Preface
In the time when men first began to creep out upon the world, there were some who understood instinctively that they had come from the sea. Men and women who knew that the oceans were their place of origin and their true mother. So they spoke among themselves: “Why should we leave our birthplace and our mother?” And so saying, they shunned the dry land and began returning to the place of their origin. While the rest of the new race of men struggled to survive and to multiply and find themselves upon the land, these folk, who soon came to call themselves mersons, scattered themselves not upon the waters but beneath them.
There is more space in the oceans and more oceans in space than can be comprehended even by those who dream. In such a part and such a place so far from the land-dwelling that it became unknown to other men, the race of mersons fought and struggled and eventually raised up a fine and nurturing civilization beneath the mirrorsky. They came to breathe water like the fish, and like their ancestors to grow proper webbing between their fingers and toes, and fins upon their legs.
Others who had also found and populated these faraway seas benefited from the presence of mersons among them, in a time and place when mersons were not the only commanders of language and thought. Some of these gifted others had fins, some had tentacles, and some were of waterkind that no longer are. Sometimes they helped the people, and sometimes they fought with them, and on occasion they might even eat one another, but all benefited from the talking and the languages. While some were forever disgruntled, most were content with their lot.
While the men of other lands forgot the First Ways, and the great Dry Magic they had once possessed returned to the dust from whence it had arisen, those who dwelled beneath the mirrorsky did not forget. The ways of Wet Magic stayed with them, to be further delved and developed. There were great masters in those days, and enchantments you could taste and smell as well as experience.
Then one day, everything changed. In a backward and insignificant corner of the realworld that was Oshenerth, a demon appeared. One that was not already dead, like the isolated expressions whose bodies were seldom recovered, but one still just barely alive.
More confusing still, the demon was pretty.…