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
04-03-2020, 04:21 PM - This post was last modified: 04-03-2020, 04:22 PM by Sereia
He doesn’t miss it tonight, walking inland and climbing upward, the low-mountain air burning clean in his lungs, absent the taste of salt. There are other horses nearby, dimly audible and only shadows in the growing darkness, but so far Benvolio is his only companion. The bat skims the air overhead, feasting on mosquitos, returning occasionally to cling to the boy’s mane.
Are we close? asks Ben in one such moment, long after moonrise and well before dawn. Caspian huffs a laugh and shrugs the bat from him again. I have no idea, he thinks into the space where their minds nestle close. Why don’t you go find out? With an indignant, mouse-sized squeak his companion vanishes into the darkness, and the paint pauses to stretch.
Most of the Terrastellans had gone to the festival earlier in the day, or were waiting for the morning to make the long trek to Denocte. But Caspian had been a creature of midnights and moonscapes even before he’d met his companion, and the Night Court’s parties were famous for going all night, anyway. Still, he stopped only long enough to catch his breath before loping ahead again, eager for new sights, new faces - perhaps new customers. It’s high time he expand his business, or else be a poor Dusk-dweller forever.
Benvolio returns to him just before he sees the arch. We’re close, he says, clinging to an errant salt-stiff curl. Caspian only smiles, refraining from asking if his companion is tired - he wasn’t the one having to climb uphill for hours.
Just then he sees the archway, and any teasing remark vanishes. With it goes the ache of his legs, and any errant thought; its beauty is the kind that calls even himself to the present. Caspian has never seen a structure so grand, higher than the walls of his court’s castle, near as high as some of the cliffs along the sea. It is easy, in that moment, to picture a dragon swooping over it and burning the forest to ash, or a beast tumbling the gate that preceded it to rubble and dust; before then such things had been only stories to him. He is ready to live his own part of them.
He steps below the arch and into the light just as another equine does, and he watches the way the colors paint her in indigo and rose and gold, colors so rich they can’t just be from the glass. Caspian thinks she smells like the sea - but maybe that’s just him.
“Nobody but myself,” he says at once to her question, and he can sense Benvolio rolling his eyes. “But maybe myself in a year or two,” he amends, and it is easy to imagine himself richer, and widely known, and used to such wonders as these. He wonders if his grin looks blue in the light, as the rest of him always does. Caspian looks at her curiously, beginning to pick out her lean and elegant features. “Why, who else would you be?”
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
04-10-2020, 11:19 AM - This post was last modified: 04-10-2020, 11:19 AM by Sereia
the salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
She looks a little like she’s underwater - deep blues with the light soft on her, diffused through the glass like the skein between water and air. Still, now that he’s looking closer, it doesn’t do much to disguise the juts of her, cut like the sharp face of the bluffs along his favorite coves; shadows pool along her hipbones, between her ribs, beneath her cheekbone and jaw. Caspian is not a stranger to hunger, but it is strange to see such an angular horse at this season; he hopes she isn’t sick, that her question wasn’t born of that kind of longing. It’s impossible to read the intensity of her gaze in this dark dream-wash of color.
Her question is not unexpected; that kind of boasting always draws nickers of laughter or incredulity from those he knows, which is why it’s a nice change to tell a stranger instead. “You’ll have to wait and see,” he answers, grinning a little fish-hook grin, and he can almost feel Benvolio’s tiny sigh against his skin. When she swims through the light he follows her, sure-footed, and catches another whiff of salt-grass and brine between the waft of bonfire smoke.
For a moment he doesn’t think she’s going to answer. She seems lost in the faint music, her chin tipped to the sky and her eyes drifted closed, and his curiosity circles again like a widening ripple in a pond that’s never quite still. Her laughter is more musical than the fiddle, and her reply makes his grin widen a degree before vanishing, and he raises a brow at her. He wants to say not yet you don’t, but he isn’t interested, tonight, in how far he has to go, and how much work lies in between him and his future. Caspian is only interested in being a boy in a place he’s never been, come to revel with strangers and follow the night with no more plan than a bit of ember on the wind.
“And if you were me, what part of the festival would you see first?”
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?”
the salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
There is something in the way she watches him that makes his skin want to shudder beneath the impression of her gaze, something that’s like curiosity only the way a river is like a flood. It is longing but more than that; and what would a young man read it as other than desire?
So Caspian stands neck-arched, hip-cocked beneath her eye, and when she says I am not a patient soul his other eyebrow lifts too. Oh? his expression seems to say, meeting its twin in her smile. When she continues, though, he only shrugs a shoulder, the lines of his face mellowing back into boyish ease. “Then I’ll have failed,“ he answers, offhandedly, but within he’s burning with determination, a new spark with a cage of wood around it. “But I’m not very patient, either.”
You’re terrible at flirting, Ben mutters into their bond. Caspian takes a moment to stretch, turning back toward the glittering, dreamlike arch. Yeah, well, you’re a mouse with wings, he retorts. Both of them prick their ears toward the stranger when she says trouble. One is wary, one intrigued.
“Me, trouble?” Caspian tries and mostly fails not to sound pleased. Now he looks at her and notices more of the flowers wound in her hair, and stones, and shells - some of them not so different than the one he wears on a simple cord around his neck. He wonders where she’s from; if Dusk, it would explain the ocean-familiar scent. “Not in a foreign city.”
Her second answer draws that smile back to his lips, a little less wild this time. Like all boys of his age, his stomach is almost always rumbling, and immediately visions of food stalls groaning under the weight of delicacies drive most other thoughts from his mind. Without a thought he followers her, out of the shimmering lights and back into darkness, where the path begins to drift downhill. “Hmmm. I’ve always heard of the night court’s dragon cakes…I should start with one fo those, I think.”
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
the salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees.
His smile is lost in the darkness when she says she’s in no doubt of his future. Caspian says nothing in return, only tucks the comment away like a little bit of treasure. The boy walks beside her, near enough to note the slight valleys of her ribs, the points of her hips before the details are lost in the dark. He wonders why she is so thin, when it is summer and all the world is a banquet - at least for those who aren’t too good for clover and meadow fescue. I don’t like her. The pronouncement from Benvolio surprises him; all the rogues they interact with, and he takes issue with a girl? Well I do, he thinks, defensive, and the bat responds No, it’s just that-
But Caspian ignores him, because Sereia is talking about pirates. “You watch them? Where?” Yet she is already continuing, talking of trouble, and though he wants to preen a little under her gaze he shakes his head at her question. “I aim higher than that,” he says. Something seems to have changed in her gaze when she looks at him next, or been revealed; her eyes are bright, the glow from a lighthouse beckoning him nearer and warning him away. When she steps closer the smell of the sea comes with her, so familiar Caspian feels no urge to withdraw. Instead he wants to reach back, to find out what her skin feels like, which looked so otherworldly beneath the lights -
He doesn’t get to tell her of the dragon cakes, how they’re enchanted to make you breathe smoke after you eat them and taste of spices he can’t name. They are coming together like a wave and shore when there is a child’s cry and Sereia steps back. Moments later she is gone, and he’s left calling goodbye to the empty dark, a little dazed, staring at the crowd where she disappeared.
Who knows how long he might have stood there, had Ben not bitten him, sharply, on the shoulder. “Ow!” he says, appalled, but the spell is broken; with a shake of his head (and a nip at the bat) he continues down into the city.
