deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: My family lives near the siren camp. One day, we will learn how t
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: My family lives near the siren camp. One day, we will learn how they make their strange blue fires, the Seaflame that burns even underwater. “You’ve got to stop letting the sirens lure you into the water!” Calchas yelled. “They’re sirens! That’s their thing!” The rest of his family paid him no attention, already stripped down and clutching reeds, splashing through the water as they lugged along an upturned cauldron. “Come now, come!” his father called out. “Everyone ready? Calchas, you’ll stay here and look after your sisters, all right? Are we all set?”Calchas sighed. “Yeah.” “There it goes now! There’s the flame!” The procession of blue seaflame flickered beneath the waters, like sunlight rippling upwards through a grotto, promising sky. Just close enough to shore to be seen, dancing temptingly at them before fading deeper into the waters. A cavalcade of sun-browned bodies leapt after it, reeds raised, disappearing with a splash, and Calchas found himself alone on the beach. He sat down heavily on a rock, head in his hands. “They’re never going to do it,” he muttered to himself. “They’ll be going down there months, years from now, gods only know how many are going to drown - they’re never going to figure it out.” “Oh, I wouldn’t be so fatalistic about it,” came a melodic voice. Calchas jumped to his feet. There was a siren lazing on the rocks, eyes bright and slitted like a cat’s, apparently having been watching them all this time. Her sea-slick skin was the same coarse brown of the rocks, and had she not spoken he would have never noticed she was there. Calchas fumbled in his satchel and held two lumps of wax up next to his ears. “Don’t try anything! Don’t you dare sing! I’m warning you!” “Oh. No. No, don’t worry, we don’t do that anymore.” She shook out her tresses, lazily combing through them with talons the size of daggers. “Singing’s out. Long gone.” Calchas did not lower the wax. “Is it?” “Mm. Yeah.”He narrowed his eyes. “And why should I believe that?” “Oh. Well. You know.” She gestured towards his hands. “The wax? Pretty easy protective measure against it. And the rope, and the tying to the mast, and the …” She made a vague eddying motion with her claw. “Pretty easy to defend against, honestly. So yeah, that’s done. Mrm. Kind of makes you wonder how it worked for so long?” “Oh.” Calchas lowered the wax, just a fraction. “You’ve moved on to the - that seaflame, then?” She beamed at him. Her smile went all the way across her very wide cheeks. “Mmhm!” “And you’re just going to lure people down there, desperate to know how it’s done, without any hope of them ever finding out.” “Oh! Oh, no!” Her yellow eyes went wide. “They’ll find out! I mean, they ought to be able to, eventually. If they keep observing how it works -” “Oh, shut up!” Calchas exploded. “You expect me to believe that? It’s the same thing! Luring people out to sea with a - with a song, or with magical fire or whatever - What’s the difference? You just switch up the bait and suddenly, oh no, it’s different now -” “No, but it is!” the siren insisted, a half-offended whine entering her tone. “A song is a song, whatever! It’s beauty. People flock after beauty all the time, that’s its own obsession. But making fire - you can learn that! Bit by bit, however long it takes. And once you learn it - well, then it’s yours!” “It’s not going to happen!” All of a sudden his eyes were filled with tears. Calchas furiously rubbed them away with his wrist. “It’s the exact same thing! They’re going to keep diving down there, after your stupid flame, and they’re never going to figure it out -” “They will! Oh, but they will! They’ve swam after us enough times already. They’ve got reeds now, and that air bubble under the pot - they’re getting better at it!” “No. You don’t know them.” Calchas sunk back down onto the rock, letting his heels kick divots into the sand. He rubbed his nose. “You don’t know my dad. We’re not - we’re not inventors here, there’s no geniuses. We’ve got pages and pages up in his study describing the fire, and its color, and how it moves from one thing to another and all that stuff, and we’re not any closer to understanding how to make it … ” “Oh, but you will. You will! How could you not?” She leaned forward to him, body arching off the rock, eyes wide and earnest. “How can you watch the sun rise and fall each day, how can you see the stars in their positions every night, and not pass each day having learned something more about the world? How can you look upon something with awe, with curiosity, with desire, and every moment not come a little closer to knowing it?” She slowly shook her head, tresses rippling hypnotically around her saucer-like eyes. “I don’t say it’ll be easy. I don’t say it’ll be soon. But sooner or later the seaflame will give up its secrets to you, and then you’ll have undying torches that will light the caverns underwater, and then - Oh! And then! You have no idea how much the oceans will open up to you, baby boy. The depths it holds. All waiting for you. Secret upon secret upon secret …” The siren’s smile was broad and full of teeth, her eyes half-closed in ecstasy, and Calchas suddenly became aware of how large she was looming over him, and just how small he was in comparison. The wax had melted from the warmth of his hand, limp and shapeless, and a small sound escaped his mouth, like from a small prey animal. The siren blinked suddenly, and then she was back draped along the rock, half-submerged in the water. She nervously picked at her talons and gave him an abashed smile. Calchas swallowed. The sea air had chapped his lips, and he could feel the dead skin rasp against his tongue. “No end to it. Always something new to discover. Something new to explore. And people keep dying. People keep drowning.” He shook his head. “What’s at the bottom of the ocean, huh? More sirens?” The siren smiled. Amber gleamed from deep within her eyes. “People die. If you all stayed at home, safe and sound, never ventured, never explored - people would die just the same, from something stupid like rocks or flea bites or undercooked meat, I don’t know. Think of everything we’re offering you in return.” She batted back a stray piece of hair. “Beats singing.” “And just out of curiosity.” He squeezed the wax into a useless nub. “Why do you want to kill us?” Her smile only deepened. “Did I say that? I don’t think I said that, not explicitly. Maybe it’s nice down there, did you consider that?” She rested her cheeks on her talons, looking coyly at him. “Down deep beyond the seaflame. Down so deep and dark that your bodies lose their shape and it gets light again. Maybe the reason some people never come back is because they’re so, so, soooo taken by just how nice it is.” Calchas laughed, despite himself. “No. Shut up. That’s not true.” “You don’t know that, not for sure,” she said, sing-song. “Not without empirical verification.” He looked out towards the sea, light filling the shallows and then a deeper and deeper blue as he looked out, a vastness so dark it was opaque. He could see no sign of the seaflame, nothing moving but the waters. “Is my dad going to be coming back home safely? How about my brothers? Is anyone else going to die this time?” She didn’t look at him, preoccupied with an out-of-place feather on her wing. “There are things you have to learn for yourself, hm?” She stretched her jaw and yawned. “Well, I’m off now. Won’t be coming back. If you have any more questions -” she glanced off to the sea “- I’m sure you know where to look for me.” Calchas nodded, and half-raised a hand in farewell. Her gaze softened. “Good-bye, baby boy,” she said, and slipped from the rocks and was gone. Calchas stood on the beach a while longer, looking out at the sea, and then began the walk back home. He knocked the sand off his sandals at the doorstep, checked in on his sisters, and then went into his father’s study. It was filled with pages and pages of parchment that recorded in minute detail the various properties of seaflame, logs of diving expeditions, oceanic maps of siren ritual sites, notes on failed experiments, lists of names of the dead. Calchas picked up a pen and unrolled a fresh sheet of parchment. He had intended to record the details of his encounter with the siren, hoping that somehow this would be vital in understanding them and their flame. But as he sat there, pen touching the paper, Calchas found that he had no idea what to write, or if he had even learned anything at all. His hand drifted aimlessly, making a thin straight line that might have been the horizon, but then swooped upward abruptly like a wave, rising, dipping, cresting, like a strange and longing song that carried across the sea. -- source link
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