The sun bled orange over the sea when she came to him.

Apollo stood at the edge of the world, where the cliffs of Delphi kissed the Aegean, his golden lyre slung across his back. He had come for silence, or as close as he could get to it in a world still humming with prophecy and prayer. But the waves brought her voice instead—a low, trembling song not meant to lure, but to grieve.

“You’re far from your kind, little siren,” Apollo said without turning.

Her voice cut through the sea air like smoke through sunlight. “We don’t sing anymore. Not like before.”

He turned then. She was perched on a stone like a half-drowned thought, feathers dulled by salt and time, hair tangled with seaweed and sorrow. Not beautiful in the way mortals feared, but beautiful in the way tragedies are remembered. Her eyes were dark pools where the sunlight ended.

“I came to speak of murder,” she said.

Apollo frowned. “There is always murder. What makes yours sacred?”

“It was not mine,” she replied, voice sharpening. “It was theirs. My sisters. Gone. Their waist crushed against rocks, their throats full of foam. And he sailed on. Odysseus.”

The name hung in the air like rot. Apollo’s hands curled around his lyre’s strings, and the wind stilled.

“He heard our song. He did not resist it—he tied himself down to take it in like stolen wine. And when he passed, he laughed. He laughed as they died. As if we were just another storm to weather. Another myth to survive.”

Apollo’s jaw tightened. “He is a favorite of Athena. A weaver of tricks. That much I know.”

“Athena gave him the wax, the rope, the will to resist,” the siren spat. “But what of us? Did you ever hear our songs, Apollo? Not the lures—the real ones. The songs we sang to the sea before men made monsters of us?”

Apollo stepped closer, the air around him humming with heat and something ancient. “I hear all music. Even the kind that breaks.”

“Then remember us,” she hissed. “Not as beasts slain by cunning. Not as footnotes in a hero’s tale. We were daughters of the river and muse. We sang to guide the lost—not drown them. But the mortals twisted us. Made us hunger for the very things we once pitied.”

Apollo looked out to sea, and for the first time in an age, he felt rage rise like fire beneath his skin. Not godly wrath, but something older, more human.

“He will answer for it,” he said. “For the desecration of song, for the slaughter of your sisters. He was warned not to mock the sacred. But he forgot that even clever men die.”

The siren smiled, and it was not sweet. “Let him hear our song again. But this time, let it be yours.”