Mermaids tried to lure you towards them, with beautiful songs and faces, enticing, tempting, coaxing you towards your doom, but with only as much strength as you allowed them to have.
These didn’t wait.
They couldn’t exist, the clever scientists said, reading over the descriptions they received. Some type of optical illusion, or unexplained natural phenomenon, or stories told by space-sick minds. The likelihood of any extremophilic lifeform even nearly approximating human appearance–especially one the size claimed–was approximately the likelihood of the universe’s laws spontaneously reversing themselves due to dropping a plate on a Tuesday.
The men and women on their ships didn’t claim that they could exist, merely that they did. Draped in silk, hair flowing in the airless wind, as impassive and as lovely as the stars themselves, and just as deadly.
They tore through layers of metal and clear steel as though peeling a hard-boiled egg, leaving the shell fragments and scattered contents behind. If there was a rhyme or a reason to those they destroyed and those they let alone, it was too long a rhyme and too large a reason for any human to understand.
Mermaids were simple creatures, hungry for landed flesh, bound by the laws human minds created for them.
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