Lygeia Reveals Her Curse

But let me start at the beginning. I was born on a small island off the coast of Grreece. Life was simple on the island where my family made a modest living fishing the coastal waters. Perhaps it was too simple for after a dashing young cat began coming to our island for food from time to time, I could think of nothing else but leaving for a grand adventure with him.

It happened that one day I was alone on the water, checking nets for my mother, when without warning, my boat was tossed into the air and I was flung headlong into the sea. I shook the seawater from my eyes and saw a giant sea serpent thrashing through the waves. My boat was destroyed, but the serpent swam on. I doubt it ever knew I existed.

I caught hold of one of the glass balls we use to float out nets and clung desperately to its slippery surface until night began to spread its cape over the world. Fearing the serpents return, I hid my face in my arms so that I did not see that a ship had come until it was but a stones cast from me. It was Nikor's ship, and he pulled me from the water.

Nikor made me warm in his cabin and said it was fate that he came to find me. How else could he have accomplished my rescue from the vast and darkening sea? I fairly swooned with gratitude, and the thought that Nikor might care for me as well. When he said I should come with him, I all but leapt into his arms. Would that I had leapt into the sea instead.

You see, he was a rogue, as red a rogue as ever walked the earth – stained with the blood of untold lives. But I didn't know that then, and I left with him without ever looking back. Only after the sun had risen the next day did I think of my family, but by then we were far out to sea and Nikor refused to turn back.

It soon become clear, however, just how Nikor made his living on the seas. I will not recount the many misdeeds, no that is too mild a word for it, the many crimes this Nikor committed on the high seas – of the merchanters sent to an early grave, nor of fisherfolk robbed of their days catch – only of the one ship which fought back when Nikor attacked.

The ships came together and grappled. The crew of the merchant ship swarmed across the bulwarks and the decks errupted in pitched fighting. The scuppers ran red with the blood of both pirate and merchant, and I, thinking this my only chance at freedom, picked up a sword from a fallen sailor and slashed Nikor's arm. Alas, it was my only stroke, as Nikor quickly disarmed me. and would have run me through then had he not had to deal with battle at hand.

As it was, Nikor's pirates won the battle, and I was thrown below decks and chained to the hull. I do not know how long I was left to starve in the darkness, but not a minute of that time went by that I did not pray for Nikor and his pirates to be delivered a horrible death.

And that was precisely what happened, for as I hung in my chains a beautiful sound began to fill the air until there was nothing else that existed except this music – Oh, but it was beautiful – the beauty of countless souls singing. I was lost in its beauty when the ship was run hard aground against a rocky shore. Water burst through a breach in the hull and the ship began to fill. As the water came to my chin, and I was welcoming my certain death, the ship was again dashed against the rocks everything around me seem to explode into splinters.

I do not remember anything else until I awoke on a beach, still chained to the piece of hull, and the most beautiful creature you will ever see stood over me. I knew her instantly as the siren and wondered why I too was not dead like the pirates.

'I have answered your prayers,' she sang. 'And now you must bear my price: you yourself must account for the lives of those who were called. You will bear my name, Lygeia, until you have expiated their deaths by performing rights in equal measure to those wrongs which they committed. Only then may you reclaim your rightful name.'

I tried to find my home once, thinking they could tell me who I was. But nowhere will I find it until I have purged this curse, which I fear I will carry to my grave. Those pirates had hearts as cold and black as obsidian, and the wrong they did can never be undone by one. It is my greatest fear that I become this siren in deed as well as name.