Xandria

Xandria
[[File:{{#setmainimage:Shipwreck Singer.jpg}}|250px]] A siren
Details
Race	Siren, formerly Human
Birthplace	Meletis, Theros
Lifetime	Mending Era
Colors

Xandria is a siren on the plane of Theros, who used to be a human scholar from Meletis.

History

Xandria had once been a scholar in the libraries of Meletis. There, she had fallen for the handsome Ninis, her classmate. In turn, he was enraptured by her ethical insights, and they spent hours talking together. Eventually, they spent the night together, and he was still there in the morning in all his beauty. Xandria was overjoyed. She had finally found love.

Then, some type of light coalesced over the water, forming into a shape. It was the presence of one of the gods, though she did not know which. This god claimed Ninis on its own and cursed Xandria for having tried to claim him from them. The shape reached out to Xandria, and she screamed with her lost love, her stolen future, and her stymied hopes.

She awoke on an island and transformed into a siren. She was immortal, she could sing and charm anything with hearing with her voice, but she was trapped in the Siren Sea and could never return to civilization. The other sirens brought her to two shipwrecked men and feasted on them. Xandria was horrified and attacked them to stop the bloodshed.

In retaliation, the others pinned her down and each siren tore a peck of flesh from her body, then left her there in horrific pain. She thought she would die, but then the pain slowly faded, and she saw in her watery reflection that her body had regenerated fully, leaving no wounds, no scar. The sirens would afterward chase away all life from near Xandria to teach her the lesson of hunger. Xandria had nothing to eat, she was starving, and she could not die.

Years later, Xandria had finally gotten close enough to a vole to charm it with her song. The enthralled creature crawled into her mouth and she ate it voraciously, finally sating her long-lasting hunger for a bit. She hated eating like this, but as a siren who refused to eat humans, she had no other choice. By now, the other sirens had stopped bothering to chase away her potential food, but the game was still very scarce.

Then, she heard the song of her siren sisters. A ship was nearby, a trireme from Meletis armed with foolish, lost men, perhaps blown in by the storm. Nobody came to this side of the Siren Sea on purpose. The ship had a mage named Chakros on board, apparently immune to the siren song, hurling fireballs at the twenty or so sirens flocking about, but hitting nothing. Most of the other men had already fallen thrall to the siren song, several plunging into the water and swimming closer to hear the song more clearly.

Another siren grappled Chakros, slicing up his back and shoulder, and breaking his concentration on whatever spell he was using to stay immune to the siren song. He fell into the embrace of a siren, who ravenously ate his flesh while he smiled contentedly. Xandria tried to approach, but the others chased her away. She was an outcast among her tribe, for refusing to kill humans.

The next morning, Xandria woke after dreaming of her former life as a human. Despite the misery of life on the island, she did love to fly and enjoyed it each time. She hunted fish, sating her hunger anew but gagging at the taste of them.

Then, she saw a man lying on the beach, and he was moving. In all her years as a siren, Xandria had never seen a human while alone, and she felt hope for the first time in a very long time. She cradled the man awake, and he screamed when he saw her, but she tried to calm him down, telling him her name. He told her his name was Tolios, and that he was from Meletis, which puzzled her, as she did not recognize his accent. Had it been so long that the speech patterns of her home city had changed so much?

Tolios told Xandria of the ship mage Chakros, who had insisted they reach the shore by dawn. When the storm came, the captain prepared a path far to the north, but Chakros demanded they cut south through the storm instead, and the captain obliged him. Tolios was glad that Chakros had been killed.

Tolios then told Xandria he was injured, but when she bent over to examine his back, he plunged a dagger toward her face. Reflexively, she burst into song, halting his attack immediately. His poisoned smile softened into a slack grin, and the dagger fell from his hand. Xandria was furious. She slapped him, accidentally cutting open his face. When her song stopped, he was gripped again by panic, so she kept singing to pacify him. She suddenly dwelled on how frail humans were. Their skin split like grapes, their minds were seized completely by a simple song. Her song.

The other sirens arrived then, but instead of hatred and attacks, they simply studied her. They crowded around her, smiling at her while she sang to the foolish man in the sand. His eyes blazed with ecstasy as she bit deeply into his neck. The other sirens started singing, making no effort to share the meal. He was her claim, her food. And he was delicious.

Story appearances

Title	Author	Publishing date	Set	Setting (plane)	Featuring
The Consequences of Attraction	Ken Troop	2013-10-09	Theros	Theros	Xandria, Ninis, Tolios, Chakros