Part of Your World (Disney Twisted Tales) - Liz Braswell Page 0,35

sadness of being alive. The joy of bemg a mermaid; the pam of being the only one like herself—the only mermaid who had been mortal, temporarily, and then lost everything.

When she finally stopped, her eyes were closed and her hands rested on her human lap, and she felt the dry, human sun and imagined wet things.

She opened her eyes.

The silence was now deafening in the lagoon.

She had the voice of the gods, some had said. The sort of voice that could lure landlubbers to sea and sailors to their deaths, a voice that could launch a thousand ships. She had the voice of the wind and the storm and the crash of the waves and the ancient speech of the whale. She had the voice of the moon as it glided serenely across the sky and the stars as they danced behind. She had the voice of the wind between the stars that mortals never heard, that rushed and blew and ushered in the beginning and end of time.

She sat for a moment quietly, remembering how it sounded but enjoying the silence.

The songs were from the old Ariel. Perhaps the new Ariel, too.

She coughed and tried again, cocking her head and effecting a stem look.

"Just do it. Flounder; I need the tax audits by the third tide so we have something to present to the council. "Sebastian, I don't care about the gala or its details. I'm sure it's all fine in your very capable claws. "And with the cutting of this ribbon, I hereby declare the Temple of Physical Arts open to all!" Ariel smiled, then threw back her head and laughed—but it was brittle. She picked up a shard of the nautilus and sighed.

Her voice had been such an important part of her life before. The merfolk celebrated her for it. Her father excused her occasionally questionable behavior because of it. Eric loved the girl who rescued him, because of her singing....

...she'd never really enjoyed singing for anyone else. In fact, she hated audiences. She sang because she liked to sing. She just...felt... something, and had to sing it. If she were happy, or sad, or angry., .she would go off by herself and sing to the coral, sing to the seaweed, smg to an audience of sea snails or tube worms (who listened, but never commented). Most of her mergirlhood had been spent swimming around, exploring, singing to herself. Making up little stories in her head and then putting them into song.

Ruefully she remembered the concert that Sebastian had so carefully planned, which she had missed, which her dad had punished her for, which led him to set the little crab on her case, and so on....

She hadn't been deliberately disobedient. She just... forgot.

Sometimes people thought she was a snob because of the way she acted. But she wasn't trying to be a diva—she was just a young mer whose head was full of fantasies. And by taking away her voice, Ursula had stolen what Ariel treasured most: the only way she knew how to express those stories.

Without spoken language—and no knowledge of signs, back then—she wasn't able to tell Eric what had happened to her or how she loved him. She wasn't able to tell her father not to trade places with her. She wasn't able to rule her kingdom without the help of a fleet of people to interpret and speak for her.

She had lost a means of communicating her desires, her commands, her wishes, her needs, her thoughts.

"How do you feel?"

Ariel looked up, suddenly aware of the gull who was perched quietly on a nearby rock, watching her with a curious, beady eye. "Jona, " Ariel said, relishing the sound of the name. "How long have you been sitting there?"

"I spotted you the moment you came out of the castle. But it looked like you needed a moment to yourself. I was gomg to interrupt if you kept on with that singing." "That singing? Why?" Ariel asked archly. Her hands signed as she spoke, too used to the process.

"Well, you were getting a little loud." The mermaid blinked at the gull. Then she began to laugh.

She laughed so hard she began to have trouble breathing. Great, pealmg gulps of laughter and air: it felt good to laugh and have it actually come out, not just be a silent recognition of something mildly amusing. "I...beg your pardon?" Jona said, a trifle offended.

"Oh... it's just..." She breathed deep, trying to control herself, not wanting to. "I