Siren Song

Chapter Thirteen

Tyri sat opposite the king, an awkward silence filling the water.

"So..." he said.

"Yes," the king replied.

Silence fell again. Lionel coughed from the corner.

"What exactly is it you want me to teach you?" Tyri asked.

"How to split my voice into more harmonies," the king stated simplistically. "Then I can defeat the leaders of your kind and kill all of you."

Tyri blinked, ignoring the threat of genocide to focus on the far more important thing. "You can do that? Like, split your voice deliberately?"

"Well, yeah."

"I did not know that. We may have an issue."

"What issue is that?" the king asked.

"I don't know how to do that."

"Then how do you have so many harmonies?"

"I was just born with it." Tyri shrugged. "I don't know how to explain it."

"You were born with it?" Lionel butted in. "You were just born with that many harmonies?"

"I mean, I wish I wasn't," Tyri said, slightly annoyed.

"Do you have any idea how lucky you are?!" Lionel exclaimed. "Why would you wish for that?"

"Unlucky, you mean," Tyri corrected. "My harmonies have brought me nothing but misery."

"Yeah, but you're like, super powerful."

"So? What am I going to do with power? It's not like I want to take over the world or anything. Besides, I don't know how to utilise the power I have."

It seemed pretty obvious to Tyri by now that the siren's had got the wrong idea about harmonies and spells. As far as he could tell— and he'd been up late into the night trying to figure this out— there was a great deal of misunderstanding between the species.

The mermen, being so close to the surface and having more contact with humans, knew a lot more about the levels of power in this world. Tyri, being reincarnated from Earth, had thought that any amount of magic was astonishing. But, now he thought about it, the spells that the sirens could perform were actually pretty weak compared to the kind of thing he'd read about or seen on television. However, because the mermen didn't even bother to use magic because they knew how weak their own was in comparison, the sirens thought that the magic they had was the thing that would give them the upper hand rather than their much more powerful song.

Because of this misinformation being spread through the generations, and due to the isolated nature of the clan system and unreliability of word-of-mouth storytelling, the fight they had with the mers that had driven them to deeper waters had been forgotten entirely and replaced by superstitions about the perils of shallow waters. And so the sirens never ventured up to see the power of the humans' magic themselves. And because harmonies made their song stronger but their magic weaker, what could have been their greatest strength had come to be seen as a negative thing.

The merpeople, on the other hand, obviously knew about how much stronger the humans' magic was than theirs, and didn't even bother training their magic because they were so outclassed. This was what had led the sirens to mistakenly believe that their magic was much more powerful than it actually was. The mers, on the other hand, knew that their song was their advantage over the humans and had been working to better that, even though they had stronger magic than the sirens.

However, due to the advancement of the world on land, the mers had become friendly with the humans. So, when the sirens kidnapped the humans and then wiped their memories and dumped them on some random island after using them in their rituals, the land-dwellers believed that they were dead and blamed the mers, leading the merpeople to believe that it was some sneaky, underhanded tactic that the sirens were using in the war.

Because of this, Tyri had realised that there was no way he could teach the king how to use his harmonies effectively. He'd thought that he'd be weakening the man if he did that, making him focus on the harmonies that were useless against the sirens rather than training his magic. But, if the king's harmonies grew stronger, he could easily get the upper hand in any negotiations with the humans without them even realising, and then use their stronger magic against the sirens.

Fortunately, it seemed that the king was actually under the impression that Tyri had magically split his voice to achieve a high number of harmonies and that was what made his song powerful, rather than his knowledge of how to mix music.

Unfortunately, Tyri couldn't bluff his way out of this like he had hoped. And that meant that he was going to end up in the pit. Well, if he was going to go down then he was going to go down with a bang. Like a firework, not that there were any under the water. After all, the king was a genocidal maniac, and the mer reminded him an awful lot of his old boss, Richard Miller— the man he partially blamed for his murder in his past life. A surge of fury overtook him, and words began to pour from him in an unbroken stream without running past his brain first.

"I'm sorry to say that I can't help you, your majesty."
He spat the title like it was an insult.
"But I'm only sorry to say that, because you're the kind of disgusting pig who's been so spoilt from such a young age that you don't know how to act when someone says no to you. So I know that you're going to throw me in the pit, because you have no idea how else to make yourself feel better. But guess what, sire? I don't care. You're a lonely, bitter, greedy, rancid old man with a son who's even worse than you are. So I'm not sorry that I can't teach you that, because even if I could, I wouldn't. You're weak and pathetic, and I wouldn't even bother to piss on you if you were on fire. So go ahead and punish me, because no matter what you do to me, it's never going to take away the fact that I am better than you."

The king sat in stunned silence for a few moments, and Tyri could see the rage slowly rising within him. In fact, it almost seemed as if the water around his head was boiling as steam shot out of his ears. His face was gradually darkening to an infuriated puce, and Tyri sat back, feeling satisfied in a job well done, until a sinister smile spread across the merman's face.

"Actually, there is one thing I think I could do."

"What's that?" Tyri asked nervously, suddenly realising that perhaps insulting the man in some charge of his fate might not have actually been the best idea.

"Well, it seems to me that the problem here is you, correct?"

He turned to Lionel, floating in the corner. "So I'm going to get rid of the problem. Throw him in the pit, Lionel. But not for long. Because hear me in this decree— on the night of the next new moon, the siren named Tyri shall be sentenced to death as an enemy spy. And you shall be his executioner."

Tyri gulped. Oops.

A/N: Hey guys! Sorry, this chapter's a bit rushed and also kind of an info dump. I had a whole plot line planned for how Tyri was going to figure all this out but it was such a slog to write that I wasn't enjoying it at all, and then Wattpad went and deleted like a whole chapter for no good reason and I couldn't face writing it all again so I've just sped up the timeline a little to get started on the real plot sooner. I'm doing better mentally, so chapters should be coming back more regularly now, though they might be a bit shorter than before because I'm really enjoying writing my new book. Go check that one out if you want— it's pretty similar to this, style wise, and I'm updating at least every other day with full chapters! Finally, I just want to thank you all for your kind comments and messages. I'm super awkward and so a lot of the time I have no idea how to respond, but I do read them all and I really appreciate it! Wow, this note is super long!