I was captivated by this story from the very first sentence, which introduces Kos, an entity from the depths that is “more magic than meat.” What was your inspiration for this story?

Well, I wrote the bulk of the first draft while I was on a cruise ship and experiencing the deep ennui that comes from being on a cruise ship. So that’s intrinsically buried deep in the DNA of this narrative in many mysterious and arcane ways. The second piece of inspiration is that a couple of years ago, on social media, I had seen an image of a mermaid in a bathtub with a bunch of tally marks written on the wall, and that painting really struck me. It’s always fun to take things seriously, and I started thinking about the sequence of events that might lead a person to keep a mermaid in a bathtub against its will, and the logistical challenges of essentially having both some guy in your house, and also a big goldfish. Somehow this led to the idea of a voiceless siren and bath crayons, but I forget the exact trajectory of how the former led to the latter. The idea that the siren is an entity made of magic that needs to build itself an organic suit to wear was vaguely inspired by the way caddisfly larvae build casing out of rocks and debris.

Throughout the story, we see how powerful voices can be as tools for us to express ourselves, seek control, and make connections. Can you tell us more about the role that voices have in this world? Are there any other themes or patterns that came up as you were writing?

Classically, the primary power a siren has is their ability to control or seduce people with their voice. In this universe, they get that power by stealing that ability from the people they drown (along with other traits, like an entire appearance and identity), which meant that the entire magic system of this universe would be based on voices, and how you might use your voice to convince someone to do something, or enact a violence upon the world, or change a relationship you have with someone. So, Irina uses her tone-of-command to capture Kos and force it into a role. Kos used its tone-of-beguile to captivate Koschei into following it into the dark and subsume him. And conversely, without a voice, Kos is forced to listen and make connections without the power of its voice subduing everyone it meets. In some ways, the magic system here is a pretty obvious visualization for the ways in which speech is an action.

A few other big themes I also was thinking about while writing were the differences and similarities between obligation and desire; death and freedom; and love and sacrifice. And how you might feel trapped by your role, or how experiencing a new role might expand your perspective. Nearly everyone is in the wrong role in this story. First—Koschei, before his death, was in the eldest-sister role that a lot of fairy tales have, because I thought it would be interesting to have an eldest brother end up in the caretaking role. Irina now needs to keep the family together since Kos is dead, which wasn’t her role before. And now the siren Kos plays the role of Koschei, poorly. How they experience these roles, and whether they think that fulfilling these roles is fulfilling or stifling or both, is very much something I was interested in as a theme.

One aspect of the story that I found intriguing was the inclusion of short folk tales that tell us about characters such as the doomed brides of the lindworm prince. What was your writing process like in regards to these shorter stories? Do you have a particular process for switching between writing styles or deciding where these sections should go?

Picking out the stories was the best part of writing this novelette—I specifically looked for classic folktales that were about transformation, and weirder stories than are usually told. The lindworm stories are specifically paired so that you see the “classic” version of a lindworm story (a princess scrapes all his skins off and he becomes human) with a “weird” version of a lindworm story (a boy and a lindworm, trapped together, end up transforming in ways they didn’t expect). All the stories are there to both prime the reader for the transformation that Kos will take at the end, and to hammer home the fact that this narrative is also a fairy tale and has the structure of a fairy tale even while it is a contemporary piece of fiction. In retrospect, I should have also included Tam Lin as one of the asides, but ah, you always miss one. And I specifically wrote the folktale sections to first read pretty emotionless, just a series of events that happen in succession, and then to gradually sound more and more like Kos was telling or thinking about them, culminating in the history of Koschei and his siblings and Koschei telling his sisters a story when they were much younger.

Do you have any advice for writers who are drawn towards fantasy or speculative fiction?

I reiterate my previously stated advice that “it’s good to learn how to make things interesting without the wizard,” which is to say, the fundamentals of storytelling and writing good prose remain the same between “literary” and “speculative” fiction. Knowing how to do the former well is a shortcut to learning the latter. Also, reading widely in the field will give you a sense of what has been “done” before in whatever genre you love and how your own interests stack up against the canon, but don’t be super surprised if what you end up writing isn’t the exact genre you like to read—I like a lot of genres (Space opera! Epic fantasy!) that, when I try to write, end up feeling like I’m trying to dig a hole with a teaspoon. That’s okay, and I wish someone had told me that this is okay when I was first starting to write.

The last piece of advice I’d give is that you should just make it weirder. I don’t know what you’re writing, but you should make it weirder.

Do you have any other works that you’d like to talk about? Is there a place where readers could look for more of your work?

I have another story out this month in Tordotcom about repairing telecommunication cables in space, so go check that out! The links to my backlog of published fiction are at my website, https://isabel.kim, along with a link to my newsletter for updates. Also, mark your calendars for June 2nd, 2026 and buy/preorder my debut novel SUBLIMATION, coming out hot from Tor! Please support my goal of “not going back to the law firm” and “writing more weird fiction to show everyone instead.”