Fantasy

They told my mother to drown me.

“It’s mercy,” they said. “The child will suffer.”

But she didn’t.

She wrapped me in salt-soaked cloth and hid me in a reed basket, pushing me downriver with a prayer stitched into the fabric like a second skin. I don’t remember her face—only the hush of her voice and the warmth of her fingertips against my forehead as she whispered, “Survive.”

The humans who found me believed I was just a lost baby girl, left by desperate hands. They never saw the slight webbing between my fingers or how my lullabies made the waves rise when I cried.

They named me Mara. It means bitter. Fitting, I suppose.

I tried to be normal.

Tried to hide the parts of me that glistened too brightly, echoed too strangely. I was careful not to hum in public. Careful not to get my feet wet. Careful not to speak when angry—my voice sharp enough to cut skin when I was.

But you can only bury what you are for so long.

It started when I turned seventeen.

My reflection began to flicker—sometimes all woman, sometimes something else. My skin would glow faintly beneath the moon, a pale shimmer like pearl. And my dreams? Full of voices calling me underwater, of scales brushing against mine, of songs that tasted like memory.

One day, I followed the call.

I left before dawn, barefoot, the mist curling around my ankles like it knew me. I found the cove hidden past the cliffside. The sea was still. Too still.

Then I heard it.

The song.

It didn’t come from the water.

It came from me.

A low hum trembled from my throat, not summoned but remembered. The notes were sharp and curved, like fishhooks dipped in honey. It was beautiful and terrible and not meant for human ears.

And someone heard it.

He stood on the rocks above, watching me. I hadn't noticed him until the song faded. His eyes were wide, his jaw slack. He stumbled forward.

“You’re one of them.”

I stepped back.

“One of who?” I asked.

He blinked, shook his head. “Sirens. Like the old tales. My grandmother told me stories. Said they were wiped out after the war. Said they were dangerous.”

“I’m not dangerous.”

He smiled, slow and unsure. “Then sing again.”

I didn’t.

I turned and left, the song coiling in my throat like a secret.

His name was Elias.

He followed me.

Not in the threatening way. In the curious, reckless way boys always do when something stirs more than their thoughts.

He brought books—ones about the sea, about myth and bone and blood. He asked questions. Listened too closely when I spoke. Watched the way I moved near water. Once, he reached out and touched the skin at my collarbone, tracing the shimmer beneath it.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “When I lie. When I don’t sing.”

He nodded, as if that made perfect sense.

The first time I kissed him, I nearly killed him.

Not on purpose. It was instinct, the kind buried in the marrow.

When a siren feels love, her voice becomes a tide. And tides pull.

I kissed him on the cliff’s edge, the salt wind tangling in our hair, and he gasped, clutched his head, and dropped to his knees like the earth itself had shifted under him.

His nose bled.

His ears rang.

And still, he said, “Do it again.”

Foolish boy.

Beautiful, foolish boy.

The village elders knew something was wrong.

They whispered of the sea growing restless. Fish swimming backward. Nets torn in the night. Babies waking, screaming, from dreams of drowning.

“Something has returned,” they said.

And one old woman, hunched and bitter, pointed at me with a trembling hand.

“She sings when no one listens,” she hissed. “She walks the shore barefoot like she belongs to it. Her eyes change with the moon.”

They called me sea-born.

They spat on my doorstep.

They locked their sons in at night.

Even Elias was watched.

And I, poor creature that I was, tried so hard to remain tame.

Until the night they came for me.

It wasn’t a mob. It was worse.

Three elders. Silent. Stern. Determined.

They knocked on the door of the cottage where I stayed, and when I opened it, their eyes filled with pity instead of fear.

“You don’t belong here,” one said.

“You’re a threat,” said another.

“We remember what your kind did. The floods. The voices. The deaths. Do you?”

I said nothing.

They handed me a blade.

“End it yourself,” they said. “We won’t hurt you. We’re not monsters.”

I laughed then. Not a siren's song. Just a girl’s bitter breath.

“You think this is mercy?”

“It’s balance.”

I ran.

Not from fear. From rage.

They would not get to write my ending.

I raced to the cove where my voice first returned to me and screamed into the sea. I screamed until it broke into waves, until the salt burned my throat and my breath came ragged.

And then—they came.

From the deep.

Women with coral in their hair and blood in their mouths. Scaled sisters with the same shimmer in their skin, the same ache in their chests.

One of them swam forward and touched my face.

“We heard you.”

“You’re alive,” I whispered.

“So are you.”

They offered me a place.

A name.

Power.

A kingdom beneath the current where no one would ask me to hide.

But I turned to the shore.

“I’m not done up there,” I said. “Not yet.”

They understood.

One placed a pearl in my palm.

“If they come for you again,” she said, “sing. But this time, do not soften the edges.”

I returned to the village different.

Not hidden.

Not afraid.

They saw it in my walk. In my eyes. In the tide that crept just a little higher that night.

They didn’t knock again.

But Elias did.

He brought me lavender and silence.

He sat beside me on the rocks and said, “You know they’ll always be scared of you.”

“I know.”

“But I’m not.”

“I know that too.”

Then I sang.

Not to enchant him.

To thank him.

He cried anyway.

Not from pain—but from release.

The song had that effect now. It wasn’t a weapon anymore. It was me.

A girl who had survived.

A voice who had been told to drown but learned to float.

A woman with a tide in her chest and mercy in her teeth.

Some still watch me with suspicion.

Some still believe I’ll burn the village to the ground with a note.

And maybe I could.

But I won’t.

Because power isn’t about what you can do.

It’s about what you choose to do with what they tried to kill.

And I choose to sing.

Even if they don’t understand the words.

Even if they call it noise.

Even if they cover their ears and bury their sons and whisper “monster” into the wind.

I will sing.

Because I am both girl and sea.

Both storm and softness.

And every time they try to silence me,

I’ll sing louder.

Until they remember who taught the ocean to speak.

Posted Aug 01, 2025
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