The One-Hundred

The baby takes its first breath as the moon reaches the top of its orbit around the Earth. The shimmering ocean embraces her small body, welcoming her as she opens and closes her mouth for oxygen in her parent’s gentle arms. A soft blue glow grows from her skin as her mother’s dims, life fading fast.

The Murlan Clan’s appointed doctor takes the baby from the woman and reaches out to the exterminator, whose fingers brush the child’s unclean body. She has legs. She won’t survive a day in this world of water, no matter from whom she is born or whether she glows. Life is not an option for her; there had already been someone saved tonight.

“Kill it.” The doctor’s voice is harsh as the exterminator lifts the child up, his all-black clothing shrouding him in shadows as his hands sparkle with a magenta-tinted glow.

“No,” the mother utters softly, her energy drained. Her eyes glisten with life, with tears, as she looks upon her baby girl. Her human baby girl. “She’s supposed to be… a Namala. Spare… spare her.”

The doctor studies the tired woman, whose blue tail shimmers below the dark surface of the water. The baby’s glow grows brighter and brighter as the exterminator hesitates, new information threading through their minds from the Emperors. There was an exception made for the other human child born tonight. This baby girl really is considered a one hundred, and she shall be saved as one. But this child isn’t just the one hundred thousandth human born, but something more dangerous than that. Something that came close to destroying everything they knew many, many years ago. She was a part of the One-Hundred. A Nasan: saved and gifted.

“She’s a One-Hundred,” the woman whispers again before closing her eyes and sinking into the chest of her strong husband.

~

Do you know how humans survived the Flood, child?

We’ve long forgotten the year it came crashing through. Humans were almost wiped out, and the merpeople population flourished because of the Flood. But of course, merpeople weren’t a natural occurrence in nature. In fact, humans had a heavy, heavy hand in their creation.

Now, what is this One-Hundred? The Namala? The Nasan? You see, not all mermaids have mermaid offspring. There are around 92,793,600 births per year beneath the waves, which equals to about 254,229 children born each day. One in every one hundred thousand of those is a human, which equals to about two to three human births a day.

Usually, there’s no magic involved with births. It could endanger the pregnancy. However, there is magic in some of the children themselves—the gifted, who are also called Nasan.

Not all the clans are as merciful as the one who spared the little girl, the one hundred thousandth human child born beneath the waves, and most of them kill humans on sight. The babies that are spared, also called the Namala, are taken to the nearest islands.

Humans have learned to survive on these islands, and they take care of the Namala. Of course, there is only a slim chance of the child making it past the one-year mark, and even slimmer chance of making it to two. But this is a story of a girl who has made it to sixteen, her seventeenth birthday coming up fast. Her body is rapidly changing with the growth of age, but not in any natural, human way.

In a mermaid way.

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