Cloudy, vacant eyes stay still, still, still, watching nothing at all.
Footsteps lead out and out and out, down onto the beach.
Corpses are left like stepping stones, like clues upon a treasure hunt.
She leaves blood like a trail between her corpses.
It began with a rabbit, but that was never enough, not for a kelpie starved. Especially not one who had grown so thin, so desperate it could barely run its hunger along her ribs like a stick along railings. A loud racket to say I am here and you are killing us.
But that was always her goal: to kill them.
Not the corpses, no, she wanted them alive, she valued their lives above her own. No, she wanted her own death, her kelpie’s death because she knew that this would happen. The Binge, the frantic, wild hunger that was like a hurricane in her veins, unstoppable, unrelenting.
She sobs as she eats, tears falling upon exposed meat. Tears that try to wash the blood from her lips, cleanse her from the violence of her nature. They try to purify her of this binge. But there is nothing that can purify Sereia. Nothing has ever stopped these moments.
Wasting away, she turns from an angel of famine into an angel of death. But at least, when she feasts, the deaths are quick, but… oh, there are so many.
It began with the rabbit, and then the fox, but the fox was not enough. In its open ribcage she saw her sister’s eyes, gleaming as she offered her own fox carcass to Sereia to share. Still famished, already guilty and panicked she fled the fox. Then, there was the fawn and its doe mother, and then out of the trees and onto the beach, a horse, and this is the worst.
She feasts upon the horse until another strays upon the beach and she captures that too, succumbing to her wicked nature, running fast and silent and swift. Until her teeth find their throat, until she pulls them down upon the sand, their limbs tangled, their bodies writhing.
Her kelpie feasts, frantic, desperate, anything to survive. It eats as much as it can before Sereia can regain control, until she can rouse from her stupor and stop this frenzy. Her kelpie eats to keep them alive, Sereia starves them in the hopes that they might die, or a cure could be found before they do…
And it it when his neck breaks with a crack between her teeth that Sereia suddenly realises what she is doing, what her kelpie is doing. She scrabbles away, as flighty as the rabbit she had ended only moments before. She looks at her path of destruction extending out across the beach. Blood and corpses littered like confetti. She is sobbing louder now, louder than when she was frantically eating the first horse. Her eyes find the listless body of the stallion she just culled. He is perfect, untouched, but for the bite at his throat, his broken bones. She wonders if she should eat him, at least to make his life worth something. Her kelpie parries, crying yes, crying out because she knows she needs this, to eat, to live.
Sereia lunges wild, hungry for the stallion’s corpse but stops. No. No. She turns, barely in control of herself. She runs for the sea, she is knee deep within it. It washes the blood from her limbs, it cannot reach the crimson that lies across her chest, her face, her neck, her abdomen. She stands, an angel of death and turns, when a voice cries out against the sea air.
He is there. Golden and bright he stands at the edge of the wood, where the trees meet the sand. Before him is the first horse corpse, behind him the doe and her fawn. The kelpie claws within her, desperate, savage, needing him, his life, his blood.
”Run!” Sereia screams, but she is the one running. Leaping through the surf towards him, her eyes not her own, her mouth too wide, too wide, her hair lifted exposing all that she is, a girl of the sea, everything he hates. Her kelpie lunges for him, leaping out of the water, up the beach. She is there, her lovely mouth parted in an ugly gawp. She reaches for his throat, to live, to die.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The closet I ever felt to my father was when he took me hunting in the woods behind our village. Most of the island was inhospitable and half-wild. If a garden were left untended for a day or more, it would become overgrown or dead. The beaches were one concern, with the water horses and their hunger; but the woods were full of wolves, and sometimes their crying would mount into a feral, haunting chorus.
He had always kept hunting hounds in a kennel behind our home. (He called them “hunting hounds,” but more often he took them to the beaches for war). They, in many ways, were insatiable. Their baying seemed more primordial than the wolves’ howls, if only because it had always been hungrier.
And, anyways, he used to take me into the woods, when I was very young. Once there, he had hounds for tracking and sighthounds for the hunt. They would start up a voracious cry, and we would run through the trees after a pack of wolves, or a mountain lion. Sometimes, we went with no dogs; sometimes, we went looking for a stag.
We never killed those.
We only watched them; regal; kings of the forest. During the rut, we listened to the bugling of the few island elk; I remember the way their breath fogged the early morning, pre-dawn air, the way it rose up like clouds.
There had been once, with the hounds, when we came upon a lone wolf. It was mostly dead; that is how I remember it, with every crevice of its body hollowed, its skin pulled tight over rigid bones. It had been old, or sickly, or mad—and in its desperation, it had somehow cornered the most beautiful stag I had ever seen.
It had been dying; but it had not wanted to die alone. The stag, cornered, had been tossing his great antlers; hot blood ran down his legs, from where the wolf had gnashed him with his teeth. When the hounds caught the scent, they had gone wild with it; and the frenzy led them to the wolf and the stag, and my father and I had been helpless to the way the pack ripped them both to pieces.
We never went hunting together, after that. We never went into the woods again.
This reminds me of that.
I find the rabbit first; and follow the trail of blood and disturbance from the woods, to the fox. The fox leads to the fawn, and the fawn to the doe. Then there is the horse.
When I find him, I understand exactly what sort of beast I am tracking. I recognize the teeth; I recognize the way an animal will succumb to hunger as one does lust.
I do not feel apprehension; I do not even feel fear.
It is like a sloughing of skin; stepping from one form, into another more comfortable shape. Finally, my mind seems to breathe. A language I understand.
Hunter, and hunted.
Hunter, and hunter.
I continue to follow the blood trail; from the woods to the beach; and from the beach I can see the sea, where the water horse stands. She is almost beautiful. Even the wolf had been beautiful, if only for its desperation to survive.
From this distance, I do not recognize her. From this distance, I remain unawares of how much of a fool I had been.
“Each-uisge!” My voice is a roar; the term belonging to the people I descend from, from those before the island. I call her the name of the spirits that drown men in the sea—I am charging down the beach, toward it, remembering how my horns are swords, my hooves for bludgeoning, my body made for this poetry of motion—
That is when I hear her voice.
Run.
Familiar. Known. My confidence lapses; my charge falters. It is enough of a flaw; I recognize my error but also understand that hesitation, slight as it might have been, is already too much.
”Sereia?” I say it aloud, a question, because—
Because I had been a fool.
How had I not recognized what she was? How had I not known?
How can anyone be at fault for this save myself?
If I had known... if I had seen what she was... there would be no dead men on the beach.
No matter how loudly she had screamed it and no matter how the wind picks it and sweeps it along in its frantic rush, still he does not run!
Yet Sereia does. She runs, fast and fleet-footed. The sea is as sand beneath her feet, it does not slow her nor trip her. Yet is splashes, hissing and shouting. The surf slaps beneath her feet and each landing of her hoof is like a clap, clap, clap that yells run! Run! Run!
She sees when he recognises her, oh it twists her stomach where she lies deep, deep beneath her kelpie instincts. Sereia might have sobbed, a wracking sound shaking bone and sinew, carving itself deep into the essence of her being. But a sob could not be heard, not above the roar of the sea or the thundering ache of her savage hunger.
The desperate need for food ripples like a deep, terrible growl. He is close, so close he glows like the sun, so close she already knows what his skin will taste like. The gilded man does not move and Sereia’s kelpie laughs, sure he will taste like sunlight, sure his blood will slip down her throat like a god’s ichor.
She is leaping, leaping and her jaws part, yawning for his throat. Her teeth sharp and already stained red as a rose, sink deep, deep through golden skin. They reach deep for blood and bone. She holds him fast, cradling his throat, her pause is like an embrace, until suddenly she drags. The kelpie holds him tight, tight, tight and pulls him with her back, back into the sea that crawls up the beach to meet him. The sand at their feet weeps red, with his blood, with the blood of others.
Come! Come! Her kelpie blood sings, come and join me in the sea. But there is no life for him beyond this. Her kelpie wants only the meat upon his bones, his torso a gift upon which her existence will depend. It needs him. In this moment, he is, quite simply, life-giving.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
It does not matter that she told me to run. It does not matter that her voice, high-pitched with an emotion I cannot name, tells me to flee her. I have been raised my entire life to charge into such cries; to meet the frenzied water horses upon the shoreline, and cull them with adeft thrust of my horns. If I had been asked only months ago, I would have said: I am ready for this at any time. I have trained, and trained, and then been tested in the uncensored field of war. I know my mettle and make.
Yet, the distance closes quicker than I had thought possible; I am taken aback by her familiarity and what it means to me, which is that I had known her, and seen her, and not recognized her for what she was.
This becomes overtly apparent in the wicked length of her mouth; the gaunt, predatory make of her body. The blood on her face.
I have faltered before, in war and in battle. In those instances of personal failure, there had always been another to cover my flank: my err had been salvaged by the preparedness of one of my comrades, one of my brothers in arms. Where I might have slipped, they covered the opening; where the onslaught had become too much, the back rank pushed forward to preserve the front.
In this instance, I am alone, and my aloneness is deafening and strange. It takes on a kind of omnipresence; a kind of fate-like severity. I am alone in my charge and when we collide, it is with her in her prime and me in my decline.
I duck my head at the last second: her teeth pierce the flesh of my shoulder instead of my throat. I expect the white-hot flash of pain, the way the blow extends to the end of the limb; a tingling pain, an almost-numbness that hurts like lightening. I exhale sharply; a practiced response to the pain that, although extreme, remains familiar. I expect the grip to be weak due to the fragile composition I remember; but she pushes into me with shattering strength. She is dragging me toward the sea in the next breath and rather than fight her direction, I continue to push forward, driving from my flanks. I flick my head to the side, horns brandished like twin swords, with the hopes of spearing her wherever they can reach.
The ocean is fast approaching. The sand is deeper, and deeper; each movement feels lethargic, slowed. My first drill instructor had said, “One day, the chaos of combat will slow itself to a tempo you can match: the adrenaline, the experience, all of it becomes familiar. You can recognize events in slow time.”
Yet, I had never experienced a pain so quiet, before. A battle so subdued, as if we are only a pair of gulls careening in the sky. The world continues outside of us and our struggle, unhurried; it does not even pause to consider the trail of blood I leave, fresh and hot, in the sand as we fight toward the sea. It occurs to me then, my breathing beginning to labour, that the silence reminds me of a funeral.
Maybe afterwards she will process the way his confusion turns to something more complex, more devastating to Sereia than shock. Though she does not process his look, she does see it. She sees in the flare of his eyes, their wandering along lips and teeth and eyes, that he sees all the ways in which she is not just a girl but a kelpie.
But Sereia is dying, like a flower choked by the weeds of her own desperate self-loathing. She has wilted for so long, her skin growing thin, her bones growing ever outward. The sea-girl has become all sharp angles, gaunt lines and piercing points. Now her instincts fight for her life, the need to live so innate, so strong. He is the sun to her wilting body. He is the rain at her roots.
Torix’s blood spills. It is hot and bright. Life slipping away in sweet, metallic droplets. She licks longs to lick them from her lips, but he is realising what is to come. Already he has swung from her first attack. To wound him is not enough and she is dragging him out, out into the sea, to drown him, to feast upon him where they float suspended by the tide.
Sharp are his horns as they reach in a gouging swoop for her head. Sereia releases the meat of his shoulder, just as they reach the lapping shoreline. The water splashes, frantic between them, stained crimson, frothing pale pink like a blush. Nothing perturbs her and the creature lunges again with death between her lips. She longs to kiss him with it, to feast upon his body and let it birth life within her own.
Close to him, grappling with him, she lunges again for his throat, the place where she can control him, where she can pull life from him with just a twitch of her head. There are no words that Sereia had for him. She never speaks within her frenzy for she is too far gone. She is barely Sereia at all. Now she is just nature, instinct kicking in to keep this body of bones and blood alive, alive, alive.
She seeks his throat, wicked fast, her jaws a vice, leonine and savage. Still she tries to pull him out to sea as the water rises up to welcome him, whispering that he will not leave it tonight, it will hold him whilst he sleeps, whilst his body becomes no more beneath the workings of her teeth and tongue.
Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand
They say that in these dire moments the faces of those you loved most will return to you; they say that in the stillness between violence, the nonexistent and incomprehensible blink between the movement of a clock’s secondhand, you will see your brightest memories.
It is not like that, for me. Instead, it is their absence that fills my mind. It is the fact that if I am to die on this beach, then I am to die utterly alone. There are none to mourn me. Although once the favored son of a nation, those decorations and that admiration did not follow me to these haunting shores.
“How are you so brave?” He asks. It is one of the many times we perform fire watch at night on the shore. We are dug into the sand and we watch the tide go out at eye-level, from a distance. The question emerges after hours of silence; when he asks it, his breath fogs the cold autumn air.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“In battle—I am thinking of when Dagda was hurt, and Ciaan. It is because the front rank broke from an onslaught. They were afraid. I saw it in their eyes. And I felt it—I felt it when, well. I would have been hurt, if you were not there to save me.”
I am quiet. The answer does not come easily to me; and I am silent so long I feel Bondike begin to doze beside me. His lids are heavy, and the sea is singing her sirens song. It is almost daybreak by the time I answer.
“I’m not afraid,” I say, “Because I expect to die.”
The sounds of my struggle are understated. The sea lulls a rhythmic beat. A gull laughs, unperturbed, overhead. The wind skates across the sand and beats the trees beyond the shoreline. The puncture of her teeth into my flesh when she redirects from my shoulder to my throat is a wet, almost quiet, squelching.
I have never fought this kind of hunger, I think. I have never fought against starvation; against desperation. My impression of her frailness is abruptly shattered; and the fight has been lost since I first saw her.
I expect to die.
The pain is fire-hot; I gurgle out something in between a laugh and a scream.
The gull is still cackling. I must look like meat already.
(And somehow, none of this is a surprise. Somehow, the moment her teeth find my jugular does not feel like disaster. Instead, the tension in me breathes out. Finally. What am I, if not this moment? How was I meant to end, if not dragged into the sea?)
It is the adrenaline, perhaps, that masked this fact from me. She has dragged me knee-deep into the water. I feel lightheaded; weakened; the pain that was so sharp only moments ago is so much lighter now. I cannot breathe and, somehow, that does not seem to matter.
My eyes roll toward the sky.
That is when I push into her grip with all my weight, rising onto my hind legs.
That is when I, with all my remaining strength, plunge us together beneath the waves.
(It is the only way I have ever been meant to end).
It’s almost a favor, this death, this warrior’s end.
It is almost like a final salute to the only time in my life when I had been happy.
“What do you mean, you expect to die?”
“It’s that old proverb. ‘Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.’ There’s no other ending for me. If it isn’t last week during that battle, then it will be in a few years in another.”
He is quiet; so quiet, the air feels electric. On the far horizon, the sun crests the end of the earth; it glows luminescent, too-bright, too-red, a drop of blood into a clear pool.
“Do you want to die, like that?”
“Yes. I don’t think I’m meant to live in this world as anything other than what I am right now. I think if I last through this war, it’ll be an injustice to myself and others. I would be no better than a lion in a circus.”
It is the only time I had ever rendered him truly speechless.
“There is more to you, you know. If you want there to be.”
I was never like him.
I was never a dancer; I was never a philosopher; I was never anything but a sword and a body and a mind told to conquer.
He is growing weaker, she feels it in the way he breathes between her teeth, the way he no longer writhes in her grasp. He squirms now, but he is little more than a rabbit held fast between the talons of an eagle.
The golden stranger moves with her deeper into the water and all the time her eyes are searching for his dragon. Will it come? She wonders. Sereia does not trust that it will not. It is an irony though, that it is his dragon, with the mangled remains of its feast hanging between its teeth that tipped her over the edge, into the frenzied need for food and survival.
So she clasps him, her blood mixing with his where her lips lie tight upon his throat. Her own blood weeps down from a cut she did not realise was there. She barely feels it now, but oh, when she realises in her sane mind, when she feels the cut of it, it will be a lifetime of shame. His horn, when he swung against her, had cut the corner of her lips, cutting a shallow line up her cheek towards her eye. It was shallow, not enough to grow her smile, but it will scar enough to make it look so - an even ugly reminder and warning of what she is.
But now, now she does not feel it. Not above the waves of desperate, ravenous hunger. All that matters to her now is survival and every ounce of her energy focusses upon living and thriving and eating, eating, eating.
He rears up and she goes with him (clasped as she is at his throat). Then, suddenly, down he plunges them, into the deeper water. Sereia goes with him, they descend in a tangle of limbs and a plume of bright red blood. It froths above them and the sea laps over it until their presence upon the beach is little more than a memory. The beach falls still and silent. The corpses lying still and open to the salt-sea air.
Below the surface his dive is still pushing them deeper, deeper. The momentum of their bodies is strong, so strong they collide with the rocks of the mainland that lie in shallow wait beneath the water’s surface. Pain lances through her spine, only moments before it might have been enough to stir her desperation, to shoot adrenaline into her already frenzied body. But over the morning, as her binging proceed, so too had her stomach filled until suddenly it begins the return sweep from hunger to satiated contentment. The pain is enough to stop her. And she relelases him, though them still sink like a boat broken in two upon the rocks.
Sereia sinks first, upon her back. Beneath the floating of her hair she watches her kill. He is near lifeless now. She wonders if the twitch of his limbs is the tide, or life still trying to go on within his body. He is floating down above her, they descend, each lifeless (though she is the only one who is now thriving. It has been his life for hers. It was never meant to be that way).
Oh she gazes, suddenly sober, suddenly so very much Sereia. Her kelpie is suddenly so quiet within her, an eerie calm. She knows what she has done, she knows who she has attacked. Has she killed him? Suddenly she finds motion and swims up to where he descends toward her. She presses her lips to the groove of his throat, where life should flow bright and energetic… Nothing. The only pulse there is weak and thready. His life fills the water around her, crimson and bright. He is bleeding too much, too fast. She knows how death holds him tightly.
Tears bloom in her eyes, but the sea steals them. Grief shatters her, it touches every part of her she thought she had purged of her kelpie nature. Was it always due to happen again? Still that frenzied hunger swirls in her gut like a pool of sharks ravenous and chaotic.
It would be a kindness, she knows, to cut the fragile thread that keeps him clinging on to life. She cannot bear to see him suffer, to see the sea cradle him in his own blood. With a sob she lunges forward a small “I am sorry”, exhales against his neck before she fastens on to his throat again and shakes. Her bite is hard, fierce, anything to stop his life, anything to help him die faster, with less pain.
She shakes him until she can no more, until sorrow and grief makes her weak and then, weaker still, she flees him, down, down into the deep. She cannot bear to see him floating, limp, his eyes and body lifeless. She flees like the coward she has always been. Sereia escapes her nature as she always has, repulsed by herself. Down and down and down she sinks and never once does she look back.
Surely some revelation is at hand; surely the Second Coming is at hand
Oh, Sereia, Fifth Princess of Minn—did you think the ocean would ever let me die so easily?
The mother sea cannot hold your ignorance against you. How are you to know the man bleeding at your teeth has wrought tragedy on an island so far away, to a lineage of horses already forgotten? How are you to know that I Bound one of the sea’s favored sons, or condemned one of her daughters? Even I do not think of these facts; they are only moments in a long history.
But the sea never forgets.
The only things that matter become tactile; the cold, numbing press of the water and the way that, suddenly, I cannot feel any of my limbs. My vision is darkness and stars; through which she swims, nearly angelic in her grace. The waves, which seemed to lull above, frantically toss us beneath them; I feel the pressure of the rocks but not the sting.
(Somewhere, my old soldier’s instincts are crying out—how dare I succumb so easily, with so little struggle! How dare I be dragged into the sea, where no men return!)
More importantly, there is a serene calm blanketing me. I watch through the water the way my own blood billows; it looks more like ink at this depth, spilling readily from my throat and shoulder. I admire it with a kind of apathetic curiosity.
I think, for a moment, that she has abandoned me. I have never experienced such silence as I sink; I have never heard the absolute absence of sound.
The memory that fills my mind is gold and bright as sunlight. It is the only memory that matters, the one that I take out and revisit some nights when I feel most forsaken by my deeds.
We are climbing the cliffs for the first time after my fall. It is a ritual we established as boys; one we engaged in yearly, to summit the highest point of Oresziah. We start on the only beach on our island with white sand before the sun is up; and we climb the cliffside on a game-trail that is far too narrow for either of us. He is so patient with my assent; I am self-conscious of my slowness, the extreme soreness of my leg, the way I nearly fall and my entire body trembles with the memory of what that had been like.
“Just take it slow,” he assures me.
The sun is the only object in the sky. There are no clouds; but the wind is brisk and powerful. The entire climb he speaks from behind me, as if we are colts, and we had never summited the cliff-face before. “Next, step on that small ledge; push off your left leg and rise with your right, but you have to stretch it a little.”
By the time we reach the top, the sun is nearly setting. I am covered in sweat and my nerves are shot; but he is as calm and measured as he had been when we began. It had been eye-opening for me; to be so vulnerable, my weaknesses so exposed, and to have him treat me with the same quiet compassion he always had.
It is the closet I ever came to telling him I loved him.
But, I hadn’t needed to—not when our eyes met atop the cliff and the ocean roared below. No, I hadn’t needed to; because it was written in his eyes, and in mine, and when I leaned my head into his shoulder it was simply inevitable.
Inevitable, just as this is inevitable.
Just as the sea refuses to relinquish me to death’s serene gates; I will have no funeral pyre; I will have no freedom. Even as my skin tingles with the memory of sunlight and warmth and the uselessness of goodbyes, even as my life ebbs and flows with the tide and my eyes at last slip close, Sereia thinks to act upon me in mercy.
When she returns to thrash me once last time, a pact is signed.
It is my blood and hers. It is signed when my open mouth kisses her bleeding cheek.
Oh, Sereia.
Did you ever wonder if I even deserved your mercy?
The sea takes me in her arms, wickedly, and drags my limp body away. The sea takes me into her arms, laughing in her rhythms, and nestles me at the bottom among the coral and the rocks. It is there, unconscious and alone, that some revelation is had. The second coming of me, if you will.
