A few days outside of Point Conquest

Vel’s early optimism and enthusiasm were quickly challenged during the voyage’s first few days by an inevitable reality of naval life: boredom. Every day was the same. The view was endless ocean with the occasional rocky island. The sailors all had plenty of work to do to keep them busy, but he was an officer without any naval duties. Tedious though their tasks looked, the men at least had something to do, away to be useful. Until there were decisions to be made or battles to fight, he was useless.

Something that surprised Vel was just how quickly he grew homesick. Well, maybe not homesick, Point Conquest wasn’t really his home he supposed, but how quickly he missed his family. He had expected he would come to miss them eventually, especially Adi who he never liked to be separated from for long, but not so fast. Literally on the second day of the voyage he began to feel the first hints of that longing ache.

Vel missed his family. Uncle, aunt, cousins, mother, sisters, all of them. He also missed his wives, who of course overlapped with the family in some instances. More than anything though, he missed Adeline. Being so far away from her felt wrong, like a little piece of him was missing. Their permanent connection clearly wasn’t strong enough to survive this kind of distance and had grown steadily weaker as they sailed ever further away, eventually cutting off completely on the second day. And, apart from that lovely vision of Ella, he’d had no further dreams of home.

He also hadn’t expected to miss his horses quite as much as he did. Not just the sensation of riding, though he missed that greatly. He really missed Glaweder and Velred the way he would a good friend or family member. The big destrier had grown so much gentler of late, especially with the women of the harem. Vel had been surprised by his mounts seemingly confused reaction to Adeline as she carefully petted his muzzle during an early stop on their trip to the north. Before this recent change she'd been one of very few people besides Vel himself who could do that. The large horse had, in a very human way, pulled his head back, tilted it, and looked at Adeline wide-eyed. Then he'd sniffed her intently. Vel, curious, had entered his steed's mind just in time to see the realization hit. She was carrying his rider's foal! Ever since he'd been a gentle giant in the proximity of any of the wives, even permitting them to ride him. Veldred was actually flattered that Vel trusted him to carry his broodmares. Glaweder had of course realized too, but was less excited about it, he'd always been more mellow than Veldred. Not that that was saying much.

There were some silver linings though. He met with his aunt at least briefly every evening and had very carefully begun exploring her mind. No suggestions had been made yet though, he was just testing the waters. He also sparred with both Fal and Dina, all three of them needed to practice fighting on the shifting deck of a warship. And of course, Dina continued to make his nights very enjoyable indeed, much more enjoyable than his days were. She could enter his room without anyone ever knowing, so she never slept in her own bed.

Another way he passed the time was by rereading a favorite book from his teens. Lord Adalbert Hoffring had been a famous explorer in his day, even sailing around the entire continent. On those travels he had seen, or at least claimed to have seen, a great many wondrous things. And he had of course written about them, filling multiple books. Those books could be divided into two main categories. The fanciful and romantic tales of his exploits which were embellished and decorated to the point of mostly being fiction, and his more scholarly treatises, which Vel much preferred. The man had been a legitimate scholar as well as a self-aggrandizing skirt chaser, and his academic works were genuinely good.

Vel had brought only one of Hoffring’s works along, the one he was currently reading for probably the 5th or 6th time in his life. A treatise on the mermaids and their various tribes was a thrilling read indeed, containing both Adalbert’s own observations as well as accounts and myths collected from locals in the many coastal settlements the man had visited. This trip had felt like a suitable time to read it again, considering these waters were said to house mermaids. More specifically the kind that Hoffring termed northern merfolk.

Despite being called mermaids, males did exist, that was just what most people called all of them. Merfolk was a more accurate term and what Hoffring opted for, but it had yet to catch on with the general populace.

The variation in the different merfolk populations was something that particularly fascinated Vel. Those living in what was often called the Shallow Sea, the bay that formed between the Unknow Wilds and the Great Desert, were said to look quite bestial, often being described as feline. The northern kind however were said to look far more human, except they of course sported tails too. And by all accounts they were completely blue, ranging in shades from light to very dark.

The way locals viewed them differed greatly from place to place as well. Here in the north, there were plenty of tales of mermaids entrancing sailors with their songs or by other means and luring them to their doom beneath the waves. Hoffring had collected quite a few of them, and Vel had already heard plenty from the men serving on his ship. Not so in the Shallow Sea though. There the merfolk seemed to be quite well regarded by the natives, who mostly lived in small fishing villages along the jungle coast or in small villages built on poles in the actual sea. The mermaids, meaning the females, especially had some kind of religious significance, and Hoffring had encountered many stories of men wooing and even mating with mermaids. Something that apparently was a very impressive thing for a man to accomplish, and which also had religious significance. While Adalbert didn’t claim to have seen any direct evidence of it, he himself seemed to mostly believe those stories. He was more skeptical about stories of such unions producing children though. According to the natives it was possible for a man to impregnate a mermaid, such children were always female and always fully a mermaid, no visible differences from those without a human father. A big part of the writer’s skepticism seemed to stem from the fact that it was impossible for humans and elves to interbreed, so surely the same should be true for humans and mermaids. Vel wasn’t sure how much of it all he believed, but it sure was a fun read, and he and Dina passed some of their lazy afternoons scanning the waters for any hint of beautiful blue women.

They didn’t see any, nor did Vel expect they ever would. On the sixth night of the journey, he was proven wrong.