The comb is the price of my audience with the sea-witch.

It’s a sturdy tool - for all its nacreous beauty - and while it’s of no use to me, the witch has a penchant for surface-dweller curios.

I stand before her, trapped between two worlds. Her eyes linger on my scales, my bulbous eyes and translucent gills, my pale almost-human legs dangling awkwardly in the current.

Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a singular, perfect, congruous form!

“Born between two worlds, heir to both,” the sea-witch says, her tentacles splayed. “Are you certain you wish to bind yourself to one?

I nod; my lips aren’t made for speech. I long to swim the reef, to float in the blue, in the body I wish fate had granted me.

“Let it be so,” she says; her magic sweeps my flesh, and reshapes me from the waist down.

I burst from her grotto with sweeps of my new tail, as the comb floats gently to the white sand.