Siren

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he knew he should have been repulsed.

She grasped the edge of the barnacled pier and hauled herself up, dragging her torso up out of the water. Thick, blue-green hair framed her face and tumbled over her shoulders, heavy with seawater and laced with pearls. Her skin was tinted a grayish blue and mottled, blending into iridescent scales further down her elongated midriff. The long tips of her ears and in between her fingers were webbed. Her lashes were thick and downy like the thin rays of some underwater plant, and the flash of her teeth was sharp and white.

Her appearance was savage and unearthly, and he nearly yelled, almost sprung to his feet away from the edge of the dock. She was a creature of the night, the dark and the depths and the ancients. Fear seized him, a tremor thick in the blood. But her eyes lifted beneath those heavy lids and latched onto him. Large, without pupils, a flat surface of milky silver. He froze, entranced.

In those fathomless depths, like the shades and reflections of still water, he saw himself mirrored and changed. His dreams, ambitions. She captured them all, spun them with her moonlight and tempest, and fed them back to him. He leaned forward, trying to focus the illusive images.

Her lips flushed crimson as an autumn apple, a wicked smile curving them. There, in her eyes, a million promises and heady imaginings, the garden of paradise. She opened her mouth, and softly began to sing.

Her words—what waves throw men as their power may? Her lines and choruses, mysterious, high and clear and gently piercing. She sang to him of knowledge and power, of understanding and illumination. Staring and gaping, he fell headlong into them.He did not feel her sharp claws as they sank into his skin, her cold clammy touch against his cheek. Beguiling and cruelly sweet, she whispered the secrets of the deep and the treasures they held.

He reached out, and could not see or recall her former ugliness. He was consumed by her. Seized by fierce, triumphant joy she twined her arms about him and kissed him. He drowned in her, in the taste of the undiscovered, and the brine of her skin was sweet now.

He did not feel the water until it had closed over him.

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I know, not quite what some of you were hoping for from me (I'm working on Theory's new chap, I promise. I've been reading through Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales and I couldn't help myself. I love sirens, they're rad.