Mythical bestiary

Sirens

A very well known creature of the legendary bestiary, the siren is a woman with the tail of a fish whose song bring sailors to their death.

No mortal can resist the song of a siren, both in their ancient form, the winged siren, and their current, most known form, the sea creature.

No one is sure where this ancient race started off, but one thing that is known is that they are the most ancient of the European seas and oceans and that they were at first not at all the aquatic creature that we know today.

The first sirens where winged being with the head and bust of a woman and the body of a man. They were a terror of the sea, and were known by the Greeks to bring many boats and their crew to crash into rocks.

Although some creatures of the sea retain the wings of the siren, the siren themselves lost them during a competition of song with the goddess Hera. The goddess and her muses, refusing to accept that their voices were the most beautiful, tore their wings to shreds and threw them into the sea. The survivors, the ones that we now call siren, got their fish tail from the rocks around them.

Still, the voice of sirens come from their old lost affiliation with the element of air. Their beauty come both from water and air, making them one of the most beautiful creature when singing, but also one of the most scary when angered.

Sirens are often fascinated with mirrors, loving to see their reflects and to play with the rays of lights under water.

Although most often predatory and dangerous, some sirens do interact with humans, either due to being thankful, pure curiosity or to get something from them.

Rarely, sirens and humans have gotten attached, either as mate or friends. Very picky in terms of love, but great romantics, sirens value platonic relationship very much, sometimes even considering humans that they decided to protect as part of their pod.

Many tales of couples between siren and man talk about underwater temples and cities.

Sirens are also gifted at controlling the weather to an extent, some pods hunting by creating sea storms breaking the boats caught in them.

Very rare in most parts of the world, sirens are said to be the most common near Italy and Greece, and mostly in the Mediterranean Sea.

There is many tales of siren, both ancient, like the Odyssy, where winged siren appear, and current form (Ovide's metamorphosis which is a total shot in the dark from the author for the traduction, talk about the gift of sirens), or even in pop culture, with the little mermaid.

I seem to have a few known siren names and their traduction, so here they are.

Aglaope : She who has a beautiful face.
Aglaophone : She who has a beautiful voice.
Leucosie : The white lady
Ligeia : She who shriek high
Molpe : She who sings lost stories
Parthenope : She who looks like a maiden
Peisione : The Convincing
Raidne : She who progress
Teles : Perfect
Thelxinoe : She who ease the soul by her music
Thelxepeia : She who talk soothing words
Thelxiope : She who has a trusting face.

They might be traduced into human words, legendary siren from human legends or even just made up, but being in my book, I thought it would be nice to include them here. The source I'm using is trustworthy most of the time, so why not here.

Forbidden knowledge : The scalp of a siren is an erogenous zone, hence their habits to comb it very often. You won't see the little mermaid the same way now.

Tl;dr : Birb got yeeted into the sea, sing a lot, eat people sometimes, would cut someone over the last cookie