Ooh, a convenient really-high wave.  If she lets it carry her up the side and then holds on with her whole body out of the water, maybe she'll be able to see them, properly?  Finally?

She can see the backs of them, though this one looks over his shoulder as he's hustled into a cabin.

Ughhhh.  Well, back to the other side, to see if anyone's there now?

Sailors, messing with ropes!

It occurs to Cyllene that weather like this could maybe be related to the sunken ships and their accompanying scores of skeletons.  She lets the sailors be.

(But still sticks around.  She's supposed to be off practicing her music for the next few hours; no one will miss her until after that.)

The weather continues to get more like this. The sailors are very busy and yell at each other a lot.

If it were merfolk (or, royal merfolk specifically), there would be an obvious person to magic the weather away, and they would do that.  But Cyllene doesn't have a way to communicate with them; she doesn't know what they're doing up there - she hums to try and find out, and it's clear they're doing something, and it's not something she recognizes, and it would be very stupid for her to try and mess with that.

So she continues to wait at the ship's belly, going back and forth, checking it on each side, again and again...

Is she sure? The ship is heaving around quite a lot and might smack into her.

Ow.

But yes.  She'll just give it a wider berth.

Those two from before are back out on the deck, doing something with glass globes. This one is sitting down and clinging to the railing while he does it.

Oh, they're the ones doing the magic.

She considers for several long minutes, whether to do anything that might interfere with this; she hums, trying to figure out exactly what they're doing -

She decides to try and say something to them, but what's something they'll understand - if she tries to sound frantic they might think she's the one that needs help; if she tries to sound imposing and authoritative then there are a lot of ways that could go wrong...

The storm keeps getting worse.

Whatever they're doing doesn't seem to be working very well.

Okay, she's going to - try and hold the ship still.

That's worse! Everything on the ship that isn't part of it - the humans, but also their glass spheres - goes flying. Many of them hit the railing; many go over entirely.

- That's really not what she wanted to happen!!  And humans are really not supposed to be in the water - she drops the ship-holding song (slowly, she doesn't need to cause more problems with a sudden jerk) and starts swimming for the overboarded humans.  It seems like the most important thing is to get them to the surface; she'll collect them there and close to each other before figuring out a longer-term solution.  - Or, breathing is important, and she'll make sure that they each get at least a couple breaths before she moves on.

They don't seem to die instantly on hitting the water and some of them can sort of kick to the surface under sufficiently supportive conditions but those conditions are pretty hard to come by in the storm.

The grippable parts of the ship are not remotely stable enough for Cyllene to want to try and attach humans to it.

She cycles, a few times, giving them each a turn kept above the water, trying to figure out what to do next - she sings, checking each one, making sure they're alive and keeping them alive, when it looks like they might stop -

There are things coming off the floor part of the ship, which is probably not good, but some of them do float.  She directs the humans to grip onto those.  (Mostly in a physical sense; almost all of them are too panicked and flailing for her to communicate with, and that would probably still be true if she spoke their language.)

what yes okay grab the wood thing sure

Cyllene suspects that humans need more light than merfolk to see well; she's seen lights shining out from where they live even at the long distances she's previously kept.  So she's not, initially, that worried about the orange light coming off the other side of the ship.

But when a few more humans seemingly on purpose go into the water to get away from it, she updates her assessment.

Yeah, whatever that thing is seems to be... eating the boat?

That seems super bad.  Well, the thing to do is still to bring humans to floating things - oh no, if you put too many humans on one floating thing it will stop floating - yes come on human, she's prying you off this thing but she'll get you to a new one.  (She's stronger than most of them but this would still be so much easier if they'd stop fighting her - she would do something about this, but she can't make them calm only about her and it seems really counter to what she wants to make them chill out in full generality; that seems like a great way to get humans relaxing with their faces in the water.)

- Oh, oh, there's a small ship?  It may have many of the same problems as the large ship, but at least it's not being eaten by light, and there are already some humans in it so clearly they think it's a good idea to be in there; come on, humans, get in.

Yes, great idea, thank you singing sharkthing!

She has really not gotten everyone there is to get, yet, but is anyone here lucid enough to attempt to communicate with her?  Any hint that there's something else more important she should be doing?  She'll take a songline-span to see if anyone tries.

This guy is peering urgently into the darkness in between hacking up seawater, but he doesn't see anything he likes.

Okay, cool.  Human: small ship; human: small ship; human - 

- the big ship gets eaten enough that its spines fall, thankfully away from the small ship but not thankfully pretty close to somewhere her mental map thinks there's probably a human.  She can't see from this side of the big ship whether he gets hit.

Well, nothing for it.  She can only be in one place at once.  (....Yet.  Maybe that's something to work on, later.)  She finishes pulling this human to the small ship, and then goes to find that one - is he at the surface, still?