Nerissa

"Close your eyes, let the song in—there is no need for breath where we are going." —Calypso The deep has always sung. To those who listen, the ocean is more than waves and currents—it is a chorus, a symphony of voices rising from the trenches, echoing through the abyss. The Merfolk have long known this. Some believe the songs are ancient spirits whispering through the tides. Others fear them, warning that not all melodies are meant to be heard. Nerissa was one who listened. Born among the Merfolk, she lacked the gift of song. Where others wove music through the tides, shifting currents and creating whole worlds beneath the waves, Nerissa's voice produced nothing but silence. She was a pariah, adrift in an endless blue expanse, untethered and unseen. Yet in the stillness of the deep, she found solace. Where others feared the hush, she surrendered to it, diving deeper than any dared. And there, in the abyssal void, she heard it—a song meant for her alone. It did not call with the gentle harmonies of the reef-born, nor did it carry the solemn gravity of the north. It slithered, a whispering tide curling into her mind, laced with promises too intoxicating to resist. Power. Purpose. The voice from below did not reject her silence—it cradled it, shaped it into something sacred. A melody not for the living, but for those who dared to become something more. The Merfolk spoke of a cursed song from the south, an eerie and deceitful melody that had once ensnared another: Calypso. They told tales of her fall, of how she had been lured into the abyss and returned unrecognizable, a herald of something vast and unknowable. They feared the same fate for Nerissa, and those that had shunned her now pleaded with her to turn back... But alas, it was too late. The song had already woven itself into the marrow of her bones, beginning to unravel the last strands of what she had been. She let herself sink, the currents carrying her downward like a forgotten echo. The trenches stretched before her, gaping and waiting. In their blackened heart lay an urn, ancient and patient. The moment she touched it, it was as if the world held its breath. The song did not simply consume her—it remade her, slithering through her mind like ink spilled in water. Tendrils of darkness wound around her form, her flesh unspooled and rewoven into something neither merfolk nor monster, but a vessel of the abyss itself. Now, she carries the song through the tides, loosing it into the currents, luring the lost and the wandering to join the chorus. Where once there was silence, now there is a voice—a siren's call from the depths. And when the entity stirs, when the abyss opens its maw to claim what is owed, Nerissa will not kneel in servitude. She will not cower as a vessel. She will stand at its side, its hymn given flesh, the first note of a requiem that will never end.