The ocean was a vastness of crystal clear, sapphire water. The ocean's surface stretched as far as the eye could see. A view out in the open and in the middle of nowhere is how someone could get lost or forever want to sail across the open waters that stretches onward forever. Each wave circulated and moved with ease of momentum and carried many boats through its soft waves, and the waves swayed as far as the ocean surface stretched across the distant horizon without end.
On sunny days with no clouds and the sun to reflect its light at the blue surface, the ocean is smooth as wind in a valley. It is only on story days the ocean surface becomes wild and dangerous. Waves rise and curve high and higher than the largest boat, and the winds howl through the wild waters and makes boat travel dangerous and risks drowning.
Whatever happens on the surface isn't where real life lies; it all lies beneath the waves, either the waves are soft as a butterfly on a flower or wild like a hurricane tearing a house from the ground.
Aquatic animal life swam beneath the waves of the ocean surface. Fish, whales, sharks, eels, sea turtles, seals, clams, squids, oysters, snails, and octopi are only a few of the creatures living and swimming beneath the ocean waves. Many undiscovered species of fish and marine life animals live under the sea and a few dwell in the deepest, darkness depths the sunlight won't brighten.
While these creatures swim near or far from the surface, other life can be found, and they look human but with long bright fish fins: merpeople. Mermaids and mermen.
The creatures of human mythology lived beneath the ocean waves as well, and they were rather friendly toward both creatures and humanity. Beautiful and attractive as they are, the mermaids were distinct singers and often attracted the human men to the shorelines to closely hear the mermaids' melodies. Their colorful hair and their slenderness entice the males to be lured to them.
The mermen were equally attractive to the human females for their big physique. The merman don't sing, but they do sit beside their female counterparts and play harps. They play instruments to go with the mermaids' singing voices.
When it wasn't music time for the humans on the surface, the mermaids and mermen spent their time underwater. They always lived underwater in coral reefs near the mainland that humans call Shimabellia. The merpeople are quite a unique species that could talk to the underwater animals and swim with them.
While the merpeople may be easy to get along with, there were other underwater creatures not quite as friendly. There were large whale-sized, snake-shaped sea serpents. They moved like eels and were deadly as a venomous cobra. Sea serpents were quite a rare sight to behold, but they were more dangerous than a shark and could swallow a person whole.
The merpeople and the sea serpents shared the sea together, but rarely would be seen together. When together, the serpents always showed an aggressive nature, and the merpeople showed monstrous teeth ready to eat the large sea serpent down the down like a piranha eating away at a corpse.
Both sides showed aggressive sides when swimming or coming close, and rarely would attack each other. Merpeople have the speed and ability to move faster than the sea serpents, but the sea serpents have strength and an incredible size, about twenty times the size of the merpeople.
While hostility is strong between two different species, there was another danger and far deadlier creature than an angry mermaid or a vicious sea serpent living around the different coasts of Shimabellia.
The most dangerous place where the most dangerous sea creatures lived was at Siren's Cove; the vile cave where deadly sirens dwelled. Sirens were humanoid fish bearing human body similarities but with fish scales as their skin. Their skin color was more of a blue color and could camouflage against stone like a lizard. They were beautiful as a human woman, but they were deadly human-eating, two legged piranhas.
For many years, they prowled Shimabellia's southern coasts and always sang with the most beautiful tones of musical voices. This lured male sailors away from their main destination and fell for the appearances of the Sirens. The sailors would be hepatized at first sight of the Sirens leaning against spiky rocks and hollow reefs near the shorelines, and this would make a ship unable to escape from the wrath of sharp teeth.
They have long been "cousins" of the mermaids, but mermaids were a friendly race to the humans as sirens thought humans to be food.
Mermaids never had legs to walk on land, and their fish fins kept them to the sea. Sirens, however, had legs and could walk up to the mainland of Shimabellia and live in its few rivers located around the land. A handful of sirens could show off their fake beauty and impose entrancing songs to make a male human fall into a mind-controlling trance.
The men are easily lured away, even from married wives, and are never seen again. They have always been a big problem for humanity and the mermaids and soon caused an all-out war against the sirens.
The sirens' numbers were outnumbered, but their singing voices still lured the men but not the women. The women took matters into their own hands and hunted down any sirens lingering near rivers or the ocean coasts.
So, the sirens resorted to lingering in a cave too small for a warship to invade or a small army to move. The rock was hard to drill or wedge hammers against. The little cave became a personal cove and haven for the sirens, and no one dared, even the mermaids with human aid, wouldn't dare enter a big cove in a small entrance.
Now the sirens can come and go in small numbers of a small group without worrying about having their species hunted down to extinction. The mermen and mermaids would always watch the cave when sirens would leave their only safe cove, but sirens' scales can camouflage and easily deceive any mortal eyes.
While all the sirens are perceived as monsters that take a liking to human's red liquid, something peculiar was about them. A siren among them wasn't as monstrous as the other sirens. One Siren is not considered to be a real Siren but a runt of the species. A Siren that didn't love the taste or the moistness of the human blood.
This siren was named Marina, and she was entirely different from her species. She was a siren who would love life like a toddler running and playing with a butterfly in a valley of beautiful flowers, and she'd rather eat off the seaweed that flows to the cove from the ocean floor.
Her appearance was rather different. Her red hair remained distinct from the main sirens' hair, which was made of seaweed as part of their main appearances. Sirens' blue scaled humanoid bodies were considered of humanlike features, but they always had three fingers and a thump with claws, and their feet were always fish fins with no toes to help them swim underwater. In appearance, they were more ugly than a mule.
Marina was the only Siren to have humanlike hair, humanlike feigners, and humanlike feet. Therefore, she remained different from the other sirens, some of her appearance was more humanlike than she was fishlike. They saw her as a human in a false siren body, a fake siren.
For years, she was ridiculed, and even her own mother tried to abandon her. Sirens didn't need a mate to create an offspring; their genetics can gradually change to when in a single gender environment like a frog. So, a siren didn't need to mate or a mate-friend to produce an offspring or need another siren for the breeding process, and they would only birth a single siren in a lifetime.
For Marina's birth, she was rather strange when the sirens saw that red hair was different from seaweed hair, four fingers instead of three and a thump, human feet instead of fish fins. Her change of appearances thought of this to be a disorder, but these were strange and natural, not a disorder.
And through the years of growth, Marina showed outlandish behavior and the sirens were seen as unnatural for a siren. Marina was a caring, loving siren, and the other sirens were a selfish, ruthless species. And Marina's mother tried tossing her away and killing her when still in youth, but Marina's singing voice in her youth made the sirens cover their ears of her beautiful singing of love and the world's beauty.
So instead of trying to kill her when her back was turned to them, they had little choice but to accept her as what she was: a runt of their species. An opposite personification of a real siren. The sirens also kept their distance from the only siren that doesn't act like a real siren: a deceitful fish aimed to lure and eat human men alive.
Marina spent some time around humans and disguised herself as a human figure, but she refrained from singing. She came close to human travelers traveling far from the shore and toward the inner land. Her disguise often came as a poor peasant woman with ragged old clothes, and listened to their voices.
Sometimes she was often a beautiful princess, but she could never sing. This was an experimentation she put up with. What entrances a man to lose their common sense and fall for a siren's disguised form. She tried her appearance on many men found on the beach with other women or traveling in ships of the southern coats; they seemed attracted to her, but they never lost their common sense.
She learned it was the sirens' singing voices that made men look at the sirens' appearances. There was a magic ability in their voices that made human minds scatter from their common sense and become under the control of the sirens.
So, Marina kept her appearance to show men her looks, but she never sang in front of them. After a while, jealous women suddenly came out of nowhere and she retreated into the waters.
Then there was a time when Marina went out to sea and came back with many previous metals found in graveyards of shipwrecks. Ships wrecked into rocky and plunged into spikey, sharp rocks near the shorelines and where giant waves crashed into the rocks. The use of sailors turning their ships to the direction of sirens sitting on the rugged cliffs aligned above dangerous watery waves.
Marina carried a bag of a metal bundle over her shoulder and dropped it on the ground. She sat down to open the bag to show emerald metals and ripped leather clothes to use for herself. She flattened the bag like a piece of paper to show what she carried into the cave.
A single siren, her mother, stepped on an emerald metal while Marina tried to grab it. Her mother's foot-fin caught her hand trying to grab the metal.
"Looks whos backs; 'tis runts of species," said the siren.
Over a hundred sirens gathered in a crowded spot swimming in water and walking on rock stretching beyond the surface water beat against as they watched Marina's mother press her foot against her daughter's hand and the metal she grabbed.
"Let go, mother," said Marina.
"Daughters fights backs. Whys fights backs?"
"For me to leave and never come back."
"Nevers comes backs. You lives withs humans? Dangers humans."
Marina looked straight into her mother's eyes while she sat and her mother stood. "So you do care about me? You don't want me to leave and stay here with you? But if you still hate me, why do you stomp my hand?"
Marina's mother's eyes, which were the eyes of a shark, just stared. She backed her foot-fin from Marina's hand and walked backward.
Marina's hand was free and organized together the colored metals and the leather in different sections. Her scaly hands pressed and molded together the metal to make those of armor to fit a human.
"After seventeen years, I am finally going to walk away from this cove and speak as humans do. I'm done living with sirens that speak differently, look differently, and treat me differently. Treat me with hostility, but you don't kill me, so you resort to insulting me. I'm going to live with humans"
"Walks! Yous lives withs humans? Yous dies!"
"So what if I die? I'll be out of here. Sirens already hate me. You hate me, mother. Because I am a runt, and I don't belong here in this cave, which is called Siren's Cove."
In no time, Marina had wrapped around her naked fish-scaled body armor, and she was a warrior in appearance than she was a siren to deceit human men.
A thin, emerald vambrace slung her left wrist, a long stretch of brown leather clothing wrapped around her legs up to her chest covered with an emerald chest plate. An emerald greave with a golden seahorse tied to her bottom left leg, and an emerald hung from her left thigh with painted golden fish bones. Her right left is composed of a thinly stretched emerald armor made of a metal that bends like paper. Lastly, a small halt-striped skirt was wrapped around her waist.
After she arranged everything to cover her body to make her more human-like, she stood on her own feet and tangled with the armor on her arms. Then she moved her legs to test if the feeling of her new clothes and armor felt right and movable for her joints.
"Yes," she exclaimed softly. Then she grabbed the flattened bag and placed it over her shoulders and lifted a small section of it to cover her head like a hood. "I'm out of here."
Marina jumped into the water and swam away. She left out the only exit and out into the open ocean. She warmed toward the southern coast of Shimabellia and made it to land, walking on the muddy sand on her feet. Water dripped from her wet scales and the single clothing hiding her face.
So a new life begins or it ends here on land, she thought. She sighed and walked forward.
Thus leaving her past behind and moving onward to her future. A future with no sirens and no insults to her grieving heart, and a hopeful future where she'd meet someone just like her and become accepted has to be who she is and not what she is.