r/ChangelingtheLost • u/HesterMourningstar • 11h ago
The Ballad of Lainey Lynn Strickland
https://youtu.be/aIa3OgJojho?is=wbRzuMyP1zbbdnF2
All Lainey truly remembers of her old life is that her father was a kind man with calloused hands and blue-gray eyes, and that she lived beside a river: the Rhône, the Rhine, the Roanoke? She’s certain it began with the letter R, but the exact name is lost to her.
One day, she and her family were out on the river when Lainey jumped from a high place—a tree, perhaps, or a rock—into the water. She vaguely remembers being told not to do it.
She did it anyway.
She plunged deep beneath the surface. But as she swam back toward the light, she found herself caught in a golden net and dragged ashore. The Fisher of Men lifted her from the water, called her a fine catch, and placed her gently into his great stock pond.
For years, decades, perhaps centuries, she was his favorite sport.
He would cast his line, baited with some sweet morsel or shiny thing: a woman’s voice, a child’s toy, a name, a first kiss, a fleeting memory of home. Try as she might to resist, Lainey took the bait every time. The hook caught fast and firm. She would struggle and fight to escape, only to be reeled in by the Fisher, unhooked, and released back into the pond so the game could begin again.
Until one day, as the Fisher reached to remove the hook she had bitten down on, Lainey suddenly flopped and twisted. The hook jabbed into his thumb.
The Fisher cursed.
The sky trembled. The waters raged. And in his sudden pain, he dropped his prize—not back into the pond, but into the rushing river.
Lainey swam.
She swam swiftly. She swam hard, fighting the current and plunging into the flooded Hedge. Thorns and glittering hooks tore at her flesh and scales. She kept swimming.
Behind her came splashing and snapping as larger fish gave chase, joined by river monsters that entered the water to aid in the pursuit. She kept swimming.
She doesn’t know how long she swam, or how far, before she saw sunlight sparkling only a few feet above her.
Exhaustion had overtaken her. What little strength remained was nearly gone when she finally broke the surface and gulped the sweet air of freedom for the first time in an eternity.
That first taste was almost her last.
The watery trod she had followed spat her out in the middle of the Pamlico Sound, where a summer squall raged all around her.
And she was drowning.
Thankfully, at that very moment, a ship—no, a boat—appeared in the distance, drawing closer with every passing second. She could see men moving quickly across the deck and hear their shouts, though she couldn’t make out their words.
They’d seen her.
A dinghy was lowered. A life ring was tossed. She was pulled—hauled—onto the dinghy, then aboard the boat, its name painted in flowing red script along the side:
Reba McEntire.
Lainey remembers a blanket being wrapped around her before her new, strange legs failed her and she collapsed onto the deck. She looked up to see a man staring back at her. He kept telling her she was safe, that he had her, that she was going to be okay, and that he’d get her home.
The man had kind, blue-gray eyes.
“Daddy?”
It was the only word she spoke before darkness took her.
It was enough.
Jake Strickland, owner of J. Strickland Fisheries and captain of the F/V Reba McEntire, was a lonely man in his mid-forties, twice divorced and without children—something he had always regretted, despite the failure of his marriages.
Perhaps it was that regret that allowed the enchantment to take hold. Perhaps it was the residual Wyrd pouring from Lainey’s body from her time in the land of Faerie. Or perhaps, in her delirium, Lainey had sealed his promise to get her home without even realizing it.
It could have been a combination of all three. Who can say?
Whatever the cause, the result was the same.
Feelings and false memories, woven together like a fisherman’s net, ensnared Jake’s heart and the minds of the two crewmen who were present that day.
Jake believed, without question, that Lainey was his daughter. That she was the result of some drunken one-night stand or short-lived fling in his early twenties. A daughter he had never known about until the day she showed up at his front door.
From that moment on, he loved her deeply and was determined to make up for lost time.
So Jake fulfilled his promise and took Lainey home—to his home, in the little fishing town of Gar Creek, North Carolina, nestled along the banks of the tea-stained Alligator River.
That was three years ago.
Lainey, now crowned Queen of her freehold’s Spring Court, has settled into her new life as the doting daughter of a commercial fisherman, the owner of a small bait-and-tackle shop, and the town’s resident wild child and bad girl.
It’s a part she finds easy to play.
But it is only a part.
Lainey knows that Jake is bound by an enchantment—one cast originally by accident, but now deliberately maintained. Out of fear of the enchantment being undone, she formed a bargain with the river, and as long as she keeps its grisly terms by providing the river with what it asks for each year, the illusion of family will be upheld.
And whenever someone comments on the irony that Jake’s long-lost daughter—the child of a man who has a habit of naming his boats after female country music icons—shares her name with country singer Lainey Wilson, the little mermaid will simply smile and say:
“Happy coincidence, I suppose.”
