Overview
The Door-Keep Siren is the patient, certain voice of The Shattered Coast, a vocal, grey-plumed coast-kin of the broken cliffs who keeps the door and guards the high cliffs, the coast's patient, exact, and most certain voice. It stands just under two meters tall, watchful and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept doors rather than years. Where the selkie of the shore keep the skin, the Door-Keep siren of the coast keeps the door, and it has been keeping the first door on the first cliff for a very long time.
Habitat
The Door-Keep Siren keeps to the high cliffs of The Shattered Coast, a range of broken stone where the coast is a promise and the door is a treaty. Its dwellings are hollows of black rock and kept air, their floors dissolving and re-forming with the tide, their faces catching the grey shimmer of the coast on the inside and the shelter of the cliff on the outside. It favors the higher cliffs where the door runs oldest and the keeping is oldest, the places where a door can be kept without the coast's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Door-Keep Siren is about 1.89 m tall, watchful and patient, with grey-black coast plume that reads as cold in the grey shore-light. Its throat carries the pale-silver band, a deliberate mark worn as a record of the long art of the keeping, and its tail-plume is deep-sea teal, the color of the coast's own water at the deep. Its eyes are pale grey, bright and certain beneath the brow, and they hold still in a way that no other eye on the coast does. It wears nothing, for the plume is its garment, and it carries a single grey stone at its throat, set with a single keep-loop at the brow, the loop of a keeper.
Behaviour
The Door-Keep Siren is patient, exact, and profoundly honor-bound, a creature of long doors and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It keeps before it acts, often for hours, keeping on a cliff or a person or a door until it understands the shape of the song, and only then does it act, and then with an exactness that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Door-Keep siren is a debt the coast will keep long after the keeper has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Door-Keep siren is no open-water fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the keep and the cliff itself, not force. Its primary defense is the cliff, for it knows every hollow of the high shore and can lead a pursuer along The Shattered Coast until the pursuit loses its nerve and its footing on the broken stone. Should it be forced to act, a Door-Keep siren is precise and patient, 5 m/s along the broken cliffs and low, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, dimming a light, holding a hollow, or singing until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Door-Keep siren is attuned to the long song of the coast, for the song is the keeping and the keeping is the whole of its power, and a siren that has a coast and a plume and a door does not need a spell that is not its own. It is not attuned to any art that is not the song, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the song you cannot stop hearing, which is not a magic but is a thing that the siren of the coast has sung for a very long time, and the song is the keep, and the keep is the whole of its power.
Society
The Door-Keep Sirens live on The Shattered Coast in patient, exact coast-clans of ten to a hundred, bound by the doors they keep together rather than by blood or by place, led by the Song-Keeper. There is no elder and no ruler beyond the Song-Keeper, for a siren that has kept the most and sung the truest is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a song and the song is the whole of their society. Decisions are made on the cliff, by a company of grey-eyed keepers that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a siren that breaks a keeping is a siren that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Door-Keep Siren is a culture of the kept door, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is patient and exact is the only honest word on the coast. They keep no records, for a siren that has kept a door does not need a record, the keeping is the record, and the keeping is patient and exact and does not fade. Their stories are slow and patient, told on the cliff at the low tide, and they are stories of doors kept and songs kept and the patient, exact difference between them, told in a voice that is vocal and means every keeping.
Home
The Shattered Coast is the Door-Keep siren's home and its keeping, a range of broken stone where the coast is a promise and the door is a treaty, where the siren keeps its doors and sings its patient, exact words. It is a strange and patient place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Door-Keep siren has learned to live on that rock rather than against it. The grey shimmer of the coast that runs across the high cliffs is the coast's own, a cold light that the siren has come to read as the color of a kept door.
Relations
The Door-Keep Siren keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of The Shattered Coast, a truce of kept doors that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing on the broken stone. To the grey shimmer of the high cliffs the Door-Keep siren is a patient, exact, and absolutely honor-bound presence, a grey-eyed keeper that is at home in the hollows and on the door, and the shimmer has learned to glow wide and let the keeps pass, for a siren that has kept you has decided you are a promise and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the coast, the Door-Keep Siren is the patient, exact edge of the tale, the place where the doors are kept and a song is kept and a keeping is read. It is the figure that keeps a new door at the low tide and holds the coast very patient and very exact, and the figure that, when the truce with the memory-sensing siren grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old keep patient and exact and absolutely honor-bound.