Hiya, knitters, and welcome to the final chapter of Call of the Siren! I’m going to keep this short this week as this is already going up a tad late. My brother and his family are getting shipped off to Germany (they live that military life) and they’re here for the weekend to visit since we probably won’t get to see each other for a couple of years. So, I’m not gonna lie, I completely forgot about all of my responsibilities the minute my niece arrived. I already miss her.

If you’re looking to advert your eyes from any spoilers, because you just ordered a Call of the Siren Kit or downloaded the pattern on Raverly, there is only one image in this post that spoils clues one through four. So, if you start to see the edges of Megan-Anne’s Instagram pic, scroll super fast!

Did you miss Chapters One, Two, Three, and Four of Call of the Siren? Click on the highlighted links and catch up on our story!

And now for your spoiler:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BkVq9KvniJo/?taken-by=doctor_llama

The Wings

In retrospect, I actually wish it had taken longer to reach Olympus, because “scenic route” just didn’t do it justice.

We walked along the ocean floor. Scientifically speaking, I knew that we ought to be getting crushed. But wherever we were, it was a hell of a long way from the New Jersey shore. I had a hard time reconciling how far from home we must be. When the song took us, before we woke up in Queen Agalope’s palace, how much time had passed? Or were we teleported somehow? I didn’t know, it seemed more likely that we were out for longer than I had thought. But if that were true, were people looking for us back home? More importantly, were the yarn orders building up? People needed their yarn.

As I was thinking about how we really needed those orders to buy new winders, and how much it would suck to refund them for taking too long, I noticed that we were going up hill. A steep hill. I turned around, and stretching out behind me as far as I could see, was an incline so steep that I worried gravity might suddenly remember us and we’d go tumbling off the side. I glanced at Jac. She stared down the side of the hill cliff looking decidedly green. Himerope spoke for the first time since we’d left Queen Agalope.

“You walk alone from here.”

And then Himerope and Thel vanished. Not like, swam away really fast, but just vanished as if they were never there. I stared at the place where Thel had been a moment before and a small fish stared back at me with a skeptical look on its face as if to say, “Have you been hallucinating Sirens weird human?” Though, I suppose that putting word bubbles over fish didn’t make a strong case for my mental health, so maybe the fish had a point.

Jac glanced behind us. “I vote up. Seems better than down.”

I had to agree. After a few steps, I had a hard time catching my breath. My chest felt tight and my lungs burned. A few more and I couldn’t inhale at all. I knew it was bad to panic underwater, but I just wasn’t built for this kind of adventuring.

Jac shook my shoulder. Bubbles came out of her mouth and nose. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear her. Her eyes were wide and filled with panic. She pointed up, and I nodded.

We pushed off the ground and kicked our feet, swimming for all we were worth.

I hadn’t been able to see the surface from the ground, but somehow we made it. I broke through the water, gasping for air. A wave of disorientation slammed into me and I forgot to keep paddling. I started to sink back underneath the ocean. Until, at the last possible second, I reached up and managed to catch the edge of a fountain.

I hauled myself up.

Yeah. Fountain. And not even a super nice one either. It looked as if it belonged in mall that hadn’t been updated or seen regular upkeep in decades.

Jac looked like a drowned cat, and the two of us were dripping wet over the cheap, blue carpet that had faded to an ugly grey. A door stood ahead of us with a painted sign duct taped to it. It read, “Welcome to Olympus. Please sign in at reception,” in bold letters.

Driven by the inexorable force of our ingrained obligation to obey signs, we walked through the door in a daze in search of reception.

Reception turned out to be three desks, standing side by side, arranged to face out at lines of chairs.

“Did they model Olympus after a DMV?” Jac muttered under her breath.

“They modeled the DMV after us dearie.” Croaked a crone at the center desk with scraggly dark hair in tangles that reminded me of garden snakes.

“Such order. Such beautiful hierarchy.” Said the crone on the right. She had one eye good eye. The other was just an empty scarred over socket.

“And the sacrifices!” The crone on the left squealed, clearly delighted. She only had a few of wisps of white hair around the crown of her gleaming, bald head.

“Um. Ok, yeah.” I said, not sure which one to make eye contact with. “I mean, I can kind of see what you mean, but we don’t have sacrifices at the DMV. Just, you know, long lines.”

The left crone cackled, the threads of white hair floating around her as she threw her head back. The sound was horrible. It was the sound equivalent of nausea. “To grant to you a photo ID, you must make tribute to me your identifications three! One from column A and two from column B; A check you must write, no credit card for thee!” She cackled again. “Saaaaaacrifice”. And licked her thin, dry lips.

The middle crone pointed a long, boney finger at us, and I swear a lock of her hair crooked at us. “Take a number.” She rasped, and slowly moved her arm to point at a small number dispenser on the side of the room.

“There is no one else here!” Jac protested, and in a gross evil-old-lady chorus they all exclaimed: “WE KNOW!”

———3 weeks later———-

I sat in the almost-but-not-quite-comfortable Starbucks chair, cupping the triple grande cinnamon dolce latte in both hands like it was the most precious thing in the world. Actually, scratch that. It was the most precious thing in the world. I reached up to scratch my head, realized what I was doing and stopped. Since getting back from Olympus a few days ago my head had been itching like crazy.

“I think the Fates gave you lice.” Jac joked, half-heartedly from the other side of her laptop screen.

“It was just the stupid salt water.” I snapped. It dried me out.” I still wasn’t ready to joke about it. I’d used an array of different conditioning treatments over the past three days and I still looked like a mess. Jac, on the other hand, was positively glowing. “How can you be so happy.” I asked. “That was the worst. The absolute worst. I see why Olympus fell.”

“Don’t be the Goddess of Cranky, Megan-Anne. That. Was. Awesome.”

For reference, we waited in that depressing waiting room for days. The sign above the crones desk said that they were, “proudly serving number XCII,” for the entire time.

We were number XCIII.

I was going nuts by the time they finally called us up to the reception desk, where they then asked if we had an appointment. When we didn’t. They made us take a new number. The crazy thing was, Jac was in her element. There was something about the oppressive blanket of bureaucracy that just brought out the best in her. She took anther number like she was happy to do it. An objective thousand years later we got called back to talk to Hermes, who Demeter apparently had on retainer. Jac missed her calling as a lawyer. They negotiated, and she kept up every step of the way. In the end, she got four months of wings a year for the Sirens and safe passage home for us, plus a toga. I didn’t even know what she planned on doing with it. I think she just wanted to make Hermes give her one more thing.

Now, as we sat safely in a Starbucks, miles away from the ocean. She looked at me with a dangerous gleam in her eyes. “Want to do some Supernatural cosplay? You can be Sam.”

“Huh?” I know, right? I’m a real wordsmith.

“Megan-Anne. Get with the witty banter program. I’ve found us another case.” She turned her screen to face me and I nearly dropped my latte as I read the headline of an online newspaper: The Jersey Devil has struck again!

To be continued in the next installment of the Lattes & Llamas Society for Knitterly Cryptid Studies!

Thanks for reading! ~Megan-Anne & Jac