Over a thousand years ago, before the souls lost at sea had a guide, a siren happened across a ship as she swam the ocean. Having never seen a human before, she followed the vessel for a time in curiosity. She soon saw that its captain was a cruel man with a wicked heart who did terrible things to both the inhabitants of her world and his fellow humans.
One night, the ship was caught in a terrible storm. A kraken rose from the depths and pulled the ship beneath the waves and all its crew were drowned. The captain found the siren watching him as he sank and he tried to bargain with her for his life. She considered the request.
The siren remembered all she had seen the captain do, and realized she could not forgive him, but still the man pleaded. Finally, she relented. Calling upon her mother's power, she not only saved the man from dying, she also made him an immortal being, a spirit in his own right. But there was a catch. In making him immortal, the siren cursed him to forever sail the ocean in his now wrecked ship to ferry the lost souls to the afterlife.
Enraged at this perceived treachery, the man lashed out at the siren, affixing her to the prow of his ship that her song might lead more sailors to their doom. His visage twisted to reflect his rotted soul, until he resembled a living corpse, but nothing he could do would unbind him from the curse. What remained of the man called Davy Jones was doomed to find and ferry those lost souls until the day the world ends.
This myth and variations thereof are most commonly known among sailors and nearly anyone living in or near a port. Some folks more inland may also be familiar with it, but it tends to be more romanticized the further removed an individual is from the seas.
One variation sets the story shortly after the beginning of the world, when the ocean was ruled by one spirit. This sort of variation also tends to stipulate that the siren in the story was the first daughter of the sea.
Another telling suggests that Davy Jones actually killed the siren before his ship was capsized and his near-death and subsequent cursing was actually caused by the siren's mother herself.
A common version told by the sirens has the story's siren die from the sheer power needed to fuel such a curse, and Davy Jones uses her corpse as a lure.
A version that is more popular inland states that, rather than the captain being originally cruel, the siren had actually fallen in love with him and had given her life to grant him immortality as a purpose-bound spirit. In this version, it is actually the heartache of losing his love and the long years wandering the seas alone as a ghost that eventually drive him mad and twist his appearance. Davy Jones is intentionally painted as a tragic figure while the siren often becomes little more than a love-interest plot device.
This is one of the most important stories in
siren culture and is often used as a cautionary tale to younger sirens about what can happen when attempting to manipulate magics beyond one's ability to control. Some siren communities use further variations of the story to foster fear of the landfolk in their children, though this is almost exclusively heard from deep-living sirens.
To the
caetyn , this is their most important legend, as it is the story of how their creator came into his power. Many caetyn reference this story when preparing to attack siren settlements, citing it as the primary reason the sirens are their mortal enemies.
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