The Dominant Species

After a long day of making decisions for my people and practicing magic I went to my room to relax. I was stressed out from the day I had so I decided to practice acrobats for fun. I’m not competing anymore, but it’s still my favorite hobby. It always has been. And I’ve always practiced it.

Mom came to my room and I stopped to talk to her.

“When are you going to track down the creatures again?” Mom asked me.

“Next week,” I said. “And I hope it will be the last time.”

“I agree. Do you think it would be?”

“There are only a handful left.”

“I hope they haven’t still been hunting humans.”

“No, they probably went into hiding after the rest of them were killed.”

“You know, normally, I wouldn’t agree to driving any species into extinction, but these look extremely dangerous.”

“They are. And they’re keeping humans from exploring the world the way we are.” “That’s terrible.”

Merpeople and humans had been hunting creatures for a year. Everyone was tired, physically and emotionally. We’ve been hunting them for a long time, since there had been a thousand creatures. I was still practicing the spell and I wanted to cast it, but I haven’t been able to. I never tried to in battle because I could get killed if the spell didn’t work. Caleb once said he wished he could count the creatures, so he would know how many were left. The humans were grateful to the merpeople because the creatures have retreated and stopped killing humans for a while. I had talked to Caleb’s parents and this was one of the reasons they agreed to have the merpeople from my kingdom as allies. We had already signed the documents sealing that alliance on paper and in stone.

Caleb hoped humans would be able to have all merpeople as their allies some day.

Every time we hunted the creatures everyone went home tired and looking like hell. We would be dirty with torn clothes. And things had been getting worse lately, but no one wanted to give up.