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The world as we know it was not made for us humans.
In fact, it was once inhabited by the First Gods. Long ago, before they withdrew to spheres of their own creation.
Then, it was shaped by the lesser deities and the God’s creatures who were left on this world.
Only later did humankind appear. In their early days, some creatures closer to the Gods still roamed the seas and lands. Some still do to these days. But few of them are left within the realms that we inhabit and utilise now.
This is a story from what the people of the Western Seas now call the Early Days - when humans and deities still shared more space on this earth than they do now.
Once upon a time - the shores to the waters were still shaped differently then - the people of the lands by the Great Delta took to the seas. They were early to do it among the people of steady land. But they were good at the seafaring craft and they quickly utilised their skills in guiding the water and letting it guide them in turn.
Their ruler, Queen Yon, was soon known as the Human Queen of the Sea.
This did not please the Siren-Mer-Queen of the Sea, Vyv, a soul as wild and passionate as the waters themselves, who had reigned over the waves where the Delta spilled into the salt for as long as her kind could remember.
The humans from the Great Delta Shore knew this and had long honoured and praised the Siren-Mer-Queen Vyv for her power over the waters - a worship that had ceased with their own rise to power over the waters.
As one might expect, it did not take long for them to go to war.
Queen Vyv and Queen Yon fought each other for fourteen days and fourteen nights.
In this time, much land was destroyed and beaten into the shape of islands at best or sharp, unforgiving cliffs at worst. And many died. In fact, Yon and Vyv slew all the forces their enemy each had on their side. Much of the more divine mer-folk was lost or left these realms in those days, and much of the first shore tribe to successfully take to the sea was eradicated.
After thirteen nights and fourteen days, in the last night of their battle, Yon and Vyv stood alone, only facing each other, and yet unmoved by the gravity of the losses each of them had suffered.
They fought, more desperately and with more abandon than either of them had ever fought with, destroying each the other’s ship and bending the sea so much to their will that none of them sank even an inch into the foam that roared for peace beneath their feet.
It was in the passion of their fighting, in the reckless abandon with which they bared their souls through the storm that had risen around them and so torn apart much of the world, that they halted, in the same instant of a second, and their eyes met. None of them had ever known another being as intimately as the woman she had committed all she was herself to fighting. And as human eyes so met the mer-siren’s ones, it was hardly a surprise to them to realise how deeply they had fallen in love with each other.
As the sun rose to their fifteen’s day and the storm died down to the singular force contained in the meeting of their lips and the entanglement of their limbs, the sea, so grateful for the peace that had finally been found, gathered what was left of their fleets, and gifted them a new ship, by the name of Aurora - the same phenomenon that first spilled into the skies as light met the waters and the lands again and revealed the damage that was done.
Queen Yon and Queen Vyv, they say, still sail the seas on the Aurora to this day. Though whether they do so within our realm or in some other or perhaps in both at different times, cannot be known, and only occasionally will a sailor stumble into a pub by the port and tell some twisted tale of having seen the Queens of the Sea and having been bewitched by the beauty of their love.
All we truly know is that the fighting ceased and the waters settles on that fifteenth day. There is only one spot left that is forever cast into a thick fog that will not budge no matter what the weather around it is. The locals call it the Sisehtab Nebula.
Sisehtab. That means Sail with me! in the language of that first tribe that once took to sea that Queen Yon was the ruler of. And the Nebula rotates eternally around that spot where her lips first met those of the siren and merwoman, Queen Vyv, in a kiss that reset the balance of the waters to flow as they have as long as we have known them to.