old gods, while we sit inside a church that offers the heavenly grace of the one true Father who loves us all. But believe me, in a barren, bleak island like this, you’ll find that people need something more to cling to—something beyond the lifeless winters, or the cursing sea. They have little interest in the dark secrets, for life here is already as dark as it has been for millennia. Yet, my ghost ship Mermaid and my white bone flute, still belonged to one of the darkest secrets the North Sea could offer.

So listen, can you hear it? Even on a snowy winter night like this, when the north wind’s breath hushes everything to a dead silence, it’s still out there—yes, that low murmuring you hear, that crackling. It’s the whispers of Njord, the North Sea, fingering through the crevices of the ice, and wisping their way to find us.

I. The Merman’s Gift

Even among our Gods, Njord, the North Sea is ancient. He has witnessed countless eras past in a blink of his own time, and is often depicted as an old and hoary man with a fish’s tail. You’ve probably seen his sacred altar—yes, at the very pinnacle of the ‘Fang,’ at the back of our seaward graveyard. There, the rune-marked boulder was once his vé, his sacred grove, shared with his son and daughter, Frej and Freyja; the birch tree beside it was his godwood.

And I know—It may seem strange, speaking of gods when today’s world believes only in science, in the almighty power of bustling machines and roaring engines. But let me remind you once again, my dear friend, we are here in North Fang—the isolated island at the very edge of the world. We are a backwater, untouched by the sooty smoke of steam engines or the rattling clamor of trains. Here, life is only a page half-turned from what it was a millennium ago.

Only back then, the barn-red soil around his vé was always thirsty for blood. Viking warriors crossing Njord’s waves would offer him animal and human sacrifices— the blót—before their longships set sail to conquer and plunder. Merchants departing from Njord’s shores would bring him slaves to hang upon the limbs of his godwood, and bestowed blood-soaked jewels and silks before his runestone, for his goodwill.

But little goodwill lies in the old merman’s nature. Some even say the Kraken, the colossal octopus-like beast of the deep, is just his wrathful form, used to drag vessels of his willful choice into the abyss. After his fury is spent, he will leisurely sift through the wreckage for spoils. Items of disdain are sullenly spat out; others, he keeps as his treasure, toying with them. Yet his fondness is often short-lived. Once the freshness fades, he will toss a few onto our rocky shores, where they lie forsaken among dead seaweed. Should our local people care to pick them up, they would call these the Merman’s gift.

And the old merman’s gift, this is how I got my bone flute as a child. It actually came from the Mermaid vessel; I can tell you. But I found it when I was gathering shellfish along the coastline, right under the precipice where the old merman’s vé stands. I tripped over it and nearly stumbled into the water. Ah, at a half-tumbled down church like this one, even a blind child had to work for his share of food. And groping through the sand for shells was my job. A difficult task with my impaired sight, but I often toiled until dusk to avoid returning empty-handed.

Only on that day, I remember even in my gray, shape-obscured world of vision, I sensed it there, beneath the midnight sun. As I bent down to tug it free from its half-buried state, my fingers glided over its sea-worn surface, and traced its shape. It was an eerie, three-hole flute, made of a peculiar bone-material, yet covered with hairline splits, like the wrinkled face of a hoary man, long over with his heroic days.

And I lifted it to my lips. In my attempt for a tune, a curl of gentle, broken notes sighed out. Between the pounding tides against the cliff and the hovering screams of seagulls, I found the sound oddly familiar, like a lament for a long-forgotten goddess, carried by the wind moaning over the age-old runes of her lost name. I even heard the splash of a large, disappearing fish’s tail with it, as the old god himself whispered to me, from the other side of the sea: Now we have a shared secret, you and I.

His voice sounded sad though, somehow like the bone flute I now held firm in my hands. Only later did I discover there were occult runes etched into it. In an unsettling twist, I found I could read them. They said: “The curse made by blood shall only be quenched by blood; the slumber of the undead shall only be woken by undead.”

I didn’t understand what it really meant at that time, but a shared secret I kept it as. Only, secrets were meant to beget one another, like puzzle pieces revealing themselves one after another. And that night, another puzzle piece appeared, for I dreamed for the first time the dream that would haunt me ever after: I dreamed of Frej, the old merman’s son.

That dream always unfolded in a realm of wintry fog, as if I wandered in Niflheim—the primordial Norse realm of ice and cold. And it always began with the flute. A familiar soft, plaintive moan, like the lonely call of a narwhal beneath the ice, guiding me with taps of its single horn to lead me.

Knock, knock, knock. Please, follow me.

And I followed, treading barefoot upon the frozen sea, heading into the milky gauze of mist. The ice plain crunched and splintered beneath my toes, the air with its sharp, frosty tang clung to me. Yet I felt no cold—only an unnamed loss, like a forgotten promise I still struggled to keep. I walked on and on, letting the flute drift me deeper and deeper into its embrace, only to realize, to my surprise, that I was the one playing it. In my hands, I held my eerie three-holed flute, its surface covered with aging fissures. As I played, a voice surfaced from the fathomless depths of the sea, and answered me in a whispered song. In an old language, I heard it say:

”My friend sailed to the other side, far across the sea;

His lovely face beyond my sight, off the island’s lee.

No one but poor me still weeping for his sailing away,

No one but poor me still praying for his return someday."

In its airy, resonating echoes, I found myself kneeling upon the ice. Through a crystal layer, I saw my Frej for the first time. It almost felt like looking into an ancient Viking bronze mirror, and finding a being of mystique sealed behind its face. It was… a creature of soaring beauty gazing up at me from beneath the ice, his eyes an emerald green. But his face bore a lifeless gray hue, framed by dark, tendril-like hair drifting eerily, almost Medusa-like. Silvery scales extended from his gilled cheeks down his neck, shielding his waist, where broken, rudimentary wings hung in fragile deformity. In pale, lustrous glints, these scales continued down his lower body, which ended in a massive whale’s tail, overgrown with grotesque clusters of barnacles.

—Yes, I called him Frej. My merman, too young and too beautiful to be Njord himself. So he must be the old merman’s son, Frej, the prince of the North Sea.

I should have been struck with fear—both by this occult being and by his Siren song. For from his bloodless lips, sad strands of melody continued to breathe out; and beneath my feet, the ice plain trembled with it, as if the waves were troubled, sobbing in their slumber. Huge cracks webbed across the ice plain, like an earthquake, radiating outward, as if something massive and ancient beneath revolted to break free.

Yet, amid this ominous upheaval, his eyes still locked onto mine, and I forgot everything else. I am an orphan, found on the porch stairs by a vicar, and blind. I had sensed kindness before, but never had someone looked at me like that, his eyes green of a fogged emerald sheen. I had never felt…the sentiment of being loved by anyone before. Under Frej’s gaze, a soft, aching grief hammered at my chest, and melted its beats of teary joy into a tender warmth that brimmed over in my eyes.

I pressed my hands against the ice, with a queer urge to console his sorrow. Hesitantly, his webbed right hand reached out to meet mine. Our palms overlapped, as if two parallel worlds bridged by a gravely scarred mirror. And he smiled, a weary and gentle smile.

“……For he to golden Vineta went, for me and my sole sake,

The Panacea was what he sought, to mend my mounting ache.

I climbed the tallest trees, in hopes to catch his faintest sight;

I made the heartiest pleas—may gods’ mercy grant him light."

The pale string of notes still bubbled up, but I saw a colossal, monstrous shadow begin to surface behind him, ascending from its lair. With a massive and majestic grace it approached, like the first creature emerging from the primal chaos. As its silhouette cleared, I saw a long, slim bow emerging, encrusted with the most hideous sorts of parasitic shells, like a gruesome coverlet of dead men’s nails; followed it, the figurehead of a mermaid, her hair a foul tangle of floating seaweed.

Even in my dreams, there was an eerie, instant recognition. It was a barge, and I knew her name. She was the Mermaid, the lost vessel that vanished in the North Sea a century ago; and my flute was a present she sent to me.

This book is already finished, and I upload a new chapter every day. So if you prefer to read it all at once, just bookmark and come back in a month!