Juniper is gun-smoke on the land, soft and silver and ethereal. There one minute, gone the next. Dove grey wings spread wide and fall, up and down, a cloud-dance through the endless blue that turns dark, dark, dark as night too quick. Even the stars cannot hold her, cannot pin the girl-goddess to the ground with their spearing needles of light. They might try and reach out, to embrace her, but she's lived in shadowed canopies too long to belong to any one brightness or any one darkness.
Green, green, pickadilly green eyes trace shapes and forms on the cliffside. They dip into crevices and great curves, fall softly like snowflakes on the whispers of bodies out for an evening stroll. Biting winds do not seem to bother moonlighting couples, so why should they bother the girl in the sky who rides them like a wild thing?
Her shadow is only a speck upon the land, her body is a silk ribbon teetering among the heavens, dancing in and out of cumulonimbus shadows like she's a girl just playing tag with the moon. Perhaps she is, in those moments of tinkling laughter that shakes like the stars. Or perhaps she is just a vision of her past an future selves - both there and not, something other and something real.
At last the night nips her nose, kisses eyelids that flutter down for but a moment. Striped mouth tips up and then down. Tightly her wings tuck, quickly her heart beats, and the girl plummets down, down, down. She is a rocket streaming in reverse, spinning and moving faster and faster so that her breath is the wind and her stomach is left somewhere up above.
The cliffs rise like a beast, hulking and large, corded with rock muscles that would tear her to pieces in an instant. But Juniper has never hit the ground since she learned to fly, never let it shred her wings or devour her skin. She left that to the earthlings, to mortals bound to the ground with weights upon their bones like the weights upon their brows.
At the last moment, she dives over the cliffside and settles gently to the sand, to the edge of the sea that makes her quake and shake at its vastness, at everything about it that is unknown to the girl of the swamps. Now, she does not look to the dark waters that go on until they curve at the edge of the world. No, the Priestess stares instead to the crevice that held the message pointing her South. Southward to an island with a riddle and a secret. So many mortal lives were full of secrets now, and she wonders if her swamps and fallen temples could swallow them all for an eternity.
There’s this shape, black as the entrance to a cave.
A longing wells up in its throat
like a blossom
as it breathes slowly.
If Juniper did look into the dark waters, she would have seen a princess there, cradled by the sharp rocks, tail curled languidly around her body. Her eyes half-opened and catlike, feigning sleepiness as her mind peters off into the endless calculations of a creature of prey.
Anandi had been watching with her heart in her mouth as the sky-horse wove among the clouds and then plummeted to earth, so casual and confident and dangerous. The way the other woman commanded the sky– forbidden territory, for the kelpie– made her… feel. Admiration and jealousy and need. A dirty, aching need to possess, to covet, to consume.
The stranger steps into the sand, leaving little half-moon hoofprints in her wake. She’s tiny, the little dove. A scrumptious little snack, if Anandi allowed herself to indulge in such a luxury. (such a sin, she reminds herself. such a shame. her belly clenches in protest.)
Anandi sits up and gently clears her throat. Somehow the sound carries above the rushing, crashing, ocean sounds, and when it reaches Juniper it rings impossibly soft and rich. Not unlike a purr.
"All the birds seem unbearably ugly and utterly without grace, compared to you." The compliment is offered freely with a honeyed smile and a lazy, casual bat of the eyes. The water horse shed compliments like brushing water from her satin skin. "What’s your name?" She fights the urge to slip into the water and swim the small distance to shore. Not yet, she thinks. I don't want to scare the little bird away.
Turn the winds whisper to her, urging her to look into the waters, into their briny midst and find the creature that purrs over the sand. Her words are starlight and silk, they are soft and seductive, and they take the girl off-guard for but a moment. Juniper knows she should look to the sea, should protect herself, should find the voice that could be a threat, but she does not. No, green eyes cannot leave the frothy surface of the waves that wash upon these beaches, cannot bear to raise higher than the lip of the smallest splash.
Her bones quake from the exposure and vulnerability.
She was never meant to sit upon the ground as a lying duck before a feast.
Instead, the goddess-girl dips her head lower, a small bow as her wings extend to either side. Always the performer, always the wild thing in the wings waiting to take center stage. When she looks up, it is to the stars and clouds, it is to the sighing of the wind that calls her so ardently. "The birds never learned as I did," she hums in response, languid words a chiming bell to counter the rich temptation Anandi's hold. They are not sharp, but laughing and sweet, bearing the innocence of youth that cannot quite be washed from ivory skin no matter how the years touch her.
"I'll trade it for a story from you?" She's quick to counter, glancing down ever so briefly into the darkness, to the land just offshore, to the woman half hidden in coral and sand. Heart sighs, eyes travel over the silver slip of a girl, and then she looks back to her sands, back to the safety of the land that is not the sea. Juniper pushes the shaking of her bones down, urges her heart to soften, soften like the clouds she rushes through, soften like the summer flowers she shreds and rebuilds, soften until it is no longer beating a furious tattoo, but instead is calm like the night.
She will not be afraid.
She is free.
Wings continue to flare, stretching and dancing with the angles of the breeze as she walks along the shoreline, never quite close enough to let saltwater stain her shoes. "Tell me of the ocean," the goddess-girl asks, looking back to the heights of the cliff, the heart of the sky, the holes in the ground. Looking, looking, everywhere but the sea. Everywhere but the root of her terror and irrationality. "In return, you may have my name as a kiss upon your lips." She smiles then, as radiant as the sun, as breathless as the breeze, and how she is a beacon of moonlight and dreams ! Juniper longs to feel skin against velvet water-slick sides, to know a distraction that offers the gentle shh shh shh of the waters without any of the threats.
It is something she does not yet say. If you look, you'll find it in the crinkling laughter of those green, green, piccadilly green eyes and the corner of her kiss-me lips. Perhaps the night also hides that, perhaps some things will only be revealed when they are close enough to sin.
There is a battle going on behind those stormy eyes. Anandi watches it unfold with sleepy-sharp cat eyes. On one side there is the wary, sensible fear of one wild thing in the presence of another. On the other there is intrigue, and attraction, and that oh-so-ancient allure of the unknown.
Curiosity wins. Curiosity will always win, when it comes to girls like them.
“Poor birds. And if I prefer a kiss instead of a name? What would the cost of that be?” She blinks slowly. The setting sun at her back paints them both in blushing colors. Come closer. Let me take a better look at you.
It doesn't matter what the cost is. Anandi is committed. Whatever the beautiful stranger wishes, she need only ask. So she begins to talk about the sea. “The ocean you know is a lie. Nothing more than a reflection of the sky.” It reveals only what it wants to-- which is not very much.
“There is a story about how the moon fell in love with the sea. And the sea loved the moon, as much as the sea can love anything. But the moon became sad, for she only ever saw the surface of the sea. She wanted to swim with its children and feel its gentle touch and know its depths. So the moon began to cry, big fat silver tears that fell to earth and rolled into the ocean.” Anandi glances to the sky. The slivered moon could hardly compete with the sun’s radiance, but you could still see its vague outline. Like a piece of the sky was missing.
“It is said those tears became the ancestors of my people. Kelpies.” There were other names, of course. Orestes had rattled them off to her like a cursed laundry list. But her tribe had always called themself kelpie and it was the name Anandi identified with most. “Once they knew the depth of the sea they never returned to the surface, and the moon lost her children forever more. So we have the moon in our veins, but our mother-- our mother is really the sea.”
That’s not how everything really happened. The truth was more complicated and less romantic than that. But it’s the story they were told as children. It was their creation story; and wasn’t there an element to truth in every myth?
Anandi licks her lips. “So how about it? Do I get a name?” A tilt of the head, a generous smile. All of it coming easy, so easy; the sun setting on her back and the ocean swaying like it was drunk. It was an extraordinary ease of being she possessed, and maybe that’s what drew her to the kohl-eyed pegasus: they were birds of a feather, if only in one way.
