#sirens | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ashintheairlikesnow · 1 day

Text

To the Depths of the Sea

Bones in the Ocean Masterlist

CW: I don’t know, man. Siren commits a murder? This is out of order, timewise, but it's what wanted to be written, so...

-

His name was different, then.

It was not a clumsy tongue against the roof of a small mouth, flat teeth and full lips mouthing animal grunts without melody. Back then, his name was a lyric, a new line in the sirens' endless, ancient song.

His very being was a scale of perfect pitch. Sirens sang together, notes dancing up and down that mortal mouths and lungs could never recreate. He and his mother and his sisters sang in harmonies, children of the goddess of moon and tides, the wild water-woman who could turn a calm sea to turbulent waves in an instant.

He was born, at some point long ago. Borne by his mother, with his sisters huddled around her to be a dozen midwives, while the moon shone on the rock and the goddess watched. Born, yes, but he did not age, his wounds healed, he did not die.

Time shifted around him, like it did for all of the gods’ children.

The waves slapped the sand, sirens sang on rocks, and ships came and brought the men who heard their song. The men who steered their ships, unseeing and smiling, into the reefs to shred them apart, so that their bodies could be given to the sirens, and after that to the sea.

The ships changed, with time. The clothing the sailors they tore into wore changed, the style of shoe, the weight or shape of a sword and finally of the strange rifles. All these things changed.

The sirens didn’t.

They remained the same.

The siren boy had been sunbathing on the beach that day, eyes closed. The heat of the day lay over his brown skin like the humans’ heavy blankets, lulling him into a dreamless doze. Somewhere nearby, his sisters sang for their supper, having seen a ship hovering at the horizon.

But the siren boy was not alone. He was not the only one on the island to hear the song.

His eyes snapped open when he heard the softest crush of footsteps on underbrush. An animal, he told himself, even as he pushed himself up on his elbows, turned to see, half-hidden in the shadows just back from the beach, a human man staring back at him.

The human man’s hair was tangled and dirtied, hanging in clumps over his face. Mud had dried on his face and his shirt was worn nearly to shreds. He must have survived a past wreck, somehow slipped through the sirens’ fingers. Been here since then, wandering the island. He must have somehow held out against the siren song’s pull.

The man’s mouth moved.

He was whispering, but the siren was too far to hear him, leaning against a palm tree’s heavy, narrow trunk to stay upright. There was something wrong with one of his legs, the pants were torn but nothing was there beneath the tear.

The siren got slowly to his feet, tipping his head to one side. His curly black hair shifted, shadowing his own eyes as he moved soundlessly over the burning sand, where driftwood bits of broken ships lay in dried, bleached lines around him, their companions the scattered bones of the sirens’ meals.

Human voices, so flat and featureless, disgusted him.

But the eating would be good, and then the man's foul flat voice would stop interrupting the melodies.

“Monsters,” The man was whispering, but the siren didn’t know this word. He didn’t know any of their words. He knew what those throats tasted like, though, beneath his teeth. “Th-this island is made of monsters… You’re not a boy-... y-you’re not-”

The siren took one step, and then another. Each step sank his foot slightly into sand, brushed against shell and stick, rock, bone, and wood. Each movement a hypnotic sway, and he licked at his dry lips as his mouth watered for the meal.

His sisters’ song was all around them, and yet the man didn’t fall to it.

Their eyes met, then. The man’s were a faded blue, like the sky when the sun nearly bleached out all its colors with no clouds to subdue its power. His skin was like dried animal hides, wrinkled and tough. All bones and sinew, no real meat for the eating.

It didn’t matter.

All men were meals.

“They-... they said there was gold here.” The human’s whining voice, like a child, grated on the siren. Some foul mockery of the beautiful way the sirens spoke to each other, all out of tune, off-key. Not a song at all. This man’s name would be like the harsh screech of the birds the sirens ate during starving times, when there was nothing else.

There was no song in this man.

“There… isn’t any gold, is there?” The man’s voice tipped upwards, but the siren ignored it. He was so close he could smell the man, human odor of sweat and blood and something rotten where his leg used to be. The man was trembling, voice and body shaking together. He closed his eyes, slowly, and lifted his chin as if offering himself for the taking. Even so, his lips still moved in pointless speech. “It was a-a trick, a lie-... there was no gold here…”

The siren was on him.

He took him down onto his back, the underbrush soft beneath them. A flock of birds took flight with their cries an echo of the siren’s own triumphant song, one that buried itself in blood. A hundred teeth sharper than a shark’s tore out his throat, devoured skin and muscle, picked clean bones. The siren’s melody as it rejoiced in the meal was a sharp thing, rending apart the man’s soul and sending it to be held by the ocean, like all men who died to sirens and the sea.

His prey never fought him.

But it whispered, once more, with dead sightless eyes and unmoving lips, monster.

The siren woke.

He was not in the sun-warmed sand or roaming the island he had always known, his sisters and mother beside him. He was in a cool pool of pointless water hemmed in on all sides by stone, the high windows mocking him with the world he could not escape. The dream was already fading, and the memories of who he had been, more than a century ago, faded with it.

He lost himself, every time he woke.

He found himself only in sleep.

Areyto rolled aimlessly onto his back, staring up at the ceiling whie he floated in the water. He could feel the tingle of the power in the marks the magicians made, each decade, that kept him captive to his master’s whims. He could feel how the marks drained his memories away, the ones he could see in dreams but that were lost to him after. He floated there feeling his sisters fade to little more than shadows, a thought he'd had once. Maybe never real at all.

Moonlight shone, diffused by the windows so much his goddess could not have heard him, no matter how he cried to her. Areyto had long since stopped crying, anyway.

What use was pleading if no one could hear you, and those who could would only mock you and take yet another part of you away?

Like his name.

The magic made sure he couldn’t remember it.

Come.

His master’s command came like an oil slick in the water, slithering slime over his bared skin and pushing him from the water. He shook himself and went, step by step, to the door that was already being unlocked to allow him to leave - but only to go where he was ordered, only to do whatever vile thing his master demanded. The butler on the other side looked through him, saw something else. Saw whatever the master wanted him to see.

As the siren moved through this endless hell, the moon that had shone on him where he slept in the pool shifted behind a cloud. The goddess left him, and his half-formed prayers. It was all lost, everything that did not belong to Guilford Wentworth was gone.

Come, Areyto.

Not his name.

But the name he had been given, and must answer to. The name layered over the song, the lyric he had once been. The piece of the harmony that had belonged to him, just on the tip of his tongue, never coming together.

The melody of his identity had been stolen, replaced with the flat human syllables he went by now. A shrieking off note, a sharp staccato. His master had stolen his name, as surely as he had stolen Areyto’s life.

As surely as Areyto would steal it back.

However small his master had made him, his teeth were still sharp, and his claws were still keen to tear human skin apart. The marks would fade, if he could only keep them from being remade yet again. The power that held him here would crack apart beneath his fury, if the human magician would help him. Her voice held the edge of a song even in flat human words.

Areyto didn’t understand it, yet, but he knew what the song meant even if he didn’t know the melodies.

Hope.

-

Taglist: @grizzlie70 @burtlederp @finder-of-rings @theelvishcowgirl @whump-for-all-and-all-for-whump @bloodinkandashes @squishablesunbeam @mj-or-say10 @apokolyps @wildfaewhump @shrimpwritings @there-will-always-be-blood @latenightcupsofcoffee @angelsproject

#whump #whump writing #captivity #original writing #original fantasy #siren whump #sirens #siren #male siren #magic whump #fantasy whump #original work #original character #memory loss #bones in the ocean

23 notes · View notes

amethystsoda · 2 months

Text

This video has not left my mind since I saw it… thank u tiktok user golblinforeva 🤲🩵

#laios touden #dungeon meshi #sirens #rhythm heaven #dunmeshi #delicious in dungeon #credit in source

6K notes · View notes

mostly-funnytwittertweets · 9 months

Text

#sirens #siren #twitter #tweets #meme #memes #tweet #funny #lol

16K notes · View notes

happyheidi · 9 months

Text

𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡: 𝑤𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟

#cottagecore #these colors <3 #water #watercore #mermaids #summer aesthetic #alternative aesthetic #soft aesthetic #pink #light academia aesthetic #sirens #ocean #sea #sea creatures #moodboard

16K notes · View notes

vampyrgrl · 7 months

Text

marielle necklace by vampyrgrl

10K notes · View notes

alohamoon · 3 months

Text

I love you ocean, I love you beach, I love you seashell, I love you fish, I love you moon, I love you sun, I love you stars, I love you mermaids, I love you ships, I love you sailors, I love you surfers, I love you weird deep sea creatures, I love you pearls, I love you fossils, I love you treasure chests, I love you houseboats, I love you anchors, I love you waves, I love you sea foam, I love you sea glass, I love you-

5K notes · View notes

the-evil-clergyman · 3 months

Text

A Fantasy of the Deep by Arthur Hopkins (1903)

#arthur hopkins #art #paintings #fine art #1900s #1900s art #academic art #academicism #academism #painting #british art #british artist #fantasy #siren #sirens #mermaid #classic art

1K notes · View notes

leatherandmossprints · 7 months

Text

‘Sirens’ by John Longstaff, c. 1892.

#john longstaff #vintage art #classic art #art #art history #old art #painting #art details #vintage #moody art #oil painting #sirens

3K notes · View notes

eirene · 11 months

Text

Mermaids, 1885 Konstantin Egorovich Makovsky

#Konstantin Makovsky #russian art #art #painting #art history #fashion #19th century #academicism #mermaids #sirens #conceptual #nature #mythology #merfolk #1880s

4K notes · View notes

strange-birb · 4 months

Text

This is an old drawing I did like 10 months ago lol

But I love her so ✨💅

#angst #black canary #dinah lance #black canary dc #sirens #gotham sirens #dc fanart #she could destroy you #she’s so #Dinah lance fanart #green arrow AU #star city #fluff #alternative

1K notes · View notes

archerinventive · 1 year

Text

A Merry MerMay to you all!🧜‍♀️

One of my favorite moments from faire last year was when a small girl came over to my booth, saw this print, and declared her sheer disappointment and frustration at whoever had taken this photo, instead of helping me in my moment of peril.

I assured her that the photo had been taken the very second the swarm had attacked, and that my friend helped me right afterwards.

She still seemed very unimpressed. lol

Never let the magic die. <3

I hope you all have a wonderful week. :)

Thank you to my friends for helping me on this shoot back in 2020. It's still one of my favorites to date. ♥️ lexi.the.first, steven.the.second, Rae, & Hanna V.

#mermaid #MerMay #Mer May #sirens #questing gone wrong #lady knight #skulls #archer inventive

4K notes · View notes

winternymphaea · 1 year

Text