Siren Song

Feast of Feasts

Aille ruffled her feathers to scatter the accumulating snow. Her expression reflected no desire or distaste; sheer neutrality that both infuriated and confused me.

Why does she not try to join? There are plenty of men to eat – she is unlikely to be shunned. Is she on my side? She might express more worry in that case!

"Aille? "

"Mhm."

"Well...what would you recommend I do? To save the soldiers."

She shrugged and twirled her hair.

"They have few options, Man. In their foolishness, they have succumbed to the songs of winged women. Their only desire is to serve. They want our love, our beauty, eternity."

"A little fucking clarity, Aille?"

"Your soldiers are already dead and lost."

I grabbed her wrist and seethed through the mask, "no one is dead until I say so. Not today." Aille's eyes sparked. Teeth bared, she had me pinned on my back with my breath knocked out of me before I could finish.

"You fiends against the earth! This is why playing God – your absent, unmerciful God – always fails you. Until you say anything means nothing. You have no power in this life." Her glare was relentless and bore into my mind like a parasite. At last she retreated and I remembered to breathe the artificially warmed air again.

"You see them," she nodded in the soldiers' direction. In the harsh mountain winds their bodies swayed zombie-like. "They are lost in the song. They choose to listen. They are weak and very nearly dead."

I could not help but scowl.

Aille is singing her own song it seems. She wants me to give up? Then what? Eat my corpse like a vulture? She's been more like a messenger bird in all honesty. Why this change?

"Are you afraid of confronting your own, Aille?" Her eyelids fluttered and she bore her teeth. "You are being a coward! And I thought you were a friend."

"Friend?" She spat, mockingly. "A siren the friend of man? You think because I haven't eaten you yet I won't or can't?"

"You haven't been included in any of the hunts for humans have you? Never, I suspect. And if you have they have denied you the spoils. What do you eat? You've failed as a siren as far as they're concerned."

"Stop it!" she hissed. Even with the storm raging, I considered worrying about being heard by the monstrous horde. Then again, if they never listened before, they surely would not listen now.

Aille's face betrayed shame and hurt. She tugged at her hair and stroked the small feathers coating her arms. Besides her lethality, she seemed very young when she knelt in the snow under a cloak of hollow bone and fragile plumage. Her clawed hand curled securely about my ankle; the joint cracked under her grip. I did not attempt to draw away as the hooded glare fixed on me warned of my imminent injury should I try.

"Man, son of blood-stained man, devourer of earth and sky. You are all that makes wrongness in this life. And you – quite possibly – are the key to salvation."

My heartbeat ran deafeningly in my ear, but slowed with self-control. Piercing eyes kept me hostage. She searched for salvation I did not know how to deliver.

"How old are you? Just you and not your previous lives?"

Her posture softened and she considered an answer with less ferocity than before. Just when I thought she might respond, I heard the first of many metal screams. Bitterly cheerful screeches exploded from the siren collective and I turned around just in time to see a human body dragged 100 meters into the sky; a metal carcass slain and sparking in the snow. Shocked out of his hypnosis, both by the elements and the broken song, the lieutenant sucked in frigid air and buckled from the lack of oxygen and bitter gusts. The harpies swarmed before he could get too cold. One by one, his extremities were stripped away; the sounds of ripping, popping, screaming, and laughing nauseated me. What was worse was the new song and his reaction.