Siren Song (Part I)

by Dusk Soul

The song the sirens sang which sank the HMS Lucens, was a howling one.

Overhead the storm cloaked sky was pitch in blackness. The sky’s darkness immutable, drew more light and life from the eyes of the ship’s sole survivor. That lone last soul. The single soul adrift the twisting sea and at its mercy.

The sky bled dark rain drops. Rain drops which ricocheted off the brine. As they reflected against the churning oil slicked surface, they would then lash the stinging salt water about and into the eyes and face.

Rebounding up and into the nostrils, making the air passage almost unbreathable. He gasped in vain, and choked on the sea water. His arms flailed and his head became drenched in petrol.

The entirety of his clothing soaked through to the bone, weighed him down, and once more his head sank below the water’s line. All before he could fill his lungs by a third with precious air.

The survivor’s arms thrashed about and struggled to clutch at the liquid. Pure panic was his state. Like mercury in the moonlight, the water slipped through his outstretched fingertips, as they skimmed the surface. They too, submerged.

Now, in the dark night, below the water, he began to dizzy. A wave pummeled him, toppling his body. With horror, he realized he didn’t know up from down. Whether the surface be above him, or below.

Within those depths, his lungs involuntarily reacted, expelling their priceless contents, in the form of alarmed bubbles. Spheres of varying size.

Each one containing its own scream. In the dark ocean, he could only guess at which direction to swim. He swept out his arms and kicked his legs once, then almost gave up. Something in him, told him to pause.

In that moment he felt the bubbles drift up his neck, followed by his chin. It took a moment. The comprehension dawned. He was upside down. He had narrowly avoided drowning.

He didn’t know how far the surface was, and the salt water stung at his wide open and shock filled eyes.

As his lungs every cell began to shriek: inhale! His brain and thoughts had begun to fog and to blur. Only then, did he come to the realization; he was one lungful of water away from death. A single inhale was all that stood between being alive and being a corpse. A watery demise.

He fought the urge to give up. He did not want to cross over death’s door by drowning. He kicked off his steel toe boots, and was rewarded with breaking through that barrier. That barrier between life and death at sea.

He gasped what air he could, fighting for his life, in between fits of coughing and choking. It felt as though someone were pouring buckets of ice water over his nostrils and mouth, as he respirated.

The skies lit up blaring to life. The iridescence illuminating the edges of those twisting vaporous titans. Ones that clash and crash into and amongst themselves, issuing forth; tongues of forked lightning.

In this flood of light, the fourteen foot swell flashed into focus. The looming monstrosity might as well have been a wall of bricks. His body might as well have been made of crystal.

His perspective was one of hope, losing itself. The wave appeared near vertical, as he dropped down into the depths of its trough. He had mere seconds to live.  Out of the corner of his eye; an orange hue. A life preserver. Within a crawls length. He mustered all the strength he had left. One arm leading the other, as he desperately crawled and kicked and swam. Exhaling below the surface, and above it, giving an inhale.

His every muscle agonized, near beyond belief, as at last he grasped his prize. Life is worth its weight in gold.