ㅤㅤㅤㅤ— ❛ true revenge, above all, is seductive. . .
MARINA OF THE BLACK SEA — THE LADY OF THE DROWNED TIDE.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤ✦⠀primary muse.⠀⠀original character.⠀⠀based in popular media about sirens, pirates and witches. takes inspiration from pirates of the carribbean, when water sang fire, and the invisible life of addie larue.
name: marina calloway.
age: immortal. ( twenty seven at the time of death )
pronouns: she/her.
species: siren.
sexuality: bisexual.
nationality: british, yorkshire rooted.
current residence: a fictional stretch of water called 'the black sea'. modern day location would be the north sea. she is tied to it, which means she can move but she always have to return to replenish.
occupation: terrorising sailors. ( formerly a healer ).
notable info: she is believed locally to be a myth.
parents: tba.
loyalties: the sea. the water gods. herself.
MBTI: INTJ.
height: 5'8.
eye colour: pitch black irises.
hair: black. worn loose, long and appears perpetually damp.
build: lithe, lean. has a mermaid's tail if she is underwater.
faceclaim: janet montgomery.
scent: salt, and like the bottom of a rock pool. occasionally a faint smell of dried herbs.
clothing: remnants of 18th century clothing that the sea has slowly altered over centuries. a dark bodice, long skirts that dissolve into water and shadow at the hem. in her siren form, she has a dark emerald that almost looks black tail with iridescent scales.
MAJOR TRAITS: calculating, wrathful, perceptive, vengeful.
MINOR TRAITS: flirtatious, seductive, empathetic, love-lorn.
POWERS: ㅤ
✦ the song: her voice used as a weapon. it does not simply attract but it dismantles the very architecture of someone's willpower and draws it towards herself. so she can target her song towards one person specifically, which may make a group around this person think this person is insane because they cannot hear the same song.
✦ form shift: her siren appearance is with sharp vampire-like canines, the whites of her eyes turning pitch black, her skin turning pale with her veins appearing as though night itself has been infused in it. but she can turn this appearance to be as she was when she died, a simple human dressed to fit the part. but there is something unnerving in her appearance, like her skin is almost too thin or her veins are almost a little too dark, that tells you that something ain't right there.
✦ the whisper: used primarily in close-range. it's like adding a thought to someone's head without them realising that they don't realise it was never her own.
✦ tide calling: she does not command the black sea but she negotates with it. marina can call currents, redirect winds, invite fog so thick a ship loses itself entirely within minutes. think making a water body so calm that it feels threatening.
✦ sea glass memory: marina can "read" objects that have drowned in the sea. just by touching it, she can know every piece of memory/history attached to it specifically, such as, holding a drowned man's compass and knowing exactly where he was wanting to go and why.
✦ the drowning dream: she can make someone experience drowning without actually letting them die. it is a mental ability used as a weapon.
WEAKNESSES: ㅤ
✦ iron: iron disrupts her connection to the water. direct contact doesn't kill her but it dulls everything: her song, her perception, her ability to call the tide. ships with iron hulls are genuinely unpleasant for her to be near.
✦ distance from the black sea: the further she gets from her water the less she is.
✦ her own song: at full force it costs her. voice fracture especially. she always needs time in deep water afterwards to recover.
✦ anyone who doesn't fear the sea: her power relies partly on existing fear. Someone who genuinely loves the ocean and feels at home in it is harder to reach than someone who doesn't.
✦ him: she won't name this one more specifically than that. just that he exists and that he is the one variable in three centuries she has not been able to fully calculate. this bothers her considerably more than she lets on.
✦ verse one.ㅤ
✦ verse two.
marina calloway was born in 1716 on the edge of the north yorkshire moors. a healer in a village small enough that everyone knew her name and kept a respectful distance from her anyway. she delivered children, set bones, pulled people back from fevers that should have killed them. she didn't think of it as anything special but the village thought differently. they came to her door when the priest failed them and left offerings on her step like she was something between a neighbour and a shrine. but she knew some would have loved to burn her at the stake.
she lost her father to the sea. no body, no explanation, just a man who went out one morning and didn't come back. her mother died four years later and marina couldn't save her, which is the kind of thing that stays with a person regardless of how many centuries pass.
by the time she met him in 1739 she was twenty three, completely alone.
he presented himself as a sea captain. he was, in reality, something considerably older and more deliberate than that: a god of mischief and ruin who had existed long enough to know exactly what he was doing at all times. what he was doing, specifically, was neutralising a problem before it could become one, because marina was destined to be his undoing. not through any choice of her own — she didn't know, had no reason to suspect, went about her life in complete ignorance of the fact that her existence was cosmologically inconvenient for a very specific and very powerful entity who had decided the cleanest solution was to simply remove her from the board before destiny could finish its sentence.
so he was charming. he was interested. he made her feel chosen. it was a particular and effective weapon against someone who has spent their whole life being useful to people who kept their distance.
she married him in 1741.
the crew never wanted her on the ship. she endured it because she was accustomed to being tolerated by people who nonetheless needed her eventually. she told herself they would come around.
she was still telling herself this when the storm arrived in autumn 1743; total and catastrophic. the crew panicked and made a decision quickly and without much debate. they needed a sacrifice. she looked at her husband across the deck with rain in her eyes waiting for him to intervene, to be the man she had chosen, and saw instead the quiet relief of someone watching a plan arrive at its conclusion.
they threw her over before she could find the words for any of it.
the sea took her the way it had taken her father, without explanation or apology. but unlike her father, it didn't keep her in its depths, hidden away. rather it kept her differently. it revealed the cosmic intervention of her birth, the history of a god's recklessness, the story of her purpose. and then it killed her.
she came back to the surface tied to her gravestone forever, tied to the stretch of water where the ship went down, the black sea. it gave her powers that she would learn to wield over centuries: a voice that could take a ship apart from the inside out, hands that could read a man's guilt like a wound, a song that found whatever a person loved most and used it against them. it gave her curses that she would peel from her skin like something stuck underneath, across decades, each one a reminder that the sea gives nothing cleanly and takes nothing back without cost. but it also gave her something he had not accounted for when he watched her go over the side of that ship with the quiet relief of a finished errand — it gave her time. enough to learn exactly what he was, enough to map the precise shape of his cruelty, enough to become something so far beyond the word dangerous. she had nothing but the black water, the memory of his face, hundred years's worth of patience.
and she intended to use all three.
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