Syrena

let the water take me

It is only by sheer luck that Syrena is here today. Not fate. She doesn’t believe in that nonsense. It wasn’t fate that brought her to Helovia, only misfortune, one wrong step. There wasn’t some greater purpose to stripping her powers and making her start over again, miserable and furious. Fate’s just a word parents tell their children; a word they use to make little ones feel better when it all goes to hell. “It was meant to be, honey.” Bull. It just happened. Why? Because shit happens.

Today, she happens to be in the Deep Forest, too damn far away from the sea for any level of comfort and trying to get out, when the rattling catches her attention. She follows the sound until she finds the tree, the trunk wearing bone instead of bark (or perhaps simply on top of the bark, but in the pitch of night, it looks rather like bones growing from the ground).

She knows that the ominous and the strange in Helovia often comes with gifts, and she needs gifts. Powers, particularly, but she’ll take just about anything. It is better than nothing, and better than the small source of power she’s managed to obtain so far. She’d been everything once, and now she fought just to be a tiny scrap of something.

So she goes to the tree, her feet unpracticed and ungraceful on the treacherous, rooted earth. It’s dark enough she hopes no one notices, and she keeps tripping along until the bones in the braches – ah, the rattling makes sense now – come into view above her head.

And then it all changes. Hell. Of course it does. The winds bites at her seal-like flesh, the rattling drowns out any hope of other sounds, and the earth moves her feet. Syrena scrambles, trying to keep her footing as the roots twist around her, though her eyes stay on the base of the tree. The roots part here, letting something through, and she almost wonders if it’s worth staying to find out. Almost.

It’s worth it. She will not be nothing. And she will not cower in fear.

There’s no word that comes to mind for the creature before her. It’s simply is - a creature pieced together from the chopped bits of a variety of different animals. Both grotesque and fascinating (a slight pang of jealousy, because though it is not beautiful, it is memorable, and that is something).

She comes, like a puppy dog, that realization grinding her to a halt. But she’s already there, anyway, already answering his question. “Sure.” And like always, her voice betrays nothing. Deadpan and uninterested. But the creature probably sees through that voice. She wants whatever is on the side of this game.

"words"