Total pages in book: 111
Estimated words: 106107 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 106107 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 531(@200wpm)___ 424(@250wpm)___ 354(@300wpm)
The next evening, I went into the waters and captured the Syren.
Now, she is in the back of the church, tied to the cross. I crucified her in the hopes that it will remind me of what I have fought for, what you have helped me become. I know you don’t believe in God, Doctor. I know you use God to inspire discipline and constraint and devotion in your monsters. You took God and used him to make us human, and it worked.
Right now, I need that discipline more than ever.
The things I want to do to this creature are unspeakable.
I thought the lust inside me had been buried for centuries. In the monastery, it didn’t even exist. Here, at the bottom of the world, I didn’t dare let it out to play. Not with you, not with anyone. And yet, now that this creature is in my presence, I fear it. I fear it as much as I fear the desire to devour her whole, drink all her blood until she’s a shriveled corpse.
I sound like a heathen, a madman. I fear I am turning into both those things, and I am powerless to stop the transformation. The longer this Syren is in my hands, the more I think she won’t survive.
That I might not survive.
I know what you would say—that it’s best to kill her and be done with it. Don’t prolong her torture any longer, that such sins are beneath me. You would say I shouldn’t prolong the risk of me snapping and becoming that dreadful thing you once discovered chained to a tree in the motherland. Do whatever you can to not regress.
But think of the people I’ll save by keeping her. Instead of killing several times a week, I can feed from her indefinitely. I will save humans, and isn’t that all I’ve wanted to do? Isn’t that the heart of my absolution? To make up for all those lives I took, not out of survival, but because killing felt good to the murderer inside me?
Aragon, you would say, you must not feel guilty for what you are made to do. To drink the blood of humans is divine. To torture a sea creature, no matter how much they might deserve it, is beneath us. We must always pick the route that leads to salvation, no matter what logic tells us.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. You are clearly on my mind and in my ear, even though you are probably in the middle of the Atlantic by now, getting further and further away from me. I know what you want me to do, but…
Perhaps I am just too curious to do it.
I haven’t felt this alive in centuries, Abe.
The excitement, the lust, the dark desires… She is becoming my obsession, my reason for being, and I’ve only just begun.
Your oldest friend,
The Priest
Ilay my fountain pen down and peer at the crinkled paper, waiting for the ink to dry. Outside, an owl hoots before its cry is swallowed by the wind. In a few hours, the sun will be up, and I will have to hold a funeral for the fishermen, followed by mass. I should be brushing up the eulogy—though I didn’t know the men well, the village will expect me to act like I did, to say all the right things, to help them make sense of such a tragedy. There has been enough tragedy in these parts, thanks to famine and disease, but this was of another nature.
To my dismay, my thoughts keep drifting to the Syren.
My little fish who won’t give me her name.
Perhaps she doesn’t have one, or at least not one that translates.
But I feel she does. She just doesn’t want me to know, for she thinks it will give me more power.
She’s right.
If she wants me to do magic for her, I’ll have to know her name to make it work. Something of that magnitude requires it.
Not that I’m considering it.
To do a spell of that enormity requires serious consideration. There are physical sacrifices to be made. The timing has to be right. I can heal those who are hurt, but my talents have been on the humbler side. The idea that I could manipulate her tail to become legs, that I could give her human anatomy, is beyond my scope.
And even if I was able to perform it successfully, I would make my whole situation more difficult. A Syren is easily contained. A woman is not. I would have to have additional security measures in place for her. She would still need to be constrained, though perhaps not to a cross. I would have to make the back room into a jail of sorts. She wouldn’t be able to yell or call attention to herself. She wouldn’t dare let herself be known as she is right now, but if she can pass for an ordinary woman, there’s no doubt she’ll seek safety and sanctuary in the arms of others.