Promptober 2025 Day 7: Full Moon
Using @thepromptfoundry's Ominous October list.
Anybody here remember my reaper76 Octosiren AU, Song of Hearts? Well I'm repurposing that idea for an original fiction. This is how my asshole pirate-doctor Tempes met his siren lover.
CWs for a siren, y'know, eating people.
It's a bit long, so the rest is under the cut.
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The waters of the bay glitter beneath the light of the full moon. Tempes admires it as he walks. The stones of the shore shift and press into the tough soles of his bare feet. He welcomes the small pains; they leach the greater ones inside him, the guilt and the fear. They'll be hunting him, by now, for what he did. But they won't look here. There's no reason for him to come this way, nowhere for him to go.
Up ahead, the shoreline fragments and opens up into a rocky beach, full of boulders and crevices that break up the rolling waves into splashing whitecaps and little sheltered pools. Plenty of things to eat, here. He could shelter for a few days.
Something moves.
It's big, and dark. Tempes had mistaken it for a shadow, but it sprawls among the rocks. It shifts again, and gleams in a beam of moonlight. He pauses, because it's over there…and over there…
A voice laughs. "Hello, little human. I see you."
It isn't human, that voice. It's beautiful, melodic and deep, and high also, carrying its own harmonies. A siren's voice.
"Come closer," it sings, like whalesong made into words. The beautiful sounds worm into Tempes' ears and take hold of his mind and he obeys, too enchanted to try to refuse.
The siren's face is turned to hm, watching him come. He's lounging across a spit of rocks jutting from the water, his arms spread wide and his tentacles thrown this way and that, a few drifting at the whims of the tide.
He's magnificent. Blue-black skin and blue-black hair, twining and clinging down over him till it's hard, in this light, to tell what's hair and what's tentacle. Human-looking from the hips up, he wears long strands of pearls and chains of gem-studded gold and silver he must have taken from some shipwreck, and the precious things accent the gnarls of scars that lace both human skin and tentacles. Shark bites and sucker marks and slashes from sea creatures—it must mark centuries of survival and triumph, because he is big, this siren. Bigger than a human, and that's before you even consider the feet and feet of tentacles. This is a lord of the sea, lazing before Tempes' eyes.
His teeth flash in a smile. "Aren't you a darling little thing." Tempes shivers at the glory of that voice.
The siren lifts a clawed, scarred hand and waves Tempes nearer. Cocks his head, the river of his hair pouring over a strong, rounded shoulder. "I can hear your heart. What has a cute little thing like you hammering with fear and self-hate under such a beautiful moon?"
Cute? Tempes wrinkles his nose. He knows damn well he's made of bones and knobs. Seductive he can manage, but cute?
The siren laughs again. It sounds like the moonbeams on the waves. Tempes blurts out, "I killed some people." He clears his throat. The siren certainly won't care; he's surely killed more than Tempes ever could manage. "I killed a lot of people. I didn't mean to…some of them by accident."
He hadn't meant… The children. For what they'd done to Tempes' family, he'd sought revenge, he thought that was his right, but not that whole town. He hadn't meant.
The siren watches him. Listens, more to the point—hearing the resonances of Tempes' voice, the vibrations between his words, the sound of his heart. "And are you running from yourself now?"
"No. I'm running from—" He cuts himself off and turns, looking landward. Was that the sound of horses' hooves? "I thought they wouldn't follow me here."
"Mmmmmmmmm." The air seems to tremble from the note of that hum. As if the world were made of cut crystal. Tempes can't breathe for a moment.
In the silence of the world at the end of that note, the distant sound comes clearer. Those are horses' hooves. Fuck.
Sloshing. Large, spreading sloshes of water as the siren bestirs himself. "You're lucky, little one. You've caught me replete from a meal and in a curious mood." As he pulls himself from the rocks, Tempes catches a sight of the full size of him. Massive tentacles release the grips of their suckers that had kept him in place despite the water's pull. He can't be less than fifteen feet, tip to tail.
Two of those appendages lift from the water and reach out in Tempes' direction. "Come. Come here, dark-hearted little creature. Tonight you will be safe with me, for I have no love of those land-dwellers."
Tempes comes, wading into the water to be caught and wrapped up by those limbs. He could hardly do anything else. Anything to please the master of that voice, this small god of the ocean. He hardly cares whether he's safe or not. To drown in this creature's grip would be a glory. Taken by the sea's most beautiful face.
He hangs obedient—laughable, to anyone who knew him, the idea of Tempes being anything short of ornery and haughty—as he's pulled in against the siren's chest. A human-shaped arm wraps around him to tuck him in and the siren kicks them out away from the shallows into the deeper water of the bay.
The horses break past the scrub line and come into view. The siren opens his mouth and sings.
The sound plunges itself into Tempes' chest and takes his heart in its clawed grip. It seizes his mind and his eyes. The power and beauty of it will render him mute, he thinks with a corner of his mind that still can; how can he use his rough and cloddish voice in a world with sounds like this?
If the siren didn't already hold him, he would throw himself in the sea to reach him.
As the men on horsesback do. They hurl themselves to the ground and scramble for the water, desperate to reach the singer. They see Tempes' in the siren's arms and jealousy kindles in their faces.
Tempes twists in that grip, wanting madly to burrow in as close as possible, for their skin to join. For this beautiful godling to open him up and swallow him piece by piece so they can become one.
The siren strokes his hair and swims them out slowly further into the bay, Tempes' pursuers splashing frantically after, and that crushingly beautiful song goes on.
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In the glowing peach of the dawn light, Tempes kneels on a stone, wet to the skin, his hair out of its braids and hanging as long and kelpy and clinging as the siren's.
They swam far, overnight. Tempes isn't even sure how far. The siren had held him, had brought Tempes' face up and sealed his lips over Tempes' and breathed into him, salty seawater rushing over his tongue and down his throat into his lungs to bring him breath. They had dived deep and Tempes had seen wonders—the jewels of the reefs and its creatures, ship-graves on the cloudy sea floor, dolphins and sharks and tuna and squid and other creatures he didn't have names for, who had watched him and the siren coast by and gone on with their mysterious underwater lives.
Tentacles swinging slowly through the water to keep him in place in front of Tempes, the siren nibbles on what's left of a man's arm. A pity to let a kill go to waste, he had said in that voice that crashed and boomed like the music of breaking waves, as Tempes had watched his pursuers drown, and then the siren had caught up a couple and brought them along to snack on.
"They were seeking justice," Tempes mutters now, watching this with an emptiness where feeling should be. His mind feels as though it were left behind on the shores of that bay.
"So?" asks the siren, licking a gobbet of flesh from a claw with a long flange-edged tongue. "What does the ocean care for justice?"
"Will you eat me too, then?" His heart rises a little with the thought. To be part of such a beast…! Part of the sea…
The sea has always called to him. But he had other, more immediate calls then, that had kept him in place among his family and home. But now? Where else does he have to go now? What else is there for him to be?
The siren gives him a long, slow, thoughtful look. "You would like that, would you?" He leans forward. Tempes doesn't flinch back as that long purple tongue emerges from between the sharp fish-eating teeth and those full beautiful lips to lick his face—over his features, down his throat and chest.
Then he smiles. "This light hurts my eyes. But I will come find you again."
Tempes watches the water swirl into a vortex as the beautiful creature sinks beneath the waves, and hopes he'll be summoned by that song again.
