#throbbweek

Robb has always been fascinated by what the other locals say about the creatures of the sea. As a boy he’s been told stories of the krakens, the fierce squids that prowl the depth of the sea with eight horrid tentacles and razor teeth, or the sirens, with their axes in hand and men’s blood lining their lips. His old nurse, Nan, would always be the one to pull him onto her lap and whisper about the great Euron, with one eye and a penchant for unnecessary cruelty, or Asha, the deadly beauty who lured men to her and slit their throats for fun. The stories would excite him in a way that no other tale would, and each night he’d run to Nan and plead for more of the stories about the sea.

Nan lived right by the sea shore; he lived in the village nearby with the rest of his family. Sometimes she would pretend to be upset with him when he’d sneak out of his house at night to go hear her stories, but she never truly was. She’d always pat him on the head and remind him that the real monsters don’t live in the dark alleys that his parents warned him about, but in the sea. Her eyes would close for a moment, and he could smell the sea from her open window, which made him shiver regardless of the cold. And then she’d tell him a story about the evil wife-murdering kraken Victarion and everything would go back to normal.

Here he is seven years old and the weather is warm enough to go outside, so he grabs his half-brother’s hand and runs to the seashore. His mother is following behind, pregnant and carrying his little sister Sansa and shouting for him to slow down, but he only has eyes for the clear blue water and the waves that sweep the sandy shores.

“D’you think we’ll get to see any krakens today?” he asks Jon as they stand before the water, the tips of the waves stinging their toes.

“What are those?” his brother replies.

“Big animals, like squids but much meaner. They’ve got hooks and claws and stuff, and they live in the water and eat people.”

“You’re a liar.” His brother is small and stubborn, always scowling and disbelieving. “There aren’t any krakens in the sea. Not here."

Robb stares down at the sand. "What about sirens? They're very pretty but in an evil way. They sing so beautifully that men swim to them and the sirens eat them."

Jon shakes his head fast. "No. That's not real either."

"I think they are."

“They’re not!” Jon is petulant, fists clenched and lips tight. Robb doesn’t understand his brother’s anger. “You’re just making things up because you want someone else to talk to! You don’t like talking to me because I’m not your real brother!”

“I wouldn’t talk to a kraken, silly,” reasons Robb. His brother has tantrums like this almost every day, and he’s learned to change the subject. “They’d eat me up.”

Jon glances up from under his eyelashes. “Are they evil?”

“Yes!” Robb is happy Jon still wants to talk about the sea monsters. “There’s one named Balon. He eats his sons if he’s not happy with them! But after that, Balon gets so sad and angry at himself for eating them that he pukes them back up and tries to reincarnate them.” He pauses. “I think. I’m not sure, I might be mixing up the stories.”

“What about the sirens?” Jon squints his eyes out at the sea.

“They’re beautiful and terrible,” recites Robb, feeling the ghost of Nan’s whispery voice against his neck. “Alannys is the queen, but she’s very very sad all the time because her children all leave her to hunt men. So Alannys sings these sad songs, and the men fall in love with her and drown.”

Jon snorts. “Men don’t fall in love with women because they’re sad, stupid.”

“Maybe they do,” Robb speculates. “Maybe they want to help the women, you know?”

“Why would you fall in love with someone that needs help?” Jon punches the sand. “That’s dumb, and Alannys is a lie. She’s not real and neither are your dumb krakens.”

“They could be-”

“No!”

Robb sighs, playing with the seaweed and mussel shells he’s found. The shells dig into his soft fingertips and draw blood; he smears his blood along the sand in a smiley face. He almost hopes a siren will swim up to suck up his macabre offering and show Jon that he’s wrong, but Robb only says “Okay then.”

His mother Catelyn is seated on her chair under the umbrella, Sansa squirming happily in her arms, and she motions for Robb to go into the ocean if he likes. Robb grabs Jon around the waist and pushes him into the water as his brother screams and Sansa laughs from the shore, her voice high and happy.

  Robb hits the water a second later, eyes open and stinging from the salt. He could swear he sees something move under the waves- something with a glittering tail and dark hair- but it's gone when he jumps up, spluttering.

-

  Something washes up on the shore when he’s fourteen. It’s not an animal and it’s not human and it is wholly terrifying. He finds it early in the morning, almost before the sun is up, and it appears that the creature has not been found by anyone else. It feels like the creature is... his.

Nan’s always told him how to avoid sirens, but this isn’t a siren. It looks a little bit like a boy older than him, at least from the waist up- there’s a smooth hairless chest, two arms, and a head with a mop of long tangled black hair. But the neck has gills and the eyes, though glazed and half-closed, are a peculiar shade of green. From the waist down the boy has a jagged gold-and-black tail, torso littered with sharp scales, and his first thought is of that redheaded mermaid in the movie his sister likes but the creature is much more terrible than Ariel ever was. His scales are sharp, his teeth protruding past scarred lips and daggerlike. A monster.

The creature has long, open wounds running from his tail to his body, but they do not bleed. He’s hurt, thinks he, and the Stark blood in his veins makes him reach out a hand and press it to the creature’s flesh. The creature is cold and a little slimy, smelling strongly of the sea, and it reminds him of dead fish.

“Are you alive?” he whispers quietly, reaching out a hand to test for a pulse. The creature doesn’t stir, but its heartbeat skips lightly in its chest. Relieved, he cups some sea water and pours it over the boy’s gills. He debates whether to try giving the creature mouth-to-mouth, but its teeth look too dangerous.

The creature is frighteningly handsome. He skims his fingertips over the creature’s tail. It looks and feels powerful, the pointed scales glistening atop hard muscle that he pressed his hand to eagerly. The creature’s black hair is thick and knotted, its flesh icy, and he thinks that even if it looks human it can’t possibly be.

Maybe, he thinks, I could put it back into the water. But the creature really does appear to be badly wounded and he’s not going to feed it to the sharks. So he awkwardly grasps its shoulders and painstakingly hauls it up to the dry sand, pressing his warm hands to its body to relinquish any drop of heat. Its heartbeat pumps away slowly, lazily, unaware of his panic.

When Robb finally manages to pull it up to the warm, dry sand, the creature coughs and the sound makes him want to scream with fear or laugh with joy. He’s saved a life, but what exactly did he save?

“Hello?” he says as the creature coughs again. “Hello? Are you okay?”

It mumbles something that Robb can’t quite discern, a lilting language he hasn’t before heard. The creature’s eyes open a little further and the lids flutter slightly, pupils dilating as it takes him in. He waits for a response that doesn’t come for a long time, until the creature coughs again and spits up what looks like a full gallon of seawater.

“Can you breathe?” Robb finally asks nervously, glancing at the creature’s gills. “Do you want to go back into the water?”

Its eyes widen even further and it shakes his head. There’s a look of pleading in its eyes.

“Okay,” he says reasonably. “No water.”

The creature closes its eyes, and Robb hits it gently. “You can’t close your eyes, you’ll pass out.”

It raises one of its eyebrows, and it looks so human that it scares him. Its eyes flick upwards to the horizon, where the sun is just starting to rise, and then the street where his bike is parked. He doesn’t understand.

“So if you don’t, um, want to go back into the water...” Robb trails off. It’s not like he can bring the creature home. His mum will have a fit and his father would try to throw it back into the sea, and something about the creature’s wounds makes him think that is a very bad idea. But leaving it in the sand will attract other people who might try to hurt it, and the Stark blood in Robb's veins compels him to look after the creature.

“I’m going to take you home,” he declares. “I’ll protect you.”

The creature tries to say something, an unidentifiable expression washing over its face, but Robb simply picks the creature up bridal-style and tries to walk up to the street. It’s really heavy though, and he falls several times, which makes the creature laugh a little.