the siren's call | felix lee

i.

Your grandmother had died recently.

She was the only member of your family that liked you, and now that she was gone, you were quite sure that you could say with confidence that you hated every single member of your family. You supposed you could try harder to maintain the peace in the castle, but it was so hard to keep up with your royal duties, and the ideals that your parents upheld were cruel and selfish, and you disagreed with the way they ruled over the Wisteria Kingdom in every aspect. Talking to them only fueled arguments and created more tension within the family.

Your only escape from them was your tower. At least they gave you privacy. You had stocked the shelves in your room well, but no one would know that. You kept your research hidden, something for your eyes only. You spent hours in your tower room, reading and re-reading your favorite stories, creating theories about sirens, making up stories about them in your head. Ever since you had seen that siren on your sixth birthday, and your grandmother had exposed her scar, you had been obsessed with them, trying to find out everything about them. But you hadn't seen one since.

You were so curious about your grandmother that you had done some snooping, and ended up in the castle library, poring over dusty old books on your family history. It had taken months, but six-year-old you was dedicated, and you finally came across the recording of your grandmother's early life. The story was, to say the least, incredibly disturbing.

On your grandmother's sixteenth birthday, she and her twin sister had gone to the beach to celebrate. They had been splashing in the shallow water together when her sister fell into a trance, and started swimming out to sea. Your grandmother had called desperately for their parents, but by the time they reached her they were too late. Her sister had swam out too far, and seemed to be in an altered state of mind, their desperate calls ignored. Despite her parents' panic, your grandmother had swam out after her sister, trying to reach her and bring her back, but failed to do so. All that she remembers is a white-hot, searing pain in her neck, and the sensation of choking on her own blood. That, and the horrifying sight of her sister's body being torn apart by a bloodthirsty, vicious creature with glowing eyes and gleaming purple scales.
She had been saved, but barely made it out alive. She never went back into the ocean after that, and you were surprised that she had been able to bring you to the beach at all. You understood why she had been so afraid.

You never asked her about it. After that fateful day when her eyes seemed so far away, you knew that bringing it up to her would only bring forth pain. Even at an extremely young and curious age, you didn't want to make her relive that.

She was buried with a purple scarf around her neck.
But that story only fueled your curiosity towards sirens. You snuck around the village, swiping every book and scrap of information on the creatures, listening to the elder's tales on their supposed encounters with them and scanning the water daily to try and catch a glimpse. But alas, the creatures knew how to hide their existence well, and it seemed like the more you found out about them, the further you got from ever seeing one again.

It was on a particular autumnal afternoon when you were poring over a well-read novel on sirens, examining the drawings closely, trying to spot some miniscule detail that you might have missed the past hundred times you had read the book, when everything started to change.

It had been a usual day for you, trying your hardest to please your parents by attending and excelling in your classes that morning, and when they had refused to acknowledge you and instead complimented your younger brother on how much he his sparring skills had improved, you retreated to your tower, somewhat sulkily. You knew that you shouldn't be surprised at how they favored your younger siblings over you, but it still stung every time they ignored another one of your accomplishments and instead focused on something miniscule from your brother and sister. What hurt even more was that you knew they only complimented your siblings because of you wanting their attention and approval. If only Gran were still alive, you thought bitterly, she would appreciate all of my hard work.