There is no city more grand to the surface dwellers than Anteronia. Still, to the inhabitants of the world beneath, it is but another blight upon the sun-scorched and water-deserted surface. They instead have something much more beautiful, a city whose name does not pass the lips of any surface folk still living. Whose antediluvian secrets hold truths best never found in the tomes of the old academy.
It is where old gods are worshipped in rites blasphemous to the ways of the upper gods. It is where dark dealings in darker depths occur. It is a place of great mystery and of greater import.
But for Alda and the many others who live there, it is home.
The warrior swims down past the outer ring of defenses, a network of coral and weed and tunnels and all matter of underwater folk, to reach her way down beneath to places far more fantastic, where light is a danger and where the mournful keening of the inhabitants is a jubilant cry of delight to herald the returning champion.
Among the ones seeking to find her is a massive creature, its eye reflecting its whole body as it moves ponderously through the sea. It rumbles with a bellow far below what humans can hear. Still, to the mermaid, it is a casual conversation that sounds like this.
"You have returned home, my daughter. Were you successful in cowing the surface dweller?"
She lifts the soaked satchel over her shoulder, holding it out upon the end of one trident. "I have received from him what you have asked. But there was a complication. I have found her, Chastity, or the one that has taken her mantle."
The giant eye widens momentarily, and the rumbling is so deep and loud that it warms the mermaid's bones.
"Did you destroy her?"
"I defeated her, but she had issued a challenge to me so that I may overwhelm her in a fair fight."
The enormous creature's grumbling groan heats the water around it, bubbles rising from the boiling temperatures beneath her fins.
"You are one of honor, Alda," the leviathan says. "But you must be wary of what the surface-dwellers can do, lest you forget what they have done to your kin."
"I shall never forget what I saw that day. That is why I must prove strong enough to defeat and humiliate."
"Your heart is strong in your conviction," the abyssal creature groans, and from the blackness of the sea emerges a long, sucker-filled arm, which caresses under her cheek and then hooks the satchel. "This trinket shall prove useful in our superiority over the outside world."
"I shall not let you down, my master," she says, bowing her head.
"You must train well to defeat your life foe," the master rumbles, the satchel and its contents disappearing into the void. "You have experience more than this magical monstrosity up above, but you may need more to fight on her level."
"More…? What more is there?"
Swimming up from the darkness is a fish-like creature, bejeweled in bioluminescent light, the most brilliant of which hangs from her crown, dangling and tantalizing Alda with its allure. But the maid keeps her resolve against the beautiful lantern. She focuses instead on the old crone's milky eyes and the sharp rows of teeth.
"Your opponent is a guardian of her kind, much as you are a guardian of your own," speaks the witch. "But she has something you do not."
The crone claps her hands together, and a prismatic display dances between her fin tips, her smile widening greater and far more brilliantly than even the brightest scales.
The master rumbles to fill in the crone's words. "She possesses magic."
The mermaid narrows her eyes, tightening her grip on her weapon. "You wish me to use magic against my opponent?"
"It is only natural to fight against your opponents with their weapons," says the crone.
There's a moment of hesitation within the warrior, but she finally lowers her head, closing her eyes before the two. "Oh, ancient and powerful beings beneath the sea. What shall I do?"
"Swim deeper than you have gone before," rumbles the master, his arm placed upon her back, urging her toward the deepest darkness. "Train your body to make the journey, and deep down, you shall find a treasure worthy of our greatest guardian."
"Once there," continues the crone, her webbed finger pointed into the trench. "You shall find what you need to be able to face your foe on her level. To humiliate her fully."
"And hopefully, rumbles the master, "to show the whole of their so-called great city that we are here, and we are the masters of this domain."
"I will do what I must," says Alda, placing a clenched hand upon her breast. Without hesitation and without asking for a chance to rest or resupply, she kicks her fin and plunges deep into the water, traversing deeper down into the darkness until the light of the crone becomes but the furthest mote, and then finally swallowed by the pure darkness.
In the pitch blackness, Alda sings, her voice guiding her to forgotten structures far beyond the eldest beings. Even older than her master.
Her voice carried, making its way up to her sisters. These other mermaids listen to her conviction in the caves, where a handful of surface dwellers live, listening to the songs played by the people of this city.
And despite the strange circumstances that brought them here, it is the most beautiful and saddest song they have ever heard.