“Brother, help me!”

An elf reached out to their sibling who had just reached the roof of their family home. The house was one that they had both grown up in, and it was once a marvelous place where an entire family line once existed together in prosperity. Now, though? Now it was nearly entirely submerged beneath the salty waters that had flooded their homeland, with only the roof being dry.

“Just give me a minute, Sylvie!” the second elf said with a panicked voice. He was looking around for a branch that he could rip free and toss to his sister, but rather regrettably the family had been overly zealous in pruning their tree mansion. At best he was able to find a few twigs, but they would not be nearly enough to keep his floundering sister’s head above the water for long.

“H-help! I felt something touch my leg!”

“Damn it! Just try and make it closer to me! I’ll grab you and pull you up!”

Sylvie didn’t seem to take too kindly to that, but that was perhaps due to the mixture of her not knowing how to swim and the shadows darting around and beneath her. She had already seen more than a few others get dragged under, only to resurface as dismembered corpses, and now those damn.. whatever they were… were circling around her!

Damn monsters!” Sylvie’s brother screamed, partly out of anger, partly out of fear, and partly out of sorrow, “Go pick on something from your realm, not us!”

The brother was answered with a rather unwelcome ‘gift’. From the depths, a single object was tossed up and at him, which he barely dodged in time. As he regained his footing, he couldn’t help himself from looking at what was thrown at him, only to recoil in horror as he saw a heavily damaged Drow head missing its eyes, tongue, and with its spinal column still attached. The gruesome ‘gift’ looked a bit like a macabre mockery of a tadpole by how badly it had been mangled, and the fact that he even recognized it as the head of a Drow at all was what made the act so terrible.

“Great Tree preserve us!” he shouted, but his attention was quickly redirected back to his sister, who was now coloring the water with crimson liquids. “No! Stop! Take me instead! Leave her alone!” He yelled, but the monsters in the water just kept toying with their prey, his words falling on seemingly deaf ears.

He watched with growing fear and anger as his sister was slowly pulled under, and for a while, he saw no traces of her save the shadows that gradually faded from his sight as they sank deeper. He was about to break down in a state of pure emotional shock, but a voice diverted his mind for a brief moment.

“You wish to trade her body for yours?”

He looked up. Reclining on the edge of the roof where the water met the wooden tiles was a monster that blended the features of a few aquatic creatures with those of an absurdly attractive woman. The contrast between those unnatural features and the beauty of this… thing caused his mind to rapidly shift between gears. Nothing that was this malign could be so beautiful, but nothing so beautiful could also have such disgusting features. The creature before him was a paradox that his mind was unable to deal with.

The creature smiled, revealing the teeth of a tiger shark inside its mouth. It seemed to enjoy watching him shift between the various states his mind found itself in. Ironically, Humans seemed more than capable of rationalizing their features with their beauty, but these elves and their foreign minds seemed to constantly shift between extremes, for better or for worse.

“We’ll put your sister back up here, but you have to dive in and give yourself to us willingly. It is the only way to save her from a watery grave. We’ll even let you see us put her up here, but only if you dive in first and let us grab hold of you first.”

“Y-you will?”

The aquatic abomination’s grin widened, and its eyes became rather wild.

“Yes, of course. You and your kind are… new to us. Exciting. Novel. Foreign. And from what I can see,” it said as it and his eyes fell on his loincloth, “you might very well be worth something to us. More than she would, anyway.”

“You sick monsters!”

The brother elf recoiled in horror. These things wanted to breed with him?! They tortured his sister in front of him just so that they could corrupt his line forevermore?! To ever even dream of doing such a thing would shame his family line for an eternity, but… his family wouldn’t exist any longer if he didn’t save his sister…

He growled and slammed his fists into the roof, trying to keep his shame from keeping him from saving his last blood relation. Eventually, though, he caved.

“Fine then, monster. Just keep your end of the bargain.”

He did not expect them to, but he had some small hope that he would see his sister one last time, both intact and mostly unharmed before he was forced into his Faustian fate.

The monster seemed to grin even wider as the elf brother made his way to the edge. “We always keep our word. Now jump in; the water’s nice this time of year.”

With nothing else to do but hope that his sacrifice would be worth it, he jumped. He immediately felt the chill of the water assault him, and his eyes and nose stung with the various things in the fluids around him. He forced himself up to the surface with a mix of natural buoyancy ad random thrashing, but he soon found a number of webbed hands grab him and force his head above the water. He gasped for air and regained his senses, only to feel very uncomfortable as unnatural bodies rubbed up against him and the hot breath of those monsters assaulted his neck and ears.

One of the webbed hands grabbed him by the chin and a familiar but still very unsettling voice began to speak into his right ear at near point-blank.

“Look. We’ve kept our side of the bargain. There she is, on top of the roof, just as I told you she would be.”

He looked up. Sure enough, his sister was lying there. However, she wasn’t moving.

“She! She’s dead! You killed her! Let me go! You didn’t-!”

His head was forced underwater and then brought back up for air.

“Idiot. We never swore that she would be alive, you know. Just accept this, as well as what’s to come. We’ll make sure that you are well kept.”

He forced himself free of the monsters’ clutches and managed to look around one last time before being forced under.

Oh, by the Great Tree, there were a metric fuckton of them….

This… was not going to be fun.