and I tremble and grow pale for I am dying of such love
The moon is hanging like an ornament in the perfect center of the sky. It is perfectly full, totally round, and shedding silver-shine easy as water onto the beach, where O stands and tries not to tremble as she waits and waits and waits—
She has waited far too long already—
Calm down. The beach is littered with salt and ebbing foam. O digs her hooves deeper into the sand and tries not to sway as the wind comes to batter her, snarls its fingers in her hair, sends her pulse rocketing up to her teeth. Her whole body shakes with cold adrenaline. The island is seemingly empty; the shadows are long and deep all around her, and if O were younger or more easily scared, she might find herself unnerved by the way they twist their fingers into the landscape like a Halloween witch. Instead, what she feels is impatience.
Growing stronger and stronger by the moment. Gnawing a hole into the pit of her stomach. Every second she stands alone sends another hit of acid crawling through her organs. Please show up, O thinks, and her desperation is a dull drumbeat in her chest. Like its own heart. Please be here.
The waves aren’t still, but their movement isn’t… right. It’s not what O is looking for. Not what she really wants. She is waiting (too eagerly) for a disruption of the tides, for a head to break the surface and the foam to split around a head of gray, pink and white. She is waiting (too urgently) to see Anandi again, to admit her pretty weakness—I haven’t stopped thinking of you—and hope and pray, as if she were really religious, that the water-girl will say the same. She is waiting, like a fool, for the love or the lust of someone she has only met once.
She did not think she would be… this. Not now, not ever. But of course, times change.
Tucked into the hilt of her hurlbat, at her hip, is a bouquet of Solterra’s finest flowers. They have a different kind of beauty than the lush, tropical petals that grow on the island here, and still a different appeal than Delumine’s or Denocte’s brightly colored flora, but they are uniquely pretty. Hardy to a fault. Appealing for their dusty stubbornness. And, lucky for her, it is the season for the Mors’ prettiest blooms. Bright-orange poppies freckled with sedative seeds, sprigs of deeply purple coulter’s lupine, fists of flowers from the beavertail cactus, sloshed in perfect vivid pink; bound in pale twine, they sit comfortably next to the blade of her axe.
O’s blue-black mane is bound in a waterfall braid, and her forelock and tail are brushed into pin-straight sheets. The flowers bristle against her skin. For once she almost looks like a girl.
Time on the island was cruel.It turned out the sun, which Anandi did not have a great impression of to begin with, was not only garish and arrogant, it was selfish. It stole the sky for far longer than it had any right to, waltzing around overhead for what seemed like entire days at a time. So the appointed full moon, when she would meet Apolonia again, somehow stretched further and further away with each passing minute. Anandi was not fond of waiting, but she had little choice in the matter. The heavens were not her domain, and not particularly receptive to the appeals of those bound to land or sea.
Finally, with no fanfare save the churning of the ocean and the chorus of frogsong and crickets, the moon fills to bursting.
When Anandi steps forth from the sea, she does not shake the water from her body. It would be something like a travesty to part with the ocean so soon. And this is how she comes to Apolonia, step by step, slick as a seal and gleaming. Cut from the silver-bright night and silhouetted by the moonlit ocean.
She stands at ease, even in a world that is not hers, surrounded by still unfamiliar sound and scent and feel. Before her the jungle looms dark and exotic, painting the senses with over-ripened fruit and black mud, at once secretive and inviting. And there stands her girl, painted in shades of moonlight. Hair so neatly braided. Waiting so patiently. So tensely, all anticipation and coiled springs. A wonderful calamity of contradictions: soft but certain, certain but hesitant. Fierce, underneath it all, that familiar fierceness which so stirred Anandi the first time they met.
And so wondrously obedient.
"Apolonia." Those five syllables are practically purred, songlike and velvet. The kelpie looks at her (friend? companion? something more and less?) a long minute. Fish bones roll in her stomach like dice. "You look nice." Her sharp green eyes narrow into focus on the bundle at the other girl's slender hip. "What's that?"
If you do not sting, it will be a love.
A N A N D I
and I tremble and grow pale for I am dying of such love
Apolonia.
Her heart stops. It feels like missing a step on the way down the stairs; it feels like all the atoms in her body are begging to split apart. Be reasonable. An incapacitatingly strong buzz of adrenaline crawls up O’s already-tense spine. Ah, to be young, to be lovely, to be dangerous—they are all those things and more, and, just to herself, O smiles. Sharp. Unafraid. With a little dark-lashed blink, she looks up.
Anandi is just as beautiful as she was the last time they met. The first time, too, when the world was still stable enough to turn as it should. Her skin shimmers like moonstone underneath the kiss of the moon and the ocean; she smells of salt and jasmine, of the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean; O’s nostrils flare and her stomach tightens as her own eyes meet the sweet, spring green of Anandi’s, and the smile that she flashes is breathless, insatiable. Again, again, again, she wants to say. Would say, if she were desperate. Look at me like this forever.
Anandi’s voice snaps her back into focus. It rings like so many harp-strings in her ear, and it pulsates and trembles in her chest. “Oh.” Blood rises to her cheeks, though it’s hard to tell in the dim, warm light; uncharacteristically demure, she lowers her eyes and with a gentle telekinetic hand offers the bouquet. It bristles like gemstone under the moonlight. The smell of the desert is loosened from the burst of petals, dust and sunlight and clean, hot sand.
It soothes the rough edges of her stuttering heart just a little. In Solis’ name, amen.
“I brought you flowers,” she finishes suddenly. “From Solterra. Although—“O smiles, sheepish, the curl of her lips unusually soft. Unwittingly she touches her cheek to her shoulder as if turning to hide her expression, just for a moment as her stomach settles. “I’m not sure how well they’ll hold up underwater.”
Tuchulcha sings against her hip, a low, reassuring hum like a bee’s. O shifts back against it. The bouquet shivers and trembles in the air, her focus weakened by anxiety. But still she stands firm with her small hooves steady in the sand, and even when the salty wind comes to bite at her neck and tousle the oh-so-carefully crafted braids in her hair she does not flinch. Stubborn and prideful as an old god turning new.
To be young, to be lovely, to be dangerous. To make a temple of two girls, stained-glass windows of emerald and turquoise. Flowers and fish bones and moonlight at their hooves. Quivering axe, quivering heart, wondering flesh. Looks to lust, and to kill. It's love, isn't it, that causes the snake to eat its own tail?
Anandi has never been given flowers before. Her face opens in a look of pleased surprise. She says nothing of how Apolonia's grip trembles, only reaches to accept the gift halfway with unflinching telekinesis, and draw it to her muzzle. The bouquet smells of spiced, dry heat and resinous sunlight and other things she cannot put into words. Solterra is what she will call it for now. Land of the sun god she so disliked. Apolonia's home.
"Oh, they're beautiful." She smiles broadly. The expression, highly genuine and for this reason highly rare for the kelpie, looks almost goofy on her beautiful, sharp-angled face. It is too broad, too big, too happy for someone so competent at subtlety. It is a crack in the door, and behind it you can glimpse the girl that hides behind it, the girl, full of awe and uncertainty and rose-bud softness, illuminated by a long, slender finger of light.
The door closes, the veil falls, but Andi's still just a little vulnerable, still a little uncertain, still a little soft-- gifts will do that to a girl. "I'll have to stay up here as long as I can, then. To enjoy them. What's this orange one?" Even in the monotone moonlight, the poppy is decidedly orange. Almost stubbornly so. It reminds her of Apolonia, bright and stubbornly beautiful, and she conveys this as well as she can through a heavy-lidded gaze and a catlike smile.
A droning, white-noise restlessness is building in her bones. She needs to do something, anything other than stand here looking at Apolonia. It felt too much like watching a fuse burn, not knowing where it ended. "Lets go for a walk?" Anandi tilts a pretty head toward the forest. It was full of lush darkness and fresh-mud smells and countless unknowns. Most girls would stay far away from it, but of course they were not anything at all like most girls.
After a drawn-out moment, a look that lasts too long, the water horse goes first, paving a way through the sea grass and into the long shadows of the forest. "Tell me about your home, Apolonia," she inquires behind her shoulder. The treasured bouquet is still held close to her lips where she can breathe deeply of lands she's never seen.
If you do not sting, it will be a love.
A N A N D I
and I tremble and grow pale for I am dying of such love
Sweet girl she is! whose face opens at the presentation of flowers, though her teeth in their smile should perhaps not be so sharp. But O has never been scared when she shouldn’t be, and not even when she should, and she only smiles back sweetly to match the look on Anandi’s face. She doesn’t think of it as goofy. Only unreasonably beautiful.
Now her stomach curls and her whole chest burns, and it feels like her mother’s magic, bright and beautiful like swallowing the sun. It’s hot against the back of her teeth. The already-small space between them seems to tighten and narrow. “Oh,” she says, and bats her lashes just a little (who would’ve guessed?); “Oriental poppies. But I’ve heard people call them Wonderland flowers, too.”
Only in the old books. Only in the oil paintings, titled in a language that died out long ago. Only in the mouths of the oldest of old tribes, who live and die in those corners of the desert where they still call the sun ra and braid bones into their hair.
But O has spent enough time in Solterra to know all of that. Even if, in this iteration of her body, she hasn’t quite lived it.
Anandi suggests they go for a walk, and who is she to say no? Happily obedient, a hunting dog set upon ducks, O follows with a smile and her head held easy-high. The jungle holds its arms out to her. A lush, dark green that smells like rain and dirt and lovely magic. Even in the dead of night birds are singing from the treetops. She’s sure, even without seeing, that somewhere inside a flock of butterflies is waiting for their kiss.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs. “And people think it’s intolerable, but it isn’t, just the right amount of dangerous. There’s no fucking up, not in the desert; you’re smart or you die, like it should be. Sand to the edge of the world. Cacti, flowers, skeletons, ghosts. At night it’s like—it’s like being on the moon, everything gets so still and so, so silver. Like you’re on a planet no one else gets to know about.”
Without trepidation (but also without really thinking), O reaches out. She bumps her careful teeth against the so-close curve of Anandi’s hip, and smiles into her skin, and the touch of her lips grows sharper before it lets go completely.
I would clench your memory in my mouth, a meal
I’d tear to pieces
Oriental poppies. Wonderland flowers. Does everything in the desert have two names or just the most beautiful? Anandi smiles at the thought, breathes in deep again the scent of a faraway land. “Do you have a second name too?” Anandi doesn’t know, of course, that Apolonia’s second name is the one everyone else calls her by.
The kelpie did not often like listening to others talk. Most people had a tendency of droning away, trying to impress her (or so she assumed). Apolonia’s not like that, though. She is thoughtful and eloquent and speaks from the heart– an expression that before now seemed trite and overused.
Anandi listens, enamored (with what, we won’t say– sometimes all a lady has is her secrets), and even when Apolonia is done she waits a long moment before speaking, in case any more precious words are going to rise to the surface. “You love it,” she’s a little breathless, thinking of that word. The statement is almost an accusation– somewhere along the way, perhaps from the very start, Anandi had decided that, like it or not– although she would endeavor for the first to always be true– Apolonia was hers. And she would seize every grain of sand in the desert and make it hers too, if only to say “this is mine” and “I did it for you” and be thanked, and loved, and maybe even a little bit feared.
So this is how girls set their sights on kingdoms. Love, or something like it.
“I want people to speak of me like that someday,” the twilight princess admits with a soft giggle. Two girls, with the future wide open before them. No ceiling but the stars themselves, and even those– close enough to reach out and touch.
She looks back, raises a brow in question as the other girl’s teeth gently scrape her hips. Then Apolonia smiles into her skin and her heart does a strange little dance, not in her chest but her throat, like she could spit it out and they could both watch it, dark gleaming red, flopping on the ground.
Anandi swallows, and her heart tumbles down her throat and back into the safety of its cage. She’s so very good at resisting her base instincts. With a sharp grin, eyes hazy with forbidden thoughts, she bats away the touch of a playful flick of the her tail against Apolonia’s neck. The heat of the touch lingers long after she turns away, like a blush.
“The sea gets so deep, there are places the sun never shines,” she speaks over her shoulder. “But it’s not completely dark. The fish down there have lights all over their skin, little lures of blue-green. It’s like the night sky, if all the stars were in constant motion. And at the surface, in the light,” they reach a clearing of sorts. It’s the undercanopy of a massive banyan tree, big as a whale. She blinks, awed. “there’s so much of everything, you wouldn’t believe it. Colors, scents. Life. And it’s all in constant motion.” Sometimes slow and patient, sometimes urgent and restless.
Anandi steps forward and turns to Apolonia. Apolonia, dappled with moonlight that pierces the canopy in determined rays of silver-blue. Apolonia, cream-kissed, sun-stung, neat and perfect and– Anandi thinks– and violent down there somewhere. Ready to kill. Waiting for the right reason. I can give you a reason. I can show you--
Face to face, Anandi asks: “Do you know how to dance?” She tilts her head with a grin, letting the sparse light catch her high cheekbones. Hip still warm with the memory of the smile (and, even more memorably, the teeth) pressed so sweetly to the flesh. Leaves are falling so slowly to the ground in the clearing around them, it's like the air itself has turned to honey.
My heart
was an estuary you could never survive inside.
A N A N D I
and I tremble and grow pale for I am dying of such love
Do you have a second name?
O’s body warps into overdrive, her heart stops, then starts again at twice the normal speed, she feels dizzy; her chest is cold and light; all at once she is back in the desert.
The wind bites at her skin. The sky is dark overhead. She is standing in the cool sand, smaller than she can ever remember being, and Acton is looking at her and saying lead on then, daughter mine, and then she’s back on the island so sick she feels she might die and realizes, with acrid nausea, that he had never called her O.
And maybe that was part of it, a part she had never considered (or wanted to) before. She had not been so angry before he died. She had not been so vehement about keeping her name a secret. Now it feels sacred—like telling too much of herself too quick, like digging up the wrong dirt.
She exhales. “Apolonia is my second name.”Admitting feels wrong. It feels like an apology, even. The sound of it is clumsy in her mouth, too wide and somehow too sharp, even for her. “I tell everyone else to call me O.”Almost she thinks of adding an explanation, but what is there to explain?
My name is O. “Apolonia” is too intimate. “Apolonia” has too much power. It all sounds stupid out loud, like she’s afraid.
O is not afraid.
She can’t be afraid, or the world will break open.
“I’m sure they will,” the girl says, half-smiling. “I will.”It is a promise as binding as anything else, and yet somehow she manages to make it sound casual (though it would be lying to say that it does not take some effort). Now they’re deep in the jungle, and leafy arms rise high overhead, lacquered green-dark and rustling in the faint sigh of wind. The air smells dark and wet and rich; the boughs look ancient, though the forest cannot be. This is as foreign to her as the desert must be to Anandi, and she gazes at it with no small sense of wonder.
And she cannot pretend she is dissatisfied by the way Anandi shudders under her touch. No, she can’t even quite hide it—she smiles, a secret-sweetheart kind of smile, and then turns her eyes duly away from Anandi and back toward the dark, seething earth as if she has seen nothing. Her heart trills in her chest like a mine-canary. But over that trill she listens intently, eyes wide and ears pricked forward as she imagines the ocean the way Anandi describes it:
Dark and deep and scary, and beautiful, so beautiful, like everything savage, the way an apex predator is beautiful—dark and deep interrupted by pearled, rainbow fish, curling tentacles, sharp sets of teeth—something between heaven and hell and the idea of being alien.
Oh, to see that with her own eyes.
But when Anandi turns to face her, O remembers: there is nothing I would rather see than this. The perfect lines of her cheeks, the steely gray skin rippled with cream, the bright, hungry eyes that should frighten her but don’t. O gives her the shyest smile. “I’ve seen it,”she says, “But no one’s ever taught me. I wouldn’t mind learning.”
I would clench your memory in my mouth, a meal
I’d tear to pieces
It feels like a gift, like a privilege, when Anandi learns she has been given Apolonia's real name. It is a certain kind of power, one she holds tight and dear. She wishes, suddenly, that she had a secret name to give Apolonia. Or a bouquet of flowers. Or anything else to give the girl who is full of presents. She wishes she could do something more than take, and take, and take.
"Don't feel bad," Boudika said to her once. "It's in your nature." So Anandi smiles, sly and beautiful, and gives in to her nature without guilt. Apolonia says "I'm sure they will," and (all hushed like prayer, like confession, even though she slings it over her shoulder casual-cool like a shrug) "I will."
"You're too sweet," Anandi appears to bat the compliment away with husky laughter and a wicked smile. Really she's drinking it in like wine. It makes her feel a little flushed, a little dizzy, a lot like the edge of a razor blade searching for something to sink into.
She feels so very alive here, in the space where tension makes the water thick as air. Here in this space where want waxes, melts, takes the shape of need. Here where the electric darkness is made salt-water buoyant by starlight."Maybe I can show you some day. The ocean. How deep it is." The offer is not made lightly. It is a grave thing, to make another of her kind. To show them her world. She counts her teeth. Then she counts her heartbeat on her tongue as Apolonia smiles shyly, reaches out, and--
Cicadas erupt into song. Anandi steps into her companion. She lingers there for a moment cheek to cheek, awed and delighted by the heat of Apolonia's skin. The smell of it, thick and sweat and visceral as sinking your teeth into an apple. Eels rustle in her belly, dangerous, hungry, needing. "I went to Night Court and watched them dance by the fire." Her breath is hitched, she doesn't bother to hide the way her very words flush with excitement. "It looked easy to learn, hard to master."
Anandi takes another step forward so they are shoulder to shoulder. Her eyes are bloodshot, her vision a bleary silver-red haze.She sidesteps into the other girl, pushing a little harder than she needs to. Guiding her roughly into the first steps of the dance. She steps again, one girl's shoulder to another, and they sway closer and closer to the dark secret heart of the night. Her lips suddenly press into the soft curve of Apolonia's spine. "Follow me," the heat of her breath erupts across that satin skin, sinks its way into the marrow. Anandi, grown emboldened by moonlight and flesh, does not ask. She commands.
My heart
was an estuary you could never survive inside.
A N A N D I
and I tremble and grow pale for I am dying of such love
Maybe I can show you someday. The ocean, Anandi says with her shark’s smile. How deep.
For one short moment O’s breath catches in her lungs like the point of a knife might catch in marrow: sharp, stubborn, with a flash of pain as bright as sunlight on snow. (As if she’s ever seen snow.) Her heart falls through her feet.
How deep? she thinks. Deeper than quicksand? Deeper than a grave? Deeper than the blackness in O’s stomach that growls and growls, always insisting on eating something more? Deeper than the endless miles of sand in the desert? Deeper than the ache in her bones?
Nothing, O realizes, can be deeper than that.
Anandi aligns herself with O and presses in, close, close, close—and O is startled and thrilled to find that she does not radiate heat, like a living being, but a vaporous kind of cold like the breeze off the sea. A chill that sends a shudder up O’s splashed skin and digs its fingers into her spine. She swallows against the ragged edge in her throat. Her heart bangs against her ribs. And then—
And then they are dancing.
It is like breathing, so willingly does she fall into the sidestep encouraged by Anandi’s weight; it is like breathing, how natural it feels, the rolling muscles, the sliding of her hooves in the sand and the way the kelpie’s hips and shoulders fit into hers like puzzle pieces, carved from the same piece of marble. It is even easier than breathing—to sway here, following the movements of someone else, for once, and not her own stubborn insistences.
She realizes with a start how close they are to the edge of the jungle. The air is thick with the sound of glossy-rustling leaves; it is perfumed with a smell like death but sweeter, cleaner, or maybe both. And the darkness is growing. It is crawling closer and closer. Rising taller and taller. This thing, this monstrous, jungle darkness, is cold and pure and overwhelming. It could smash right through her and blow out the other side like wind.
And for the first time in her life Apolonia is afraid.
Anandi’s lips come down on her spine. The thing inside O’s stomach curls tight and bares its teeth like a snake, and involuntarily a back leg tightens and flinches, kicking out at the sand before it draws up again. It is maybe also the first time she has not felt in control. And she follows Anandi into the dark.
