Sereia


It is a lesser known fact that Sereia might arguably enjoy reading just as much as her sister, Jana. Yet where Jana falls deep into the waves of academia, Sereia succumbs to the world of stories. She will take them any way she can, sat around a campfire, that burns the salt from her skin, or down in the deep ocean scrawled upon the sand by a pirate kelpie passing through. But her favourite stories are the ones she makes up when she comes across a sunken ship, or, even better, an ancient city long ago swallowed by the rising waters.


Sereia has seen grand arches in these hidden cities. She has seen tiled floors and the ruinous walls of humble abodes now inhabited by fish and shells. Peering through glass windows she has wondered what the views had once been like. She has swam beneath great gilded statues that still glow like the sun, even now, after centuries beneath the waves. So it is no surprise that news of the unveiling of a grand archway draws the dreamer-girl out of the sea.


It is a joy to step upon land, to slip as deeply as she dare into the throngs of land-horses. She wonders if she might ever fit here. Always Sereia hides her teeth, her ravenous hunger and her eyes that grow dark with a wicked want. She endeavours to hide from herself, and the world, every part of her that is kelpie. Her smile is a secret thing, hiding sharp teeth. Her hair always long, always allowed to fall forward and veil her gills. Her long elfin ears, always self-consciously carried. 


Never does she let herself see the parts of her that are quite lovely, how her ears are elegant, like the ripples of the ocean, her smile soft and warmer that the summer-sea, her eyes the gold of a setting sun, framed by lashes as dark as night-time clouds. For all that Sereia is lovely, for all that she is the gold of a sun-drenched sea, she has never seen how she is too slim, her body too slight. Her chest and ribs are always too angular, her body too starved, her kelpie deprived.


Yet Sereia, ever peaceful, ever the one to shy from blood and violence can never bring herself to hunt willingly. It is no surprise then, that she makes her way to the arch, through the markets, where sweetly flavoured foods line stall upon stall. The air is filled with heat and sugar, liquor and cooking smoke. She steps swiftly past the meat stalls that make her salivate - she swallows it down- and reaches instead for a bun, filled with raisins and syrup.


She eats as she walks, away from the markets, where laughter fades behind her and the shadow of a mountain looms in hues of blacks and purples, blues and greys. She wanders until the lights of fires are but a solitary firefly’s glow in the dark. There, before her a great arch rises. It reaches up for the sky and Sereia’s head tilts up, up, up. She follows its ornate carving and bright paintwork. It was made to be illuminated in silver and the moon and stars bathe it silver and wonderful. This is architecture that has not known time, or the sway of the deep blue sea. Moonlight pours in a thousand colours upon the ground and she steps into its lights, feeling how the colours adorn her. Ah, in these windows she could be anyone, anyone at all. The dark of night and the bright of colour hide her gills, her lovely secret smile, her golden-blue skin. With the veil of colours upon her, a second skin, a wonderful dress, unearthly and more elegant than she, Sereia turns to the person beside her and muses brightly, “Who would you rather be tonight?”


@Griffin


 

Her lips of amber never part;
but what must be the smile
upon her friend she could bestow
were such her silver will

~ Emily Dickinson

Sereia


It is exquisite pain being here.


There is something beautiful in the agony of her resistance. Her eyes close as she feels the dappling of the painted moonlight as it falls across her face. She feels the glow of the moon, through coloured glass and it marks the passage of night across her skin. Sereia’s chin tilts up as to look up toward the surface of the sea which breaks the sunlight and sends it down in dancing shards of light. Being here is like being in the ocean. 


With her eyes close, her other senses awaken. She smells all the glorious scents of jasmine, lavender and frankincense which grow stronger on her palette with every in-drawn breath. Then the sugar of eaten pastries still linger in the corners of her lips, sweeter, stickier than she ever remembered as she ate. Sereia’s ears no longer strain to pick up the song of a flute and violin, nor the drum that beats like a heart underneath. They all grow stronger, they all grow more vivid, coming alive within her like light upon a bird’s wing.


But it is her nose that betrays her first. It is easy to dream of the sea, where her body knows how to move and dance and simply be amidst the waves. It is easy to forget she is not simply equine, but kelpie too. The kelpie stirs with the tide of her feelings and remembering. It welcomes the ghostly feeling of the glass-light (like water-light) across her skin. It pushes to the fore stretching out into every inch of her - for how cramped has she kept this part of her? How tightly chained down that the kelpie is stiff and aching when released…


It is the kelpie who smells a boy with vibrant blood. Sweet cakes, sweet sugar grains upon her lips are forgotten in the blissful recollection of blood and meat. Ah, how easy it would be to fall back and succumb to the kelpie’s hunger at last. Sereia watches him, through the light of many colours. It bathes them both, but maybe him the most for his silver skin is the white of a canvas beneath the myriad paints of the stained-glass window. 


The boy answers her and she gazes at him, unwavering. It is a soft look, nothing like the sharp teeth she carefully hides behind the softness of her lips. “Oh?” Sereia asks as she smiles with a carnal confidence. “Who will you be in two years time?” She looks to the boy and wonders what great plans he might have. How wonderful it would be to be able to turn yourself into something different!


Then he is turning the question back upon herself. She sighs and moves through the light, watching how it moves across her skin and his. The kelpie watches him and it yearns, thirsty, hungry, weak. Sereia holds herself tight beneath the soft of her skin, she moves like water, though beneath her supple flesh a part of her chinks with the chains she will not release. She holds her demon down and it goes stiff and lame and weary. The girl aches with hunger and yet, yet she smiles a soft and pretty thing for none deserve to die for her hunger. 


And that is the problem with her question, is it not?


He turns it back on her: who else would you be?


Beneath the shadowed curve of her lashes she watches him, fierce and dangerous, gentle and compassionate. She is a girl at odds: one so utterly divided into two (and dying with the dissonance of it). The light tries to paint her, soft as water, but she is too slim, too angular, too deprived of meat. She is lovely in a broken way, a dying way. She clings to her stories, her discoveries, her compassion and breathes it like it will be enough to live upon. It isn’t and it never will be. 


It isn’t who she wishes she could be, but what.


Just a horse. Her smile says in the corners of her lips where sorrow gathers like tears and blooms like ebony flowers in the shadows. Just a horse, like you. But she is not ready to tell him how she is dangerous and different, how she hears his heart beat and longs to taste him.


Her eyes are still closed, her chin lifted up, as if she is floating as if there is no inner turmoil raging within her lovely bones and the soul they cradle. But she opens her eyes and lowers her gaze to his. The girl laughs and it is as soft and whimsical as the vestiges of dreams, “Maybe you, now.” 


And if she was him, she would tell his wondering mind that his smile does indeed look blue and it is the colour of the sea as it flows through coral reefs. The stained glass window must know, because it paints him in all the colours she has ever seen amidst shallow atolls.

@Caspian


 

Some days
 I am more wolf than woman
and I am still learning how to stop apologising
for my wild.

~ Nikita Gill

Sereia



Her smile might slip if she knew he looked at her and saw the blue light as the sun dappling down through the sea. A part of her might sigh to know that even on land, where she hides her smiles, her sharp-toothed gaze, she cannot be rid of the sea. There is salt in her veins, it is pressed deep into her skin. It taints her kisses and her touch. Shells hang from her hair, though she has swapped most for flowers and jewels found along her travels here.


He speaks of a future, one where he is nothing like the man before her. Sereia studies him, she lets her gaze roam across his body - though it is risky, though her teeth know how soft his muscles would be between her jaws. Her gaze is fleeting, swiftly there and then gone. It is his face she lingers on, remembering the angles. Remembering the face of a boy destined for bigger things. What secrets did the future hold for him? Was there any hint of his future there, lying secret in the crinkles around his eyes and the curl of his lips? Would she recognise him in 7 years time?


“I am not a patient soul.” Sereia says and her smile mirrors his. She has never given much thought to what the future held for her. Each day that she did not break was a blessed one. Each day she filled herself brimful with what was - fairytales, ruins, shipwrecks. He was a boy of the future and she, a girl of the past. 


“What if I do not know you then?” The girl muses and turns from him. His heartbeat thrums in her ears. She can feel it on her tongue. His blood is vibrant, it sings to her. Slipping for but a moment, her eyes fall to where his pulse beats at the junction of his neck and shoulder. There is a longing that passes across her gaze, It is sad and deep as a river. It passes like a spring shower.


The girl who returns her gaze to him does not yearn, all of her is soft with smiles and angular with hunger. “Trouble.” Beneath the wave of her hair she studies him. “If there was trouble to be found tonight, I reckon I would find you in the midst of it.”  Her smile is wicked when it comes. She softens the corners of it, fragile as petals. But the kelpie is rousing. She watches him and her stomach twists with painful desire.


“Food.” The girl then says with a bright smile upon her cheeks, as if the idea was not dust upon her tongue. “I would find the sweetest thing to eat and then see what magic stalls can breed mystery into my bones.” She departs from him, one step and then two. Slowly she looks back at him - the moon searching for the sun that follows her. “If this fayre could give you anything to eat tonight, what would it be?”


@Caspian


 

Sereia


She sees the way determination sparks like a fire beneath his gaze. She wonders if it crackles through his bones as if he were kindling, his blood gasoline. “I do not doubt that you will become something,” Sereia muses, her sunset gaze holding his, watching for that bright spark. Yet upon her lips is a smile, small and wicked. That rogue smile has her kelpie’s savagery for still it presses its wants into the corners of Sereia’s being. Still dances to the rhythm of his pulse. 


The girl’s kelpie has wanted since she left her sister, Anandi, and her sister’s vulpine meal. Still she sees the way Anandi’s cunning smile curled as she offered Sereia a share. It was not often Anandi shared a meal, often she is too aggressive, too possessive. But not that day. Not when she sets herself to tempt Sereia to eat meat.


Caspian draws her attention back from blood and the wash of the tide over red-stained sand. Sereia peers up beneath the thick bow of ehr lashes. Her gaze is as sharp as an arrow, yet it softens upon seeing his delight. Lightly she dips her head as her smile grows. Her forelock dutifully falls forward, obscuring her answering smile. “You are far too delighted by such an observation.” She laughs and then trails slowly off and watches him thoughtfully. “You remind me of the pirates I see upon the waves. They are always at the heart of any trouble. But they do not worry about causing trouble in foreign cities.” 


Her eyes follow his to where the archway glints. Oh she misses the way it bathed her with broken shards of light. Such light danced in the way that water does. She ocean is a cry upon the air but Sereia does not listen to it. The land is full of far too many delights to return to the sea just yet. “Is a foreign city not the best place to cause trouble? No one knows your face or your name in a foreign city. It is easier to cause trouble and get away with it.” And then it clicks, her wide eyes narrow and she gazes at him, studying the rogue cut of his jaw, the raffish curve of his smile. “Unless you wish to be known and recognised.” Sereia smiles, she laughs, the sound soft, unlike the sharper angles of her slim body. “Will I find your face upon a wanted poster one day?”


She takes a breath, closing her eyes as the tastes dance across her tongue. Still they are as plain as dust. But for the smell of cooked meats. Such smells burst rich and alluring over her tongue. The kelpie turns back to him, “Tell me of these dragon cakes. I have never heard of them before…” Her eyes turn bright, her kelpie filling Sereia’s body piece by piece. Her grip slips.  The kelpie has her pressing closer, her lips reaching, reaching for his pulse. A child falls suddenly, their cry splits the night and Sereia suddenly steps back, startled.


“I am going to find these dragon cakes you speak of.” Slowly she smiles, “I shall look out for your poster when you become famous.” With that Sereia is gone, slipping into the crowd as if it were the sea. 

@Caspian <3


 

She wore her hope like a crown,
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams

~ Ariana