Due to the injury on my leg I was told I had to rest it for a couple of days in order to not break the stitches and allow the soft tissue time to heal. That cougar had really messed up my calf, I was not happy about the prospect of having scars, but I could always just hide them. Staying in bed, however? Now that was something I definitely didn't mind. I got nothing but the star treatment, my parents looked in on me often and mom actually took time away from her research to actually laze on my bed with me watching movies and eating all kinds of junk food we don't normally eat. All vegetarian friendly, of course. That cougar had done nothing to tempt me towards the idea of eating meat considering I had almost become a meal for it myself.
Spending time with my mom was kinda nice. It had been a while since we'd done something as a family, so we'd all made a promise that once my leg was better, we'd all go out for a family meal. "Since you're on bed rest anyway, it might be a good time to make a start on that history project of yours." Mom broke the image of a perfect day by bringing up homework. That was the last thing on my mind right now. "And since it's a family history project, you can ask me for help this time around and I'll actually be useful."
"Can't you just give me your notes and I turn those in for my assignment?" I asked with a pleading pout but mom firmly denied my request, kissing my head as she got up and brought over a rather large box she'd brought up earlier but I had paid no attention to.
"This is just a small portion of our family history. I think you'll find it's a lot more interesting than you might expect. Let's see here…" Opening up the lid mom began to rifle through old diaries, photos and letters. "Ah, here is a diary from your great grandpa Patrick, who was a soldier in World War Two. These here are the letters written between him and your great grandma Isla. They wrote to each other all through the war until the day he came home. Quite romantic, don't you think?"
"I guess?" They were all old and dusty, making me waft a hand in front of my face in order to swipe away some of the residue that had been collected over the many years. Undeterred by my lack of interest, mom continued to pull things out and show me, explaining who everyone was and how they related to us.
"This is a picture of your great-great aunt Coral, she had seven children but only two of them lived to adulthood. This is your ancestor from seven generations back, he was one of the first settlers in Beacon Hills, did you know that?" Nothing really struck a chord with me but mom kept trying, to her credit, but it was only a little later when she mentioned something in a passing comment that I actually looked up. "You now, there's a tradition in the matriarchal line to name the eldest daughter something in connection to the ocean or water. It's been going on all the way back to the furthest generation I could find."
"Really? Why is that?" I asked her, thinking of her own name, Marina. I guess that was an ocean-like name, and my name Cordelia did mean 'daughter of the sea'. I kind of liked the tradition and began to actively look at some of the names of my female ancestors. Just as mom had said, they all had names which had some kind of link to the sea or bodies of water. I googled them.
"I'm not entirely sure why, but there is something here that I remember my grandmother telling me about." Rooting through the box down to the very bottom, mom pulled out a rather thick volume which was leather bound and had a rather interesting seal on the front. The book itself did not look all that old. It was worn on the spine and had a few nicks here and there, but other than that it looked fairly recent. The crest on the front, however, seemed to draw my entire focus.
The image showed a woman within a circle with a sea conch pressed to her lips, almost as if she were playing music, hair rippling like waves down her back. It was simplistic enough, but something about it felt oddly familiar to me. Blinking myself awake, I opened up the volume to find the pages to be written in ink, still decipherable despite the aging, but the date read the year as sixteen forty two. "You see, the tradition is that this book has been rewritten every few generations by the firstborn daughter. It's quite a miracle it's managed to survive this long, and even though the original may have been lost, what was written still remains."
Intrigued, I attempted to read the first page but struggled to even understand a single word. It didn't seem like English, just a scrawl of nonsensical words. "It's written in an old language, and although it's taken me some time to translate, I do have a copy downstairs if you want it." I agreed before I even knew what I was saying. "My grandmother used to tell me stories from this book. That's all this is, stories. It's a collection of tales which were told from a mother to her daughter, then from her daughter to the next. It's very sentimental, but they all centre around the same sort of story."
"What kind of story? And why would our family continue writing in the book or keeping it alive if they were just stories?" Mom pondered for a moment, having probably been labouring under the very same question for some time now.
"That I'm not sure about, but the stories are all about a singular woman. I've theorised that the woman in the story is actually the ancestor herself from the characteristics of the writing and the manner of which the story narrates itself." Running my fingers carefully over the pages, I felt a strong sense of urgency to understand what these words meant, a desperate need to know exactly what these stories were about until I was practically bursting at the seams. "I used to read these stories to you too, but you were young at the time and probably forgot all about them. My grandmother read them to me just as she read them to my own mother, a very long time ago."
"Mom, what are the stories about?" She blinked at me, almost having forgotten herself.
"Sirens, dear. They're all about sirens."