On May Day we dance in circles around the May Pole, each holding a coloured streamer, because apparently that's just what we do. The Wicker Man showed us what kind of story can be wrought from rural traditions like that taken further and weirder.

So what traditions might three sirens have? They're at least a millennium old, and they're not just from another world - they're from the aquatic bit of that other world that we never get to see. Their native bodies aren't humanoid or equine. Their original culture would probably be completely alien to our own, and have all manner of strange quirks and rituals.

Most would no doubt have been lost to the practicalities of time and human bodies. But what might remain?

And how might innocent, unknowing humans stumble afoul of that?

Would the sirens shun anyone who passed to their left at night, and refer to them only in third person? Burn at the stake a restaurant customer who dared to eat lobster on Victory Day? Wring every drop of blood from Flash Sentry's body and seed the land with it to lower humanity's fertility?

Any manner of strange idea could spring from this and might make a lovely detail within a larger story. But typically the stories that are dominated and driven by this concepts are horror stories in nature, where an artefact tradition from a dead culture causes mortal peril for someone in the present, who most likely has no idea what they've got themselves into.

So think Kill List, In the Earth, Mandrake, and yes, absolutely, The Wicker Man. And see what manner of folk horror our sirens can conjure up for the world!

As ever, there will be:

No maximum word limit!

No minimum word limit, aside from fimfiction's thousand-word standard!

No rating restrictions!

No prizes!

No SunDagio!

No AriNata!

No SonPie!

No time limit! ...I mean, it'd be nice to get it done this month, but, given the above thing about no prizes, if it takes you longer then it takes you longer... However, if you get it submitted this month then we'll read it and talk about it and shower you with praise, whereas by next month we'll have moved onto a different area of focus.

And that's it!

Ooh, very interesting! Horror is a fun theme.

An odd dynamic for this one though! Balancing the surens having to be part of the ship, with then also having to be the source of horror.

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I keep forgetting the prompts are meant to be for shipping! Then I remember, and with that remember why they're usually so hard to think of.

I think it could be done, like if a person got close to a siren and then realised they'd made a huge mistake in some ritual they hadn't expected. Or in more of a pairing than a relationship sense.