Carry yourself back a few centuries and pretend, just for now, that you were a young boy, playing along the dockside on, say, a North African Mediterranean sea front one day, playing where your parents had many times admonished you not to go near, and yet, this day, you’d decided to break the rules and to stray far afield from your usual playgrounds.

And the next, you found yourself, after having been snatched by the back of your shirt, o n board a pirate ship, bound for the wild, western seas, toward the Caribbean.

Scary enough already !

But did you know that the o ne who first told these stories to that long-ago storyteller on board that same pirate ship was a mermaid ? Yes ! And these have been handed down and carried far beneath the oceans, and our own StoryMermaid, Ocean, the author of The Mers epic trilogy, has collected them and has consented to retell these Mermaid Tales just for us at Mythize.com!

But say, now that you’ve found yourself aboard, with no way off, and nothing to do but to make the best of it and to follow orders – to save your life - and, as we’ve already seen – you’re not very good at having to follow rules.

But, now, you’re here. You’ve been swabbing decks and running errands all over the ship, and you’ve found out you were born with, blessed with, having sea legs, meaning the craning and rocking of the huge ship does not affect you at all.

You were a born sailor, in fact.

Not only that, but you’d secretly dreamed of someday going out into the world, finding out what lay beyond that liquid horizon you’d grown up around.

Now, it’s nighttime, and, tired as you are, you are cold, and you stay close to the stove area in the hold as the winds croon eerily across the deck above and the huge waves are battering from every side.

You’re now going out of the Mediterranean Sea, past the Rock of Gibralter, into the great, great ocean, the Atlantic, where the worst storms are, where some you’ve known or heard tell of have gone before, but where such wild tales have frightened everyone so much that most of the crew members would forever have to be Shanghaied – that is, kidnapped.

You’re a survivor, though, and you’ll bide your time, fit in, 
and as the eldest of the crew, the cook, starts talking, you draw closer. 
He’s the one whose had most sympathy with you so far. He’s even given you a bit of extra food.

His eyes look like they’re focusing o n some faraway place, and his deep, raspy voice lulls your imagination, conjuring you into another world…