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# Sirens

Story
The mast had snapped and the sea claimed the ship. I went under with it, tangled in a line that cinched tight around my chest. The weight dragged me down, deeper and deeper, until the wreck was only a blur above me. My lungs burned, my limbs thrashed, but the rope held fast.
Through the haze of bubbles and kelp I saw a shape. A long tail flicked past, silver in the dim light. My heart leapt. A mer, I thought, come to cut me free, to guide me to the surface. I stretched out my hand, begging the water for air.
The figure circled closer. Hair floated like seaweed, eyes gleaming. Then it turned, and the truth tore through me. The mouth opened wide, lined with teeth meant for rending. The black gaze never blinked, never pitied.
It came straight for me. My last sight was the jaws rushing out of the dark, and the silence of the deep swallowing my scream.

Story
Long ago, before the sea learned to hate, we were alone in the waves. We sang with the whales, we danced with the dolphins, and the deep was ours to love. Then came the Betrayer.
He was one of us, but he grew jealous of the songs. He wanted the sea to love only him. So he swam into the black rifts where no current flows, where even the light will not follow. There he called to the abyss, and the abyss answered. It gave him teeth for his song, and hunger for his heart. He returned with others like him, their eyes empty, their mouths full of blood.
From him came the sirens. They wear our form but not our soul. They do not sing. They cannot love. They are nothing but hunger given flesh.
We say the sea herself wept when she saw what he had become, and the salt of her sorrow still stings our eyes. That is why we hate them, and why we will never rest until they are gone. For every siren is the echo of the Betrayer’s sin, and every one slain is a fragment of his curse undone.

Bad meeting with a siren

Sirens are the predators of the warm seas.

From a distance, a siren might be mistaken for a mer, with a long tail flashing silver or blue in the sun. But any who have seen them close know the difference. Their eyes are like a shark’s, black and lifeless, and when they open their mouths the illusion ends. Rows of jagged teeth crowd their jaws, made for rending flesh. Their faces stretch too wide when they bite, an echo of nightmare more than beauty.

## Society

Unlike the merfolk, they form no villages, sing no songs, weave no bonds beyond the hunt. A siren knows only hunger. They drift solitary through the reefs and deep channels, sometimes gathering in twos or threes when prey is plentiful. Without words, they sense each other’s intent, moving with uncanny unity, cutting off escape routes, driving victims into their snapping jaws. When the hunt ends, the bond dissolves and they scatter once more.

They take no tools, carve no art, and raise no shrines. Whether they hold gods in secret, no one can say, but some whisper that they are drawn to storms, appearing in the foam like carrion birds on land. Sailors tell of keening wails that carry through the spray, half howl and half laughter, just before a crew vanishes beneath the waves.

## Relations

To merfolk, they are a curse and a shame. Some insist the sirens are kin twisted long ago, perhaps by dark magic or by the deep’s own cruelty. Some claim the sirens are nothing more than shark-mers, a brutal offshoot of the gentle merfolk. Their tails are thicker and more muscular, their movements more sudden and violent, and their dead eyes mirror the gaze of the hunting shark. Sailors say their skin feels rough, like sandpaper, and that the gills on their sides are wider and rawer than those of true mer. If this tale is true, then they may share blood with the mers, twisted by the deep into a form that lives only to feed. Yet no merfolk will admit such kinship, and most reject the thought with fury, for to them the sirens are not cousins, but monsters. No scholar has proved either tale, for those who study sirens seldom return.

To those cast adrift, the sight of a flicking tail above the waves is a gamble. It may be the mercy of the merfolk, or the last thing they ever see.

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