On top of that, the lack of light and the impossibility to speak from a distance had led the merfolk culture to develop special sounds to express their emotions and mark their historical buildings.

A merfolk’s underwater home sang with its inhabitants, and its individual melody would mix with those produced by the neighboring houses in the equivalent of the noise of a bustling city.

When the merfolk had stepped on the Desert’s sands for the first time, they had tried to recreate their native city, Zhen, on the surface. Salaark had gifted them a verdant oasis, and the merfolk were skilled with earth magic, yet the initial results were appalling at best.

Gravity filled any building over one story high with cracks during the construction process, and no amount of effort or stones could keep them from turning into ruins. Even the merfolk who preferred their home to extend horizontally rather than vertically fared no better.

What hundreds of meters underwater sounded like a fine-tuned orchestra, on dry land looked as though a Leviathan with a nasty stomach bug had recently relieved himself multiple times while taking a stroll through the oasis.

The walls of the elongated merfolk houses were jagged and irregular, and the vibrant brown of the fertile soil of the oasis only reinforced the initial impression.

To add insult to the injury, if a merfolk was brave enough to live inside one of those monstrosities, the buildings produced sounds that could only be defined as the forbidden love child of a Harpy’s screech and a Banshee’s scream.