It’s official, Megan-Anne and I are the weird people at the pool. While I don’t care if anyone looks at me sideways for crocheting or knitting poolside, Megan-Anne looks super weird as she gingerly pulls our sample of Call of the Siren out of her bag, which is carefully folded up and protected in a three layers of plastic bags.

Me: What are you doing?

Megan-Anne: It’s Friday, I’m taking a spoiler pic of last weeks clue.

Me: Alright, sure. But do you think you got enough bags protecting it?

Megan-Anne, looking at me with huge, horrified eyes: Oh no! Do you think I need more?

Me: It’s Superwash Merino AND you haven’t blocked it yet. Why are you being weird?

Her: I don’t want it to smell like sunblock.

At that point, I threw my hands up in the air and watched her try to take a spoiler pic that did not include the children running around the pool with their giant unicorn floats. To be honest, I was surprised she was able to get a wedge of the water in the picture at all. Those kids were EVERYWHERE. I’m not sure how five kids felt like fifty, but to their extremely tired mom who fell asleep while watching them: Don’t worry, girl. We had your back and kept an eye on them. Don’t listen to those other women that talked crap about you. We know it’s gonna be a long summer for you. We hope you enjoyed your nap.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BkD1xqaHurQ/?taken-by=doctor_llama

Did you miss Chapters One, Two, and Three of Call of the Siren? Click on the highlighted links and catch up on our story! You can get everything you’ll need to knit along with us in the Call of the Siren Kit.

The Guardians

Something halfway between a grin and a sneer unfurled on the Queen’s face. “You are wise to accept Zagreus’s task, mortal child.”

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Would she send us to fight an orca or something? I saw Blackfish. There was no way Jac and I would win that fight. To be honest, I was just happy the Queen’s magic or whatever was keeping us from drowning to death at the bottom of the ocean. My bar was pretty low at the moment.

“You will go to Demeter and inform her that we will give her Persephone in exchange for our wings.” Her tail lashed back and forth, as if to punctuate her proclamation, the deep greens and blue scales on her tail glinting in the unnatural light.

“But…” my voice trailed off.

The queen’s face darkened and her crown, which grew out of her head like horns, seemed extra pointy. “You would already break your promise?”

If I hadn’t already been pinned against the back of the cage’s bars by the force of her voice, I would’ve put up my hands as if to stop her, but my arms stuck at my sides. “No! Not at all. I just meant to say… Well. And I don’t mean to be offensive, but aren’t you mermaids? Mermaids don’t have wings.”

It was at this point the Queen downgraded us from “mortal children” to infants. At least, she spoke to us that way. She had a nice laugh and was basically like, “Right. I’m thousands of years old. In the general timeline of my life compared to yours, the doctor is still telling your mother to push.” Under the circumstances, we got lucky. Queen Agalope assigned us a couple of her guards to escort us on our quest, which did not include battling an orca, thankfully.

Just to clear it up now, I was there and in mortal danger, so I get to call it a quest. Certain sisters, who I will not name here, insisted that we weren’t on a quest if we didn’t fell passionate about it or at least get some treasure at the end. But I took it as a win and checked “D&D style quest” off my bucket list.

From what I could tell, as the crowd dissipated and the guards came forward to usher us onto our quest as indentured hostage negotiators, Disney had lied to me. I had heard the white-washed and sugar-coated of Persephone and Hades. Queen Agalope hadn’t bothered to go into details, but I learned more on our two day walk across the bottom of the ocean.

Our escorts, Thelxiepeia and Himerope, didn’t look thrilled to have pulled the short straw. On the upside, Thel was fairly chatty, but Himerope was just short of openly hostile, and as it turned out, hated being called Himer. Thel, on the other hand, took pity on us trying to pronounce her name and accepted the abbreviation. Once we got away from the queen, I actually started to enjoy it. I mean, come on. Being involved with what was best described as a Grecian Mafia dispute, taking a stroll across the ocean floor while magically breathing water, and talking to a couple of actual mythological beasts was pretty cool.

Jac knew more about the real mythology and was really in her element talking to Thel. We walked and walked and walked. That part did stop being fun after the first six hours or so, but it was worth it to hear the story.

Thousands of years ago, when Earth was controlled by the Old Gods, Demeter was the goddess of harvest and fertility. I’m still not really sure how all that worked, but I guess you could skip out on having to do IVF and just send her a goat if you were having a hard time getting pregnant. So that was pretty cool. Anyhow, she had a daughter, Persephone, that she loved more than anything else. The original Bae. When Persephone was about fifteen-years-old, Hades, the uncomfortably older god of the underworld, started low-key stalking her. They didn’t have Facebook obviously, so he had to resort to the old school tactics of just hiding and staring creepily at her. One day, when she was playing with some Nymphs in her mother’s garden, Hades snatched her up and took her to the Underworld.

Thel told the story like it was some sort of romcom, but that’s messed up. So here’s a quick PSA: Don’t kidnap women to make them love you. It’s not a great long-term plan. Demeter, understandably, flipped a metaphorical table and the world began to wither as she raged — crops died, lakes dried up, the whole nine yards. She tore Earth and Olympus apart looking for Persephone. She blamed the Nymphs for not protecting her in the garden and charged them with finding Persephone too. It got bad enough that Zeus had to intervene. Apparently, Hades had come to Zeus and asked permission to take Persephone. Zeus, being an idiot that didn’t think things through, said, “Sure. Why not?” And then he forgot to even tell Demeter about it.

Earth and humanity came to the brink of dying off from Demeter’s anger and sadness before Zeus came clean. Demeter demanded that Zeus get Persephone back. Hades got wind of all of this and tricked Persephone into eating some fruit, and even though Zeus ordered Hades to give her back, apparently fruit consumption trumped all. Now Persephone has to stay in the Underworld six months out of the year, all because she ate six pomegranate seeds. Demeter got Persephone back for half of each year and, for obvious reasons, didn’t see this as a great solution. It didn’t help that by then Persephone has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome when it came to Hades. So Demeter took it out on the Nymphs, tearing out their beautiful wings and casting them into the ocean.

Which pretty much sums up how we ended up here. The siren’s, which were definitely NOT mermaids no matter what they looked like, needed a messenger to bargain with Demeter to get her to restore their wings in exchange for Persephone. Admittedly, it was not a strong plan. But I suppose the powers of Olympus were never really known for their planning.

The story concludes next week in Chapter 5: The Wings!

Thanks for reading! ~Megan-Anne & Jac