http://callmegallifreya.tumblr.com/post/104613467865/the-magical-crawdad-mmolio-funkocide
“asexual sirens getting real fuckin pissed about all these sailors interrupting choir rehearsal”
“sirens are already asexual they dont have sex with the men they kill them”
“well no wonder they kill them they keep interrupting choir rehearsal”
“Asexual mermaids being really pleased when an asexual sailor begins singing baritone counterpoint.”
They usually didn’t pay attention to the wooden things that floated on top of their world. It would have been rather like constantly paying attention to birds or flotsam.
They sang. It was what they did. They sang their histories, or the tunes of lonely whales, and sometimes, songs they overheard from swimming close to the rare wooden things that did who-knew-what on the open waves.
They were sometimes beautiful, those Otherworld songs, and the Mer would often gather on sharp rocks or sandy bars to sing them in the air.
And that was when the trouble happened.
The floating things would float nearer and meaty treat food would come and try to have sex with them. Disgusting. But it was a way to catch food if the pod was hungry, so they just accepted it as a fact of life.
Shiriiiea was there when a miracle happened. She and her pod-sisters were singing one of the Otherworld songs when a wooden thing floated by. But this time, no meaty treat food came to have sex with them. This time, the food sang back.
Siiyer said it. “The food sings!”
“What a nice voice,” Shiriiea blurted. They sang some more, watching as the food dropped a heavy thing on a rope to keep his floating thing stable.
He bought out an instrument and played for them. Sometimes with words, sometimes with melody. Always in tune with the pod.
This was food they would not eat.
The pod swam out to sing with him. Picked up a few words of the language he called Griik. They took care to note how this one was different from all the other food. He taught them a song they would know him by. They caught him some fish to eat, and decorated his boat with jewellery of seaweed and shells.
He came back to them, to sing again. The pod loved him and his voice. He became their ‘pet’. A Griik word for an animal you feed and enjoy the company of and never, ever eat.
Otherworlders were strange.
When the storm came, his floating thing became another wreck, but the pod knew him, and fed him the Sacred Fish, the one reserved for the drowned and betrayed, who became Mer, like them.
His fins were beautiful, and the Sacred Fish made him young and beautiful, and turned his teeth sharp for the need to eat meat.
The Pod had never had a more beautiful chorus, in or out of the water.
*
They tell a tale in some areas of Greece, of a humble fisherman who was immune to the charms of the Sirens, who would go out and sing with them, in return for them helping him with his catch. They say he was lost at sea and the Sirens ate him for his hubris.
But if you go to his home village, the story changes. They say they saw him swimming with the pod, and heard his voice for many, many years after that terrible storm.
Those villagers know to only sing along when they hear a Siren. Because if you dare interrupt their song, they will kill you and eat you, and decorate their gardens with your bones.
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