Siren Song

Chapter Four

A glint of gold caught Tyri's eye, and he paused in his song to dive towards it, rooting through the sand until his fingers came into contact with the metal. He pulled it out and held it up to the light of the glowing tattoos under his skin, inspecting it carefully. Yup, a coin from the nearby shipwreck. It was a relief to find anything, really-- pickings had been growing slim, and Tyri was beginning to worry as to whether he'd need to find a new scraping ground-- but a gold coin was enough of a find that he could relax for the rest of the day.

Dropping it into the pack tied to his waist, he swam on, his song happier this time. As he scanned the sea bed, the faint light from his tattoos enough to help his already sensitive eyes pick out any discrepancies, he began to add layer after layer to the music, doing his best to replicate the song that bounced around his head.

It was hard to split his focus enough to make each tune he sang and instrument he imitated accurate-- like the most extreme version of multitasking-- but he had figured out that he could kind of 'set' one harmony to a repeating tune, which made it easy to build up melodies. He was currently just working on starting more than one at once, as he could keep track of about twenty different harmonies at the same time, which was enough to be getting on with. He just had to work on the speed with which he could reach that goal.

He'd had his song for about ten years now-- time was much harder to measure in the depths of the ocean, but he thought he was physically about fifteen. Interestingly enough, he'd found that the physical age of his body did actually have an effect on his mind as well. He hadn't realised it, but when he had been younger, he had acted more juvenile too.
In fact, he was forgetting a lot about his past life. All he could really remember was his skill with music and, of course, the songs forced into his head by the goddess. Still, it wasn't like there was much to remember. A relatively average life, with a rather traumatic death. Both of which were things he'd prefer to forget.

Although, he often wished his life were more average. Case in point.

"Tyri! Tyri, where are you?"

He sighed. "Here, Ala!"

The faint glimmer of scales shone in the gloom, before materialising as the form of Alana.

"Honestly, Tyri," she scolded. "You need to make sure to tell us where you're going."

"I'm here every day, Ala. I don't go anywhere else. I'm not allowed to go anywhere else."

"...okay, true," she admitted. "But still, what if you'd gotten yourself lost? Or even worse, attacked? Your song's not strong enough to fend off a shark, never mind a sea wyrm. And you know the Leviathan frequents the waters but five miles from here."

"I'm stronger than you think," Tyri muttered. "Which you'd know if you didn't dismiss my song out of hand."

"Tyri," she said, none too gently. "You need to face the facts. We can't even count your harmonies. Just look at your tattoos, and they'll tell you the story."

He glanced at his arms, where the ink made from the magical formula that had awakened his voice had been injected into his skin. It had been the latest and last in his father's series of desperate attempts to make him stronger-- runes etched into his body to purify his voice. It had made his song clearer and sweeter than before, but getting rid of his harmonies? It'd had the opposite effect, and his voice had more layers than ever.

But what Tyri had discovered and the sirens didn't seem to realise was that harmonies were not a bad thing.

Tyri had figured out that the 'purity' of the voice only mattered because sirens had two things: about the same level of power in every member of the species when singing with all their harmonies-- as in, every siren had the same amount of total power, but it was just split into more parts-- and absolutely no idea how to mix music. Which just meant that the fewer harmonies a siren had, the fewer melodies they had to weave into their song to get the same level of power and the better it would sound. And because the quality of the music did have a significant impact on the song's effectiveness, the sirens with fewer melodies could use more of their total power without losing that advantage.