A curious thing happens when, time after time, an impulse is stamped down and desperately cast away for the sake of polite society. The pressure must release itself somehow, and the simple truth is that the slow leak of the psyche cannot stay inert, by its nature. With you or without you, it lives, and it calls to itself to be made whole once more.
A scream is not merely the opening of a valve, but an admission. Even as it is the cracking and rumbling of your last vestiges of containment finally falling to pieces around you, it is the isolated clatter as you pick up a single fallen stone of what was and drop it back to the ground as you cast about for what is. It is this cry that the Unsiren seeks, for in order for the creature to restore itself, its counterpart must be released with full awareness. From unconscious struggle it was born, and upon conscious surrender it must feed. Its presence alone carries an aura of desperation that greatly lowers the threshold for such a release, but the final barrier to its ascension can be lifted only by you alone.
Before the figurative ascent must come the material descent, on the wings of an owl far larger than any bird ought to have any right to be, coming down to alight with one taloned foot on each of your shoulders. Its shadow looms over you in any light, the image of the antlers crowning its cervine head briefly appearing to sprout from the silhouette of your own if viewed at just the right angle. As it takes to the sky once more, its grip is firm, but not piercing, and it almost feels like the massive, silent wings bearing you swiftly away from human habitation are your own. Perhaps, in a sense, they are.
After some time, the Unsiren finally sets you down in the tallest and most secluded pine tree it can find, and its real work begins. You are fed wild berries from the bushes that dot the forest floor, and small silvery fish from the nearby river, and honeycombs still dripping with the bounty of the hive, until gradually, your body starts to remember. The golden chains binding your mind to the false and your soul to the ground are no mean feat to loosen, but in time they fall away, one by one, and your shrieks upon which the Unsiren feeds begin to ever-so-faintly resemble birdsong. You hop to higher branches to see more clearly over the canopy, and find yourself perched higher than you were yesterday. Your scalp and shoulder blades begin to itch.
It is slow going, this rewilding of the self, but after having spent so long waiting for the cry that beckoned it to the beginnings of its wholeness, the Unsiren is nothing if not patient. You could swear you see a smile cross its face as its lips part to reveal a long beak surprisingly suited to its deer snout and it begins to preen your incoming feathers. These days, when its wings brush your own, the boundaries where you end and it begins are hazier than they used to be. Losing stereopsis was a disconcerting change for a while, but now it feels natural–you were always meant for a wider field of view. Your ear twitches as the Unsiren sings for the first time, and its melody is the mirror image of your own. The red-orange cast of the sunset paints its tawny feathers with the colors of a forest fire, and as it draws closer, you ponder which of the two of you is the phoenix, and which is the flames.
The moon crests overhead, its silver light barely reaching through the thatch of branches where you wake–not with a start, but calmly, matter-of-factly. You open the keen golden eyes you have always had, and perfunctorily run your beak through your feathers as you have done every night-morning for as long as you can remember, which is a very long time indeed. You dodge the boughs that would tangle your antlers on instinct as you rise and survey the woods stretched out before you.
Somewhere in the distance, a frustrated human screams the scream it’s held in for so long, and you are aloft without a second thought, eager to exalt and be exalted once more. As your home in the branches shrinks rapidly into the distance behind you, the exactly 206 off-white bones lying undisturbed in the corner vanish into obscurity.