Somewhere in the world, it's bedtime. Somewhere a child is getting into bed, and a mother is tucking him in. She picks up a storybook, and the child listens with shining eyes as she spins him a tale of something so far removed from his warm little bed that it must be another world. Beneath the clean, clear water glide gentle mermaids with flowing, silken hair and slender, graceful beauty. A gilded, shining palace sits on silver-white sand, ruled by a sea-king of great fairness and majesty, or perhaps a more democratic oceanic council. Beauty and artistry are everywhere, peace and harmony are commonplace. The only disturbance comes when human vessel sails over their heads, casting a bleak shadow across their homes as above, the lonely sailors look down and dream of what it must be like to live beneath the sea they love so much.
But how can any dream compare to the reality?
Imagine a world without light. Without fire, or warmth, or air. Imagine a world where every creature is focused soley on surviving past this moment, a world where there exists only the hunter, and the prey. Imagine a baren world of stone and sand where no plants will grow, where metal cannot easily be found or forged, where electricity is impossible, where the only light to be had is the eerie blue glow given off by the animals who make their lives in this harsh marine desert.
This is the world of the Ahgerei. Mermaids--perhaps they could be called such, but they are as far from those delicate, wraithlike beings of sailor's tales as the butterfly is from the hawk. Their human forms fade at the waist into a scale covered tail, ending in the wide, strong flukes that propel them through the water. Their hands are webbed between their outside three fingers, and gill slits at their neck filter oxygen from the water they breathe. Their skin is the deathly pale of one who has never seen the sun, but in the darkness of the deep sea they glow with their own light, pale red in the blackness. Finlike ears are built for catching the sound that is their most reliable sense in their dark home. Their eyes are large, with wide, almost catlike pupils, searching for the light of others when they can find it, and sensing heat changes when they cannot. The smallest among them are twice as long as a man is tall, strongly built to withstand the pressure at the bottom of the sea.
Deadly cold haunts the depths of the ocean, and though the Ahgerei are armored against the killing chill with layers of fat beneath the skin, it is the Rift that makes their life possible. From this great cleft in the ocean floor seeps the warmth of the deep earth, and from its rocky depths the lifeblood of this foreign world wells up. The Rift is the anchor for a different kind of food chain, and in a world where such a volatile and tempermental force reigns supreme, no creature's place is certain for long.
The life of the Ahgerei is hard and often short, but their struggle for survival binds them together as tightly as family. Their lives are never peaceful, but in their cave-homes, peace can be found for a short time at least. Peace, and fragile but enduring hope for a future beyond what the Rift can give them.