[P] If our demons cannot dance, neither can we [Summerfest]

[Sereia]

Sereia

Sereia stands at the heart of the markets. It is here that the great moon carving shifts with the waxing and waning of the moon above. The weight of her body is heavy upon land. She feels the pull of gravity tugging her down, down. She had felt it as she stepped ashore and wove her way up from the docks and into the vibrant square. But here, stood in the beating heart of the markets, she feels lighter, as if the moon pulls her up, up. The moonshine is like the sea, Sereia things. It is tempting to dance and she does.


She is less graceful on the land, her feet move differently, her body lacking the grace it possesses cradled in water Yet she moves as they all do, she lets the dancers move her as the tide does. She laughs as she goes, she swallows down the saliva that pools on her tongue. Hearts beat fast here, bodies warm and she is so utterly ravenous. Her angular sides heave with her effort (of dancing, of not eating) but Sereia has trained her life for this and as a stranger presses close as they dance, she laughs and relishes the moment and dreams she could be normal. But soon her face is pressed into the warm of their neck, her lashes tangling in their hair, her lungs filled with the scent of their body, their blood.


Sereia peels away, elegant, unflustered, like a shadow and steps away into the crowds. She disappears as dreams do upon waking. Her sharp teeth, bereft of food, bite into her own lip, anything for blood, for meat, her body begs. Trembling, with the euphoria of the crowd, with the effort of controlling her kelpie, she steps up to a stall, honeyed cakes and buns lining their stalls. She picks a baklava that melts in sheets upon her tongue. It tastes delightful, it soothes the bite upon her tongue where blood blooms like sweet jam.


But it does not sustain her. Sereia’s stomach twists painful enough she takes a breath. But it is not bad, not yet. She has been worse. Slim and slender she weaves her way along the stalls, her eyes gleaming with every trinket that passes before them. She has found similar things in the ruins of ships, caught by pirates, or wrecked in storms. Yet rarely does she find silks and scarves not ruined by the sea. She picks up one, it is the colour of midnight and moonlight. Silver moons and stars gleam as scattered across it as if the scarf is a night sky for a world she has not yet discovered. The merchant wraps it about her throat and she blushes and smiles and wonders what it is like to have such wonderful things. “Thank you,” Sereia breathes, though she unwinds it from her throat and turns to the figure beside her. “I think it might be more your colour though.” And indeed it is.


@Nestle


 

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

~ Ariana

[Amaunet]

“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"


When the girl started to dance with the rest of them, Amaunet spared a glace only for the soft golden glow of her skin and the brine sticking to that. It was a there and then gone look, the same way she might have looked at a young noble outside the fighting ring. Soon the dancing carries her away, the ebb and flow of the dancers, the promise of the dark twin to violence in the curl of the hips pressing against her.

It's almost like fighting, this press of bodies around the bonfires. It's almost like survival.

The girl from before moves closer, this time her lips at the curl of someones neck. And this time Amaunet can see a shiver in the girl's skin. There is no look in this world she knows better than this one-- hunger. She can see it in the red-light glow of the fire on the girl's golden skin, hunger enough to devour a crowd. Beneath her skin the magic starts to hum, and plead, and sing a siren call for the hunger close enough to touch.

She follows when the girl pulls away from the dancing tide. She stays close as the girl dissolves sugar pastries on her tongue instead of form and flesh. She stays nearby as the girl stops at the tailor's booth. It's only once the girl allows a scarf to be wrapped around her throat that Amaunet closes the distance between them. Her chains make a chiming sound as she shakes out the last of the bonfire ash from her feathers and her blood-red cape.

And she almost laughs to see the blushing shyness of the girl as she talks to the merchant. Almost.

Instead she only slides closer, her magic tapping against the memory of hunger. The girl turns to her, with her bit of moon-kissed silk, and her golden eyes. Amaunet smiles softly, all her wildness tucked down below the chaos of her magic. “I've always been partial to red.” Her voice is desert and sun stained as it rings softly in the same tone as her gold chains and her whispering feathers.

The merchant turns his gaze to her. His eyes brighten at seeing the mark of wealth on her and the wrath dancing in her eyes like a faint, black shadow, smiles. He knows this dance well. He knows it as well as Amaunet does.

“Keep it if you like.” She drops a few gold coins on the table, each dented strangely on the sides (ancient almost). The merchant scoops them up greedily even as Amaunet turns her focus fully away from him and onto the silver girl. “Call it a gift.” There is a weight to her look, a promise is the rusty scrape of her voice, and the glimmer of bloody paint swooping across her face like a wound.

And there are a hundred more unspoken things when she steps closer and says, “I'm Amaunet.”


@Sereia

art credit

[Sereia]

Sereia


In the business of the market, where life thrums vibrantly on in colour and laughter and where sweet things drip syrup onto plates, Sereia can almost forget just how much she does not belong. Here on the stalls are things from all across Novus. Foreign traders sell their wares with a smile - some still bear the dust of Solterra, others the flowers of Delumine and yet more the feathers and trinkets of Terrastella. 


Here, where merchants have forced the sea to give up her secrets and laid them on tables to be sold, here, where coins clink with the merry sound of commerce, here is where Sereia can almost forget how much she hungers. She can almost forget that she hears their hearts beat, wetly, that they call to her in a way more deadly than a siren’s call. They lure the girl in and never know it is death they welcome. And maybe that is why, when Amaunet draws near and turns her gaze upon Sereia, that Sereia does not blanch when she sees the slash of crimson paint (so much like blood) across Amaunet’s face.


There is a violence to these girls, yet one looks more poised for it than the other. The latter is but lean and angular, soft in all the places her kelpie is weak. Sereia smiles, a warm thing, a shy and lovely thing - like clear waters in a paradise cove. But that smile is forever a lie (though she prays that it were not) for beneath Sereia’s gilded and blue skin is a sea that churns stormy and relentless. It claims lives with jackal teeth and an unnatural strength. It lets fearlessness breed within Sereia’s soul as though she were a poisonous flower. Beautiful to look at and deadly to hold. 


“I think red suits you.” Sereia observes, her eyes still lingering along that crimson line. She can feel a desperation stirring, the awakening of a monster. Sereia smiles, shy, and pretends she does not feel the roiling violence. The desperation of a starving animal growing ever more violent. The stranger drops her coins upon the table, they are dented and strange. They have aged in a way things never do in the sea. Keen, brazen, Sereia picks one up. She studies it, watches the way light gleams across its face. “I have not seen coins like this before.” The merchant grumbles for his missing piece and Sereia ignores him, “Where did you get them?” The girl turns her gold-bright eyes upon Amaunet, “Thank you, Amaunet.” The scarf wraps about her throat, soft as a breeze, “Though you did not need to.” Sereia has all the money of Minn behind her, there is nothing for which she wants, but for the secrets of the ocean and the eternal end to a kelpie’s hunger.


Sereia looks up from her scarf. Up the smooth column of Amaunet’s throat, past where her pulse beckons her with every throb. Up to where Amaunet’s eyes gleam dark and strong and violent.


“What brings you to Novus?” Seriea asks and smiles a smile too wide, too lovely, too dangerous.

@Amaunet


 

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

~ Ariana

[Amaunet]

“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"


Her magic feels like an almost incandescent thing, a spiraling tail of a phoenix wrapping around her bones like she's nothing more than a branch in a oak tree. It echoes in the cavern of her ribcage, and dances in the golden embers of her eyes. And it purrs to see the way the girl smiles and wraps the scarf around her throat like a noose.

How easy it is to slip between girl and monster, dance and devour. How easy.  

Amaunet watches the girl take her coin, and she watches the way the merchants face flickers between brashness and caution. There are not many of those coins left, fewer still without blood caught in the cracks of the engraving pressed into the gold.

Her smile is full of promise: of violence, of fire, of teeth laid sweetly against throat. Brine sinks into her wings when the ocean breeze ripples through the market. Embers spark and float lazy as dragon above their heads. But not a single ember catches, the market is still too full of marble, and magic, and peace.

The world is due for a little trouble, a little strife, a little wolf-hunger.

A wing settles across the girl's back, possessive as it is protective when a group of boys stumbles behind them. Tonight she does not chase them, or take their payments from their skin by way of tooth and hoof. Tonight she only pulls the girl away from the merchant by the edge of her silken scarf.

Tonight her magic has not stopped echoing in the cave of her ribs. The glow of it settles across her skin,  making her nothing more than another ember crawled out from the belly of the fire.

“Do any of us really need to do anything? I wanted to. It's as simple at that.” The sharp shards of banked fire are still dancing in her golden eyes. She echoes the girl's smile with a laugh. Ahead of them the boys are still shoving through the crowd, their steps stone heavy. Her magic purrs and starts to open its jagged tooth mouth. It starts to feast, and feast, and devour.

Amaunet does not offer an answer about the coin. Not yet. She starts to follow the beastly boys.

“I live here.” Her voice is simple, but the laugh caught in it is not. It's a tangle of amusement, and wanting, and the echo of her glowing holy skin. “But you don't, do you?” For a moment she lets her eyes trail away from the pack of boys pretending to be lions. “No one who does would ask that question.”

Because they all know that blood runs towards the center of the earth, no matter the form from which it falls.



@Sereia

art credit

[Sereia]

Sereia


Over and over the strange coin turns within her grasp. Every engraving upon its face is unusual. Its weight and its touch are nothing like the currencies of Novus.  Is it heavy, wicked deeds and stories of strange lands with stranger gods add to its weight within her grasp.


This girl is a magpie. Keenly she gathers things to herself. This coin is a trinket. It whispers to Sereia and she lets her imagination sink deep into the stories that gleam as roguish light across the coin’s bloodstained surface.


Blood.


Oh.


She looks upon those crimson stains. Her heart beats slowly, slowly, but it stirs at the sign of blood, however old. That is what starved beasts do; they grow desperate even for the oldest, most tasteless morsels. Her sharp teeth press together and when her golden eyes tip up to the strange woman, there is no fear within them. Though they are lovely, the sharpness of a kelpie’s hunger softened by lashes that lower shyly, they do not tremble as soft things might. 


Amaunet’s magic breathes, it prowls in the space between them. It yawns and its teeth prick along Sereia’s slim torso.  The magic clacks along Sereia’s ribs as a stick along railings. The kelpie feels that tapping magic. It is like a dark song to match the dark magic that swells in Amaunet’s chest. Sereia feels teeth, teeth upon the hard bones of her body. Is this what hers feel like? As they sink through flesh and bone and hold life within their grasp? It was so easy to snuff it out then. Sereia knows, her kelpie feels it. It twists in delight, it rouses -  but then boys laugh ahead. Rowdy they shove through the crowd and Sereia’s eyes lift to watch them go. 


Her kelpie does not rouse. She does not let it.


Soft is her sigh. Though it is not the sound of a girl but that of a monster groaning, hungering. There is not just one girl who wishes to feast tonight. Slowly Sereia blinks, that push and pull of her lids hypnotic. It rouses her from the deep pits of hunger and has her slipping her gaze back to the crimson mare.


Together they move, weaving through the crowd as if it were little more than the sea. Do any of us really need to do anything? Those words cut through the laughter, cut through the sounds of vendors selling their wares. 


“Yes,” the Dawn girl says by way of an answer. “If we want anything at all then we always need to do something about it. Like wanting to live and needing to breathe in order to do so.” At that she takes a breath. Anything to live - though she starves, though she lets herself waste away. Such hypocrisy. Her lungs grow, filled with smoke and sugar-sweet air. They twinge with the sharpness of alcohol fumes. 


Sereia says no more, for, as Amaunet said, it is as simple as that. The scarf brushes across her chest a shock of red more ostentatious than the droplets that nestle deep into the grooves of the coin. It is silken and merlot-dark in the late throes of the evening light.


Together they walk and Sereia is drinking in everything this strange place offers. The roar of the sea is replaced with the clack and rumble of hooves and wooden wheels over cobbled streets. “No. I am not from here.” The girl affirms and feels how the salt in her veins tries to pull her sea-ward. Beneath her forelock the girl’s gaze flits upward watching the mare who moves beside her. Her gaze is a contradiction. It hungers and yet it does not, it is sharp and yet soft, sweet and yet sour. “I am from Delumine and the ocean floor before that… You may live here now, but you have not always, have you, Amaunet?”


A pink tongue wets her lips and she leans, as if to reach, as if to taste the scent of a girl who passes too close, her blood running too hot. Slowly she leans back and sighs, closing her eyes tight, tight. She thinks of the coins instead - it is safer, even with their old, rusty blood stains. “And if you are from here, then you have travelled. Those coins are not from Novus. What tales do you keep hidden, Amaunet?”


@Amaunet


 

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

~ Ariana

[Amaunet]

“The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
to warm the blood of a world"


The night presses in against them, a dark and sentient thing that nips at their heels and whispers against their mortal souls. Amaunet can feel it in a itch down her spine like a touch of teeth and stain. It begs her onward, deeper into the liquor and smoke haze. Her feathers drift across the girl's rib-cage as she tucks them back into her own sides (lest she surrenders to the black itch and dissolves into the smoke and clouds with nothing more than a caress of silk to remember her by).

“You are a literal thing, girl-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea. Where is your poetry?” Laughter twists between her words like vines and roots around stone. Her teeth flash more than they should as she turns them into a bit of light cutting sharply through the darkness. And perhaps it's a look of hunger caught somewhere between her skin, darkness and her laughter that still drifts above them like jasmine and cedar smoke.

Ahead the boys stumble against a vendor. The wheels of his cart moan and tremble as the largest of them vainly tries to keep his balance and his cleverness before his friends. Amaunet's violence rises like a tide as the itch still racing down her spine flutters softly against it. She purrs where the other girl sighs.

She does not try to hold it in, not when the drums start to beat and pulse like monstrous hearts by the bonfires.

Another coin lifts from between the folds of her cloak. It spins and dances in the air between them as she flips it as deftly as any shark in the belly of the Night Court. The gold reflects in her eyes, dimmer but sharper than the golden-glare of her eyes. “This coin is not from your Novus, but it was forged from the same treasures as the rest of them.” She bares both her teeth in throat in an ancient challenge that perhaps only their bones truly understand. “You'll have to look deeper than that to find my secrets.” In the silence she snaps a wing, loud enough that the boys finally turn to notice the lion following in their wake.

“Careful though, the black bottom of my ocean does not have a single drop of water.” And she does not look towards the boys who are stepping towards them with drunk boldness in their gazes. She does not look at anything but the flutter of the girl's lashes as she tucks the coin back into her silk and purrs.

 


@Sereia

art credit

[Sereia]

Sereia

You are a literal thing, girl-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea. Where is your poetry?


The kelpie turns Sereia’s head and silently she regards the woman who moves beside her. The boys struggle with their cart and the air is full of their laughter, their bravado. Sereia offers them nothing. She is too embroiled in the mystery of the woman before her.


Where is Sereia’s poetry?


How long is Sereia silent? How long does she mull Amaunet’s words over, listening to the way she laughs. That laughter, it matches her kelpie. The monster presses against her flesh, her bones. It puppets her body until the girl moves like the rippling ocean beneath the sunrise sky. There is a terrible thing dawning within Sereia, a hunger ravenous and soul deep. 


Where is her poetry?


Such a question is enough to make her feel one-dimensional. It is as though she has no depth, but is that not the whole point of her. Sereia breathes her lips a sharpened line of cutting sorrow. “The poetic parts of me are the ones that do the most damage.” Such truth aches, it scolds her tongue as it takes flight into the air. “There is a creativity to broken bones and flesh and blood painted in red across the sand.” Sereia’s chin tips up, her forelock falling away, her too-wide smile illuminated by moonlight and lamplight. “My poetry I keep locked away. I live on other people’s poetry.”


Amaunet’s purr slides against her skin. It rumbles into her muscles, her bones. It stirs the violence of her kelpie. Violence. Ah, the promise of it seethes around the two girls. It dances slow and wicked through cedar smoke. 


The boys turn towards them, enchanted, drunk. Sereia sees their too-heavy eyes, the way they smile and trip as if walking through treacle. Their bodies are no longer their own and slowly the kelpie turns her gaze from them to the woman beside her. “Just one secret will do,” the girl muses. She smiles at Amaunet’s threat. Her kelpie laughs at her purr. The sound of chains breaking rattle through Sereia’s body, her ribs ache for all the time they have spent containing her savage soul. 


The air tastes too sweet, too delightful. The boy’s blood turns the air sweeter than honey. The kelpie watches them and knows how soft their skin will be. Little more than butter beneath the knife of her teeth. “What makes you think I still need water.” The girl rasps, battling her kelpie, resisting the cry of the ocean in her veins. “Sometimes the further I am from the water, the better.” Sereia breathes, her eyes pressing along the crimson line drawn across Amaunet’s face. 


The boys edge closer, closer, the taste of their blood, the song of their pulses in their air is a delight to her kelpie. Sereia slows, even at Amaunet’s purr beckons her on. Slowly the girl tips her gaze to Amaunet. “What makes you think I need water, Amaunet? I am in need of a new ocean. No matter how black.”


Her eyes trail over the boys and then slowly back to Amaunet. “Enjoy your night.” Swiftly, before she can let the want of stories and the need for meat overwhelm her, Sereia turns back into the crowd. Falling away as if into the sea. She does not breathe again until she emerges from the crowd.


@Amaunet


 

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

~ Ariana

[Amaunet]

"let us drink each other's blood in the night "


It is nothing harder than taking a breathe to realize that the girl with the sea-eyes is nothing more than another fledgling in a nest too afraid to fly. She wonders if she'll ever learn, or if it's only a life of doe-eyes and satin for her.

Amaunet is made for another world.

She is another world.

Laughter meets the other girl's words, laughter both cruel and warm. “How disappointing you are sea-creature. Poetry that you keep locked away does not belong to you in any way that matters. Perhaps someday you'll be dangerous enough to realize it.” Amaunet does not look at the girl again.

Not even when her breathing and her words turn to breathy, almost-hungry stutters does Amaunet bother again with her.

Her golden gaze looks only at the boys and their black expressions. She can see the hunger in their eyes, earthy and feral and dirty enough that she wants to become the flood. And where the sea-girl retreats she steps forward with that cold laughter still on her lips like the aftertaste of fermented fruit. The other girl has already dissolved into the crowd by the time she snaps her wings out in a challenge the stallions are too-drunk to read.

And when she steps towards them, driving them back into the darkness, there soon is more than cruel laughter and challenge lingering on her tongue.

There is blood.

There is poetry.

Hers.



"and betray each other in the sun."

art

@Sereia