What do you desire most? Love? Knowledge? Power?
What would you do to get it? Would you lie, steel, and kill? Would you even die for it?
These are questions one has to ask themselves upon hearing the promises of a siren's song.
Some confuse sirens for merfolk. As sirens look how mermaids appear in the zeitgeist, it isn't uncommon for a man to see a half-woman half-fish and assume that it's an Atlantean.
But despite looking more human, sirens are far more dangerous. They hunt in one of two ways, generally called alluring and proxying.
Alluring is the more well known hunting strategy. Though it is still very misunderstood.
A pod of sirens perch on a known shipping path: a straight, a canal, a river, and they sing their promises in a truly enchanting voice.
Those who hear this song will hear their truest and greatest want echoed back to them. And in 99.98% of cases where ears are not plugged, those who hear the song are ensnared within it. Many cases of people jumping overboard to swim to the source of the song have been recorded, often followed by the water they dived in turning red.
In other cases, the man at the helm will steer the ship towards the singing. If lacking a good harbor, the ship will likely reck against the island or drop anchor as the crew jump overboard. if the ship finds a harbor, a siren will damage the ship so its crew is stranded as the rest sing just off shore, waiting patiently for their food to come to them.
Proxying is, thankfully, much rarer. A siren will perch near a shoreside town, usually beaching itself like a whale to sell the idea that it's utterly helpless.
It will sing as it does when alluring. But now, it doesn't simply claim to offer these desires to anyone; it claims to grant these promises any kind soul walking the coast alone that will help it. If someone does show up and bring them back the sea, they will thank their "savior" and attempt to befriend them.
Then, they play the long game. They shower them with gifts, lather them with complements, condition them to feel loved. They'll tell them not to tell anyone else about them. After all, who would believe you if you said you were friends with a mermaid.
After a few weeks or months, they will try to get the person to hunt for them. The siren will say that they're injured and can no longer hunt. Using the connection the siren spent so long forging, they make the person a hunter proxy. The goal to have the proxy hunt and kill prey for the siren is accomplished. And as sirens are often very used to hunting people, the hunter proxy is most likely to hunt their own kind to feed the siren.
