As seasons passed, Amina’s beauty and strangeness became impossible to ignore.

By seventeen, she had grown tall and lithe, her hair catching the sun like dark waves, her laughter carrying across the village like birdsong after rain.

Yet there was always that invisible boundary between her and the deep waters.

The other girls dove for oysters, swam boldly into the surf, and laughed as they returned with treasures from the seabed.

Amina stood at the shore, her toes sinking into the wet sand, longing written across her face.

“You’re afraid,” Kojo teased one day, though his tone lacked the cruelty of their childhood.

He was a man now, with broad shoulders and eyes that softened when they looked at her.

“The water can’t hurt you, Amina.”

She shook her head, clutching the glowing shell at her neck.

“It isn’t fear.

It is… something else.

Like a voice holding me back.”

Kojo frowned.

“A voice?”

She didn’t explain further.

How could she? How could she tell him that sometimes the sea sang to her in dreams, a song of longing and danger, promising both love and loss?

Meanwhile, whispers in the village grew louder.

“Why does the girl never swim?” some asked.

“She is a sea-spirit’s child,” others answered.

“Her mother was not of this world.”

Some feared her, crossing themselves when she passed.

Others adored her, convinced she brought luck to their fishing nets and rain to their fields.

But reverence and fear were two sides of the same coin, and Baba Tunde knew how quickly admiration could turn to suspicion.

One evening, as the Harmattan winds cooled the earth, Baba Tunde sat outside his hut, the shell glowing faintly at Amina’s breast as she helped Mama Efe grind millet.

The rhythm of her movements seemed to synchronize with the pulse of the shell, and for a fleeting moment, Baba Tunde thought he saw the shimmer of scales flicker across her skin in the firelight.

His chest tightened.

The mermaid’s words returned with brutal clarity:

When the shell goes dark, the choice becomes hers.

But what choice? To remain human? To return to the sea? To belong to one world meant forsaking the other.

A month later, the storm came.

It rose from the horizon without warning, black clouds rolling like an army across the sky, the ocean roaring with fury.

The fishermen who had gone out at dawn were caught in its grasp, their boats tossed like driftwood.

The villagers gathered on the beach, shouting, praying, weeping as waves swallowed the horizon.

Then Amina stepped forward.

The storm seemed to call her, its howl echoing in her blood.

Her shell burned hot against her chest, brighter than it had ever glowed before, pulsing like a second heart.

Baba Tunde’s voice cut through the chaos.

“Amina! No!”

But she was already moving, her feet carrying her to the shoreline.

She did not flinch as the waves crashed around her ankles, nor when the water surged to her knees.

The unseen barrier that had always stopped her was gone.

The shell dimmed once… twice… and then went dark.

The choice was hers.

Amina lifted her chin, her hair whipping in the wind, her eyes alight with something older than the storm itself.

She felt the sea tugging at her, calling her home.

Yet behind her, the cries of her people—her family—tethered her to the shore.

She turned to Baba Tunde, who stood frozen, terror and pride etched across his weathered face.

“Father,” she whispered, though the storm roared around them, “what do I choose?”

He could not answer.

For the first time in his life, Baba Tunde had no wisdom, no story, no prayer to guide her.

And so the girl of two worlds stepped into the storm, the shell dark against her skin, carrying with her the fate of both sea and shore.