Creation
The Keeper of the Tide was created by writer John Ney Rieber and penciler Peter Gross in The Books of Magic issue 29, in 1996.
Major Story Arcs
The Keeper of the Tide burst out into normal reality from her sacred plane, onto a restricted area of the American desert called Little Moon.
Tim Hunter and Leah find her while camping. She is in mermaid form, and is dying of dehydration, tangled up in the remains of the fence that she knocked down earlier when she entered the earthly plane.
Leah and Tim can’t figure out why there’s a mermaid in the desert, and can’t move her–her body is like water. Leah moves their camp near her, as Tim is entranced by the topless mermaid’s assets, leading Leah to realize that Tim hasn’t slept with Molly yet.
They manage to put her in a tarp and fill it with water, waking her up.
The dying mermaid cryptically implies to Tim and Leah that she doesn’t live on actual water, but the depths of the soul.
Tim misunderstands and thinks she drinks blood, but Leah says that’s wrong, and in fact Leah is the one who used to drink blood. Now she just starves herself.
Tim and Leah fight, but make up, and then kiss. Their conjoining brings down a magical rain, created by Tim as an Opener, which starts the desert to flowering. The mermaid is now cured, and sits in their convertible, now full of life’s water.
They all talk. The mermaid doesn’t understand why they can’t control their magic and their reliance on words, while they are not sure they can trust her, as an elemental. She is from a Tower, but at least not the Dark Tower. The mermaid splashes them, and they all disappear from the real world, and Tim and the mermaid reappear in her tower of the Moon, a vast unending space of water.
The mermaid continues to talk to him cryptically about how words are empty, then swims away, testing his understanding. He realizes that he needs true understanding of the being behind words, like the name “Leah.” A swarm of naked water spirits come out of the moon and swirl around him, teasing him for his half-boy, half-adult state, his continuing embarrassment over sexuality and nudity, his fear of “swimming with” Leah, and the fact that he “has never felt the tide.” However, one remonstrates the rest, saying that perhaps Tim is waiting for his “Other,” a term the original mermaid also used. But then she looks deeper into him, and says it was just his fear, after all. The water spirits leave, and Tim is unmanned.
Outside the Tower of the Moon, Leah and the mermaid watch Tim’s travails and yells at the mermaid for torturing him. The mermaid says the spirits were just part of Tim’s self, and that this is necessary for him to grow up. She says she is the last Keeper of the Tide, and is alone in the Tower, dying. The kids in the area used to keep her alive with their imaginations, but now the movie being filmed there keeps them away. Only Leah’s dreams of her love for Tim are keeping the mermaid alive now.
A Storm of Chaos starts to rain down inside the Tower. The Keeper dies, but makes a chalice and tells Leah she must drink it, to become the new Keeper and save Tim.
Leah doesn’t want to drink the cup filled with the spirit of the mermaid. Her whole life has been about trying to escape a box and getting to be herself, and if she drinks, she’ll once again be imprisoned and forced to live under another’s ideas. But, to save Tim, she drinks it.
Leah wakes up as a mermaid, and despite her former fears, loves her new reality. She sees the relationships between everything.
Tim has gone through more experiences of self-awakening himself, and is now comfortable with his feelings for Leah.
Leah, however, as the new Keeper of the Tide, is now stuck in her Tower, and can no longer even see Tim. They are separated.
Much later, Leah is seen still happily watching over the forces of chaos and order, and the cosmos, as the Keeper.