Challenge Submission The Sirens Promise

[Aurelie Dankworth]

"The Siren's Promise"

​

The storm arrived at dusk, a violet bruise on the horizon. Fishermen in the coastal village of Arenth called it an omen. But Cassian Vale wasn't one to fear the sea. He was a salvager, a diver of shipwrecks and lost treasures, with lungs like bellows and a heart thrumming with stubbornness. That evening, driven by a half-mad captain's map and rumors of a sunken vessel filled with sapphires, he rowed alone into the churning surf.
Beneath the waves, the world fell silent. The hull of the Alyssandra lay broken like a dead leviathan on the seabed, its timbers crawling with anemones. He was about to pry open a barnacled chest when something brushed his ankle.

A voice, clear and lilting, rang in his skull.

"You shouldn't be here."

He turned—there she was. Pale as moonlight, with eyes the color of drowning. Not a trick of light, not the hallucination of nitrogen narcosis, but a mermaid—real, raw, and regal.

Her name was Lirael, and she should've killed him.

Instead, she followed him to the surface.

Each night after, she came to him—on rocks, in storms, under the swell of the moon. She spoke little of her kind, only that they had rules, and that she was breaking every one of them. Cassian, ever the fool for a mystery, fell hard. They met in secret, heartbeats stolen from two worlds that were never meant to touch. He dreamed of her laughter, of a life where he'd live by the sea with her and never dive again.

Then she vanished.

For weeks, he searched, near-mad, whispering her name to every wave and shadow. Finally, one cold dawn, she returned. Her skin was bruised with kelp lashes. Her hair tangled with barnacles. Her voice trembled.

"I made a promise to you," she said. "Now you must make one for me."

She begged him not to return to the wreck of the Alyssandra. Not to open the chest. Not to seek the sapphire with the spiral engraved.

But greed gnawed at his bones. What could be so dangerous about a stone?

He dove again that night.

The chest opened with a sigh, and inside was not a sapphire, but an eye. Blue and glassy, watching.

Suddenly, the ocean boiled.

Lirael appeared, screaming in a voice that shattered the sea. Her form twisted—no longer the siren of dreams, but something ancient. Her mouth widened impossibly, revealing rows of teeth not made for song but slaughter.

"You promised me," she wailed.

Cassian tried to swim, but his limbs moved like lead. The eye blinked.

Then darkness.

He awoke on the shore, alone. The eye was in his palm, fused to his skin. Whispering.

In the distance, the sea glowed red.

And from the cliffs above, dozens of figures—half-human, half-sea—watched him.

Waiting.
Cassian staggered to his feet, the sand biting cold against his bare soles. The eye in his palm pulsed once, slow and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat. He tried to rip it free, but it was fused deep, tendrils of pale tissue threading into his skin like roots into soil.

The figures on the cliff didn't move.

Wind howled. The tide began to recede, unnaturally fast, peeling away from the shore in a hiss that revealed black stones and glistening bones beneath the waves. Birds wheeled in frenzied circles above, cawing warnings too late to be heeded.

Then he heard it again—her voice.
Lirael's.
But not in his ears.

In his mind.

"You've been marked, Cassian. They'll come for you now. You opened it."​

He looked back at the cliffs, expecting her to be among them. But she wasn't.

A shape emerged from the water instead. Towering, sinuous, cloaked in seaweed and crowned with antlers of coral. Eyes like the deep trench, black and bottomless.

Cassian stumbled backward. The eye in his palm opened wide, and he saw visions not his own:

—A drowned city, rising again.
—A throne of bone and shell.
—Lirael, shackled beneath the waves, her voice stolen, her eyes filled with sorrow.

Then a new voice rose from the deep, guttural and ancient:

"Return what was taken… or take her place."​

Cassian turned to flee—but the cliff path was gone. The sea had carved it away.

And behind him, something was crawling from the surf—hands too long, faces half-formed, eyes flickering like dying stars.

They were not here to ask.

They were here to claim.