The Siren Islands are a scatter of basalt stacks at the western edge of the Shattered Sea, where the volcanic plateau that forms the Cliffs of Syquindonos crumbles apart into open water. They have no harbor, no trade, and no settlement that any outsider has ever counted. What they have is the song. The song is why every chart marks the western passage in red ink, and why most captains making for the inner archipelago take the longer route east rather than save three days running close along these rocks.
The islands
The stacks are sheer on every side, dark basalt risen straight from the sea with no beach at the foot of any of them. The same volcanic forces that raised the Cliffs of Syquindonos to the north raised these, then sank the ground between, leaving a maze of columns and drowned ridges that the swell breaks over without warning. Wave and tide have hollowed the bases into sea-caves, some of them running back further than a ship's boat has ever dared to row.
The sirens live in the caves and on the high ledges. No one who has come close enough to hear them has come close enough to see them well. Survivors describe a shape against the stone, paler than the rock, and after that they describe the sound and nothing else. Whether the sirens are a people, a remnant, or something the islands made on their own is not a question their visitors come back able to answer.
The song
The lament is thin and high, built on intervals that lean toward a resolution and never reach it. It keens. It circles. It sounds like a question with no answer and a mourning with no object, and it carries across water for miles in weather that should swallow any sound at all.
What it does is not what the old sailors' tales say it does. The song does not coax a man overboard or turn his hand on the tiller toward the rocks. It does something simpler and worse. Faesong is the emotion-and-harmony face of Ezz, the music that runs under the whole world, ambient and ownerless—no one commands it, no more than a bard commands the air he sings into. The sirens do not command it either. Their grief is only so pure, and so true to the song already running in this rock and water, that the current catches it up and carries it. The lament is not aimed at anyone; it spreads the way the song spreads, and arrives in whoever can hear it whole. It is not yours and it is not about anything you have lost, and it leaves no room in you for trimming a sail or calling a heading. Crews do not panic. They sit down. They weep, or they simply stop, and the unworked ship drifts where the current wants it, which along this coast is onto the stacks. The wreck is the sea's doing. The sirens only sing.
The chorus is always larger than it was the year before. Every crew lost here is said to be folded into it, so that what began as one grief is now the grief of everyone the islands have ever taken. Whether the drowned truly join the singers, or whether sailors only hear their own dead in a sound that was always this size, no survivor can say.
The cliffs of the western passage at dusk: columns of black basalt standing in broken ranks, white water sawing through the gaps between them. There is no light anywhere on the rock, no fire, no fishing stage, nothing a person would build. Only the caves at the waterline, and the sound coming out of them, which does not stop when the wind drops.
Passing the islands
The passage can be run. It is run, by ships that cannot afford the eastern detour, and the trick is old and brutal: stop every ear aboard with wax and wadding, and steer by a pilot who cannot hear at all. Deaf pilots are the most valuable hands in these waters. A few are deafened by fever or by the sea itself; others are deafened as children, on purpose, by families who have worked the Siren passage for generations and intend to keep the trade. The pilot binds himself near the tiller, reads the swell and the sky because he cannot read a shouted order, and brings the ship through on sight alone. A crew that trusts the wax and keeps its eyes on the pilot's hands lives. A crew with one cracked seal does not.
Ivory Keep, on the easternmost stack, is the only fort anyone has held on these shores. It is garrisoned by the deaf and is the pilots' station, a beacon for ships that mean to attempt the passage and a warning to those that do not.
The islands sit across the western and northern approach to the Shattered Sea, the route ships take coming down from the Iron Sea around the Cliffs of Syquindonos or hugging the Stratlan edge inbound. Tollgate and Sheîr both pay to keep the Syquindonos watchfires burning, in part to push traffic off this coast entirely. Neither will fund a light on the Siren stacks themselves. A fire there would only tell a captain he had already come close enough to hear.
Saveli came off the rocks alive because he was below in the bilge with a fever when his ship struck, too far gone to climb toward the song with the rest of them. He remembers the chorus and nothing of the wreck. "It was not sad for us," he says. "It was sad for someone else, and there was no room in it for us at all." He has not gone back to sea. — as told at Tollgate's harbor