1 Silent Waters

"I love you." Whispered to the waves each morning and each night. Whispered to the sun that rides the horizon and to the moon that manipulates the tide. A secret between two lovers washed away by the ocean but preserved by their pounding hearts with the dreadful sound of apprehension.

"And I you," a hushed response in the dead of night, scarcely heard over the howling winds. Waves crash over barren rocks as the sea cleansed the white-sand beaches of the day's collected sin. The incandescent, alabaster-white tail of a secret love caught the moon's gaze, and its scales redirected the light towards the land, towards her other half.

"Go with men," she'd say in broken words and a rough voice. There was a plan and it would work. She knew it could. There was a plan, and it revolved around the strange travelling men with the suspicious grins and greedy hands that wanted to take her love to the seas, to her seas. A strange currency the life of her beloved was, but it had to be this way as this may be their only chance to be together, in the ocean, no distance between them. As her love drowns, she will find her, magic will save her, and they will be happy.

"Take magic," the other would hear before their lips joined in a soft and delicate exchange. Energy of light swam at the meeting point, a beautiful bright emerald green to match her land-stricken lover's eyes, a perfect seal to the perfect spell. A small "curse" of types she had inflicted, nothing more. It wasn't anything evil or corrupt; she could never hurt her beloved like that, just one little spell to insure that her love would be joining her in the ocean, in her home, for as long as they'll have each other.

"Take with you," and again their mouths found each other, sliding like they were made for one purpose, and that was to find their other half. Even as the two had spent so much time together, so much longing to be with one another, the land's words never fit on her tongue as they would had she legs; a throat designed for the seas surrounding Greece was sure to be troublesome in that regard. However, her love had never been bothered: it was a pointless thing to be upset over, she had stressed their first few white-sand meetings.

"Part of me," rasped in the heat of the moment, in the height of love-embedded mania, before fitting together once more. It was easy to forget the different worlds separating them until the kiss endured too long to be as enjoyable any longer, with legs cramping from crouching down to sea level and a tired tail still keeping one rooted in the shifty sand.

"Keep with you," and never part, she wanted to add, but her mouth felt heavy, and the rest of the words wouldn't follow. It was disquieting, at the very least, a desire to get all of her plan out in the open, to spoil every detail, but she was not able to, and that did not feel good, not in the slightest.

"... Why, Dearest, what spell did you cast on me, sealed by our love?" And there they came, the words that may as well have ruined it all. "Why?" she asks? Because we deserve to be together in practice, not simply theory, she wants to say. Because you deserve better than the land provides, and I with the help of the sea, may grant it to you, she wishes to explain, but she can't. Her mouth could form the words, but her throat felt damaged; too much talking had been done already, too much had she used her voice this night. No longer would it work as well.

One word was able to break through the barricade of pain and escape her lips: "Again," she had said, barely able to hear herself. Again, let us meet again tomorrow and I will tell you more, was the calculated sentence, the intended meaning behind her singular word. Her lover sat up on the beach, the distance between them exaggerated only in feeling.

"Alright, tomorrow I will come back, and tomorrow you shall explain further. Is that alright?" She nodded, chest heavy with a knowledge she couldn't convey, with thoughts of a sacrifice that might end up wrecking both lovers' lives. She crouched down once more, a temporary position, knees bent and chin rested atop them, feet firmly planted in the sand. A hand came up to her face and lifted her chin, forcing eye contact between the two. A soft look enveloped her love's eyes, a true, pure beauty unknown to any but herself, and it was in that spot she felt the heat in her stomach pooling there and rising, giving her neck and cheeks a warm glow about them, hardly seen in the low light.

The hand at her chin moved to cover the side of her neck, thumb massaging the scales behind her ear absentmindedly. It was intimate and beautiful as their foreheads pressed together and a whisper flooded through the air.

"I'll gladly wait."

The sun had begun to peek over the horizon, and they separated, for now they had different lives in which they knew nothing of each other . As the hand left her neck and breeze chilled the spots of heat still residing on her face, she heard once again a low confession, unsure if it was even meant for her ears or simply the wind.

"If it's you, I'll gladly do anything," her love had said, walking up the beach and away from the other. A sad sight that even after months of the same retreating figure, she had not gotten used to, and she would never get used to it because getting used to it meant expecting it and expecting it meant accepting that they would never truly be one with the other and accepting that was not an option.

So, she swam away, tail swishing above the ocean's top before disappearing to depths unknown to any apart from her brothers and sisters and their mothers and fathers and their sons and daughters. Even her lover knew not where she went as day broke the shores of Heraklion, Crete for the uncountable time.

And when the day left and night fell and the beaches were empty yet again, she returned and waited there for her love; she waited there and she waited there, but her love never came. She stayed there until dawn broke once more, and she stayed there as passerbys filled the white-sand beaches and crowded her. She stayed there, waiting for her love until suspicious men dragged her out of the ocean with their greedy hands and tied her in the ropes of their ship and loaded her onto the deck. She was still waiting: her love would come, she knew.

"Well luck have us tonight, ain't that right?" One of them had said, a lanky skeleton of a man he was. She didn't like him very much; he reminded her of a sickly rat stowed away on the ship rather than one of the pirates that makes his living with it. The other man next to the sickly Rat man was large and tall; he reminded her of a barbarian with arms larger than barrels.

"Earlier we hads a pretty woman all alone at sunset an' now we gots our hands on a mermaid!" It was Barbarian's turn to speak, and that was how he used that gracious gift? To speak of he and his partners' heinous crimes? She didn't understand. How could someone so horrid be blessed with a gift such as speech when she, a creature of the sea, who simply wanted her land-dwelling lover to know how much she meant to her, would be cursed to silence?

It was not fair; this night was supposed to be better. This night she was supposed to clear up the exchange of magic with her love, not be dragged across the splintered deck of a pirate's ship, bound at any point of movement.

Rat opened his mouth again, most likely to waste his talent more, as Barbarian had. "She sure was a pretty 'n, what with 'er 'air of silk and those big eyes that could as well be emeral's?" That wasn't right. No, that was most definitely not right. Hair of silk? Large eyes equal to emeralds? Was that why her love had not shown up tonight? Had these pirates stolen from her the one thing she needed to survive?

"Wha's got you so worked up?" Rat, that horrible man, had spoken again. He had crouched down just as her love had done the night before, but it was worse, so much worse as he stared at her with hungry eyes. A bony hand wrapped around a clump of her wet hair and yanked hard enough to have her yelp in fiery pain. She hated this. She hated him. Rat was not a good man, that was plain to see. These men were corrupted, and she did not like them, not at all.

She could tell. It was a sense of sorts. Benevolence or malevolence, it was easy for her to see. All she had to do was look into their soul, look into their eyes and see the truths buried behind the lies. Her love, well she was good, pure. Rat? Rat was bad, poison, a man of horrible ugly truths. Barbarian was better than Rat, but still a bad man. He had lies, sure, but they weren't as dark as Rat's. Rat's were hard to see, hard to look at. Rat's lies were darker than the blackest seas she called home. He had cheated, stolen, hurt, and clambered over others for a better sell or a quicker escape. She did not like Rat, not at all.

Rat continued talking about a girl they had found on the white-sands beach just before sunset. She knew by now that they spoke about her love. It was upsetting to hear about all the things they did to her, horrible things, but it was okay to them because she was a "pretty youn' thing" and shouldn't have been alone if she had not wanted to be hurt like that.

"She looked real nice before you slit 'er throat, didn' she?" Rat said, turning back to Barbarian.

"But," he continued, jerking her head up by the hair even higher, not giving her pain a single thought, "I'm sure you'll look just as pretty when you's up for sale, won't ya'?" She growled at the disgusting man, and with a violent thrash, she tried to tear herself out of his slimy hands. This resulted in her falling hard backwards onto the wooden deck, similar to when she first was thrown down. The scales along her body and tail started to pulse and puff outwards with a frightened manner meant to intimidate. Her tail became more tangled with the pirates' scratchy rope as it dug underneath her uplifted scales.

It hurt, but the only pain she truly felt was in her heart: burning sensations of loss and grief never felt to her before. In her head, it was obvious: her love had died at the hands of these pirates. However, in her heart, in her heart she wanted to believe that Rat and Barbarian were lying, that they had never seen her love, that she may have been simply late to their fated meeting, but she knew the truth, and even if she could not bear to delve into it, it flashed in front of her eyes red.

The ocean raged with her; she and thunder growled in unison, and the lightning ignited the night as her eyes glowed with a hate previously unknown. Scales began to pulsate harder, faster. Her eyes flared an intense shade of emerald green, the same as the eyes of her murdered love. As though working in her favor, the sky darkened, and a storm brewed at every edge, waves rampaging against the ship, crashing into the sides as a physical embodiment of her anger.

Rat and Barbarian were joined by more crewmates coming up from below the deck. The all stared in a terrified silence at the beast they had unleashed, watched her nails become claws as sharp as steel, watched as she ripped through the ropes as if they were paper. The hair previously used against her whipped and wailed over her head with the howling wind and made her larger than before, a more solid and horrific presence.

Ice-cold scales ran black as the waves, no longer an inviting pearlescent white, but dark and threatening, blending into the caliginous expanses of the clouded sky. The only way to see her still was by her illuminated eyes or by catching a glimpse of a silhouette through a flash of lightning. She stalked closer to the still pirates, and with one flick of her arm, she held the closest pirate (small, perhaps just a boy) by the neck, lifting him above her head. She stared into his eyes for a moment, trying to find the color, but all she saw was a color bright like blood.

In the next lightning flash, she threw the boy off to the side, watched as calm as a hurricane's eye as he flew over the edge of the boat and a shrill scream echoed from the watery grave. Turning back towards the rest of the pirates, now scattered across the deck, she screamed and found a melodic voice escaping her throat rather than a raspy growl, a song to appeal to all. The pirates stopped their dashing about the moment her song touched their ears; it called to them, and they desperately wanted to listen. She finally had a voice, and it was beautiful, powered by a pain none should feel as she did. One by one they fell until one man remained, paralyzed by both her song and the fear in his veins.

"You…" She sung, towards the last crooked man, a man too bad to die because death was too good for him, too merciful. So she let him live, calmed the storms and cleared the sky. She leapt from the ship, swimming off into the unknown depths as he hurried the damaged ship to the shore.

Rat was lucky, he thought. However, as he returned to the land he found only that another lie had formed in his deplorable mind. He reached the shore, the same white-sands beach where they had found the damned creature in the first place, and his face had been stuck in permanent terror as he retold what had occurred on his ship to all who would listen. The story of she who sings men to their graves of water and destroys those who sail through her seas for reasons impure. He spread her tale, and he warned sailors and pirates all around, do not sail your ship through the waters surrounding Heraklion if you did not openly call to death to hold you in her cold arms, robbed of heat and the love she lost to man's cruel ways. And they called her, Siren.

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