Random Works

The Ocean's Girl

Many legends and rumors circle around the Arctic Sea and the creatures that live there. The Sirens of the Ice, the Arctic Mermaids. No matter what they're called, the story is told all the same.

The sirens have been living diligently for centuries. They stalk any sea vessel that may cross their waters, and they leave no man left alive. At least, this is what the legends recall. No one knows the truth of the sirens, simply because no one has lived to tell it. No one but me.

I live in a small fishing town, near the edge of an island. The docks - and the boats they house - are the only form of transportation in and out. The population is small, with forts placed here and there around the square mileage we call our town. There is nothing but ice and water as far as the eye can see. An endless landscape of blue and white. The winters are brutal, and the weather never changes, but it's home.

I don't know what would make me special in the eyes of a siren. My wavy brown hair and blue eyes are quite ordinary where I live, and I'm quite small and thin for a girl my age. Of course, then I was quite pudgy. I hadn't yet lost my baby fat. The one thing that has never changed is my spirit. To this day I'm still short-tempered.

Back then, I was a chubby little thing, probably only four years old. My hair still had a blonde tint and my skin had not yet tanned from the blistering sun. Again, I didn't know what would have made me special in the eyes of a siren. It must have just been a miracle that they decided to save me from that ship. Of course, they were the ones that attacked us.

It was a cruise ship, if my memory serves me right. Bright lights, smiling faces, and loud noise is all I remember before the crash came. A big, violent crash that shook the whole ship. One of the sirens had hit the ship. The captain came over the speaker and told everyone to get to the liferafts. The sirens had been spotted and protocol was to evacuate the ship.

"Take her. Take her and go," the person holding me, my father, told the woman next to him, my mother.

"I'm not leaving without you.", she replied.

"I'll be fine, dear.", he reassures her. All around them people are frantically trying to escape the ship, while the sirens continue their assault on the ship.

Reluctantly, my mother holds out her arms to take me. All of a sudden, a huge bang violently rocks the ship, sending me flying into the waters below.

Because I can't swim, I quickly sink beneath the waters, sending me from the myriad of dead men to drift among the sirens. I remember a siren catching me and cradling me to its chest as it took me to dry land. It must know that humans don't breathe under the water. I was laid on an outcrop of rock, and was forced to watch as the ship sunk and the people on it were all slaughtered.

The pretty lights I had been so mesmerized with slowly blinked out flickered out. All of the men and children were slaughtered, the women miraculously left alive. Many people sank with the ship, stuck beneath the metal. The liferaft had been followed and destroyed, everyone on it had drowned. The blood stained the water, and after a while, the screams of the dead could no longer be heard. And yet I was left untouched.

"Mama! Where are you, Mama?!", I cried, unable to make sense of the fact that she was now dead.

I cried and cried, for I was scared and cold and tired. I cried until one of the sirens picked me up and held me to its chest. I didn't know if it was the same one that rescued me from the water, but the closeness offered me some form of comfort.

Their pale skin and humanoid faces reminded me much of humans, but that was where the resemblance ends. They had webbed fingers, and pointed teeth, and their bodies ended in strange eel-like tails from the waist down. Their skin was cold and slimy, and it was difficult to differentiate the males from the females, if there was any difference at all.