Hers is a life away from open waters, held at bay from the roaring sea for years upon years. Cushioned by trees and greens and humidity and swampy stenches, of sweet decay and sweeter berries, there was so little that was so open lest you go down. Down into the ruins of old Terrastella. Down into the heart of her elaborate and decorative past. Down where the earth began to crumble away, where statues and gods cried, where obelisks told stories that were forgotten, where ghost-lights can still be seen and parties can still be heard in the dead of night when the world does not breathe. Down where there is history and monsters and stories jumping to life just as easily as nightmares do.

Juniper always enjoyed exploring those, though, for she could always find her way home. Follow the roots, and she could do that.

But the ocean. The ocean always had a way of making her heart pound as it never should.

Tonight, she walks along the shores and thinks of Prudence. Where is it. Where is she. Where is she? The question thrums in her blood like the stories her sisters tell; it is an echo of the past, a lesson to be learned from. Juniper only came to think, to let her heart calm itself with the beating of the waves, to unlearn a fear that she does not know from where it originates.

she did not come to see a body lying, near lifeless, upon the sands; flotsam and foam still covering bits of her, golden sand painting Jaylin and her beautiful scales by the moonlight. But the Priestess comes all the same, brow furrowed, lips parted, ready to call out, ready to kiss the life back into her. With a gentle crash the and flies, the goddess-girl settles upon the ground in the furthest edges of the water (her skin now goose-fleshed with fear pushed aside) and presses her nose against Jaylin's nose. "Don't be dead," she asks, her own breath mingling with that of the hippocampus'.


"Speaking."