There are a thousand fractures of color dancing on the ground, as the light of the bonfires breaks over the stained glass windows. They bounce along the trail ahead of Ipomoea, and they seem to him then like a guide meant to lead the wayward home. He wonders if they would know where to lead him, if he followed them into the depths of the mountains.
But he doesn’t follow them. And he doesn’t walk through the arches that hold back the sky, not yet.
There was something about Denocte that always made him feel as though he were both losing and finding himself. He could feel the mountain air filling his lungs, and the smoke of the fire wrapping around his skin like a cloak, and the firelight crowning him in orange flames. It was changing him. And he was welcoming it.
He remembers when it had been a gate standing here, a checkpoint instead of an invitation. Ipomoea had been only a boy it seemed when a dragon had set fire to this mountain pass - staring now at the arch replacing it had him feeling half a boy again. To him the swirling smoke and the silver mists look like the ghosts of Denocte, like Gilgamesh tearing apart the mountains once again. In the darkness beyond the bonfires he can see the monsters of a dark and terrible history rising again, and beneath his hooves he can feel the bones of the earth groaning and turning over in their unmarked graves, He can feel them dragging him down, can feel the roots of this place claiming him.
But Rhoeas is there beside him, pressing flower-draped antlers against his shoulder, pushing him out of the shadows of the arch and into the light of the bonfires. In the distance he can hear music and laughter and singing, the celebrations of a new Regime, a new era, a new dream to be made into reality. A part of him wants to celebrate with the. The part of him that is still half a boy with eyes filled with joy and a thousand wishes in his heart waiting for a falling star to attach to. The boy who dance his demons and fears away wants to join them, to turn yet another blind eye to the skeletons hiding in the closet.
But he knows now of the monsters that lurk in the dark, the beasts waiting for a chance such as this. Sometimes he feels like that beast himself.
So he stands in the fractured light between the pillars, eyes turned towards the darkness even as bodies stream past him towards the light. And until the dawn breaks over the mountains with a rose-red sun to herald the banishing of the dark, he waits.
She dances and she does not think of the bones that groan beneath her feet.
She dances as all ocean-made things do, as if it is water holding her not smoke and darkness.
Her every move is gliding, feline, sleek. Sereia is balletic and yet there is something other in the way she twists and turns, swirls and bends. That something other is not ocean born (like salt upon her skin) but deeper still. It is feral and comes from her marrow. Her body hums with it, it is a song louder than the cry of the howling wind. It is a song whose rhythm echoes in her soul. It is a feral and hungry thing; lacing through the dance of a kelpie, instinct driving each fine foot to step, step, step like a heartbeat. She is alluring, in the way all predators are. Powerful, sleek, dangerous.
The girl moves until her dance has pulled nearly every breath from her lungs. She only stops when her too-slim sides swell and swell and swell again and never draw enough air in. Even then she smiles. Always it is that small, shy grin. It is the look of a girl letting a part of her slip free. She does. It is not Sereia who lets her body move in this ocean dance, but the kelpie.
Maybe that is why her eyes linger on the softest parts of those who dance around her. Maybe that is why she presses too close and breathes, and breathes, and breathes, in, in, in. She hears hearts thrumming and blood rushing, the air is sweet (not with sugar but with skin and muscle, bone and thriving hearts). Smoke and the salty tang of flesh lay themselves across her tongue.
There is heaven in her pain. She knows this is a thin place here, where bliss and anguish meet through a veil as thin as gossamer.
Long lashes press upon her cheek and the girl breathes in and remembers what it is to hunt and crave. At once it is too much. But already she is close to a girl, their limbs nearly tangling. Oh, Sereia already knows how she would taste. Her lips are parting, her sharp, sharp teeth reaching...
They reach their prize and graze across the other girl’s skin before Sereia rouses.
Oh.
No.
No!
Scrambling back, untangling herself deftly, daring not to breathe, to taste the bead of blood upon her tongue, Sereia flees. Out, out, out from the throng of dancers she emerges. She laughs, reckless, overjoyed. Her eyes snag upon a man at the edge. He is crowned in flowers, with feathers at his ankles. Covetously she studies his wings as she steps toward him, panther sleek. Her body is slim, a flower unnourished by the sun, choked of sunlight by the weeds of her own self-loathing. Yet she smiles, lovely, sweetly.
The girl tips her chin down toward her breast until her hair tumbles forward veiling her eyes, her lips and the ruby red droplet of blood. She does not lick it away. It is bliss when her hair sweeps her mouth clean. “I prayed for feathers every night as a child.” Sereia whispers to the man and his flowers. “But ocean girls are not made for the sky.” Her lips tip up into a sad smile that he might be able to see, if she would only let him. She doesn’t.
“Why do you look so sad?” Sereia’s gaze trickles across his face, soft as butterfly wings. “There is only space for one of us to be sad tonight. Can it be me?”
@Ipomoea - So, so glad to write with Po again, I have missed him <3
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
The moonlight is embracing her, as she parts from the crowds and weaves her way over to him on legs that seem to know only how to dance, even when walking.
I prayed for feathers every night as a child, she tells him when she draws close enough to whisper in the fragile space separating them. A ghost of a smile crosses his face, quick as lightning. But ocean girls are not made for the sky.
“Neither am I.”
He had been made for the earth, for the roots tangled deep in the forest and the flowers filling all the empty spaces. He had never known what the wind tasted like above the canopy, had only watched as it carried petals, and leaves, and feathers, and other whisper-light things to places he would never reach. No, when the gods made him, surely they had joked about the irony of giving an earth-bound creature wings he could never use.
Why do you look sad? she continues, and he can feel her gaze as it sweeps across her face. He wonders what she sees there, what others see when they look upon him. He wonders if they still see the orphan boy’s hope, staring hungrily from the hollows of his cheeks - but he fears they see the creased brows of a weary king, bowed beneath the weight of a crown he thought he was ready for.
He tips his head back to study the arch again, each spire, each stained glass cutting sharp and bright and new. It takes the light of the moon, the light of the bonfires, and makes them its own. Ipomoea knows he should feel relief when he looks upon it, and hope for brighter tomorrows; and he thinks perhaps he does, somewhere down in the bottom of his heart. But it is buried beneath the heat of dragon-fire and the screams of dying things.
A promise of change did not bring the dead back to life. It did not right the wrongs already made.
“The way you dance does not look sad,” he tells her, his voice as soft now as the wind whispering against the stained glass windows. Ipomoea knows one does not need to look sad to be sad - and that, to him, wondering how many smiles hid a soul as tired as his own, is reason enough to mourn tonight.
He turns his head back to her, as the lights shift and send fractals of color dancing across her skin. He could almost smile, if it were not for the shifting of the earth, and the aching of his heart that turns over restlessly with it.
“This used to be a graveyard,” the words sound hollow, because what he does not say is the bodies are still here, buried beneath ash, bones tangled in roots -
Her gaze tips up to watch him as he studies the archway. The lights cast their light upon him. They make him luminescent. She once thought the light from the archway was as if being held beneath the surface of the water. But seeing him, this man, with his wings and flowers, she now realises it is nothing like being beneath the water. There is too much colour here.
The glass paints him in sorrow and despair. It inks colour across his skin that glows with hope. Sereia is sure he does not feel it. Not when his head bows low as if burdened, as if there is a weight upon it so heavy he cannot lift his head. If she knew he was a king, she would know. She had seen the way ruling a kingdom laid its weight upon her father, her mother, her sister. They were all weighed low. They all suffered. Though she may not yet know it, Sereia had already vowed in her soul to never marry into royalty, no matter her own royal status. She ached for her elder sister, for the demands placed upon her. A fine prince she must meet. Continue the line, make more royal progeny.
No.
No.
The kelpie opens up a part of herself. It is a safe piece of her to expose. It is the part of her that dreams, that is not stained with blood and hunger. This side of her is not a monster.
The way you danced did not look sad.
For so long she gazes at him and does not speak. Time slows, it lays itself out before them. Each passing second is beautiful, long and agonising in the way a note is drawn out upon a violin. Time turns into a symphony, for Ipomoea its voices are screams and dragon fire. For her the symphony is the hiss of waves, the keening of the dying - at her hand. Time fills their silence with the laments of the dead. The way you danced did not look sad, he said. She breathes, “I danced to forget.”
He talks of a graveyard beneath her feet. The things he does not say - that of bones and bodies and ash - she imagines anyway. What else could one imagine when given the picture of a graveyard? Though she longs to no longer be a kelpie and not yearn for meat a moment longer, she does not shy from the macabre. The fact of bones and skin and death are so deeply entrenched in her being. It is a song full of beauty and horror that sings out through every part of her.
Sereia inflicts upon herself a plague, because she refuses to succumb to the sin of taking another’s life. Even at the cost of her own. She would die here, if it meant she did not kill another. But oh, her kelpie had other plans. It longed to survive more instinctively than she.
So Sereia lowers her lips to the earth, where the thump of drums resonates through the earth. Do the dead hear the festival above? Do their bones tremble in a deathless dance in their afterlife? She touches the earth that forms their sky, it is respect and quiet sorrow. How many bones are buried because of her?
She lifts her head, her lips stained with earth. It blows from her mouth like ashes on the wind. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust... “Do you know the dead?” Sereia asks, low, low so only his ears catch her question. The rest is swallowed by the night music.
“I can show you how to dance, to forget too?” She beckons him. “The arch is beautiful, but you are growing roots. They are holding you down.” She whispers, “Come and break your chains.”
@Ipomoea
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
It stretches between them now, a thread so thin and tight he wonders how their breath alone is not enough to make it snap. The light from the arch turns them into so many colors — she is the soft blush of the sun rising over the water, he the bruise-blue of a stone buried beneath the waves. He used to be light, like her; he used to know how to forget all his worries with a song.
He listens to it now, the music whistling against the glass, the drumbeats of the festival echoing in his bones.
And he does not remember how to dance. He does not think he wants to.
The silence stretches between them and in it, Ipomoea can hear the world turning. He can hear the roots growing through the bones, and the wind whispering to the treetops, and the shush of wings overhead. The earth is both dying and living, wilting and blooming, a serpent eating its own tail and oh —
oh!
Ipomoea understands now. The beauty of the earth was not found in a field of everlasting flowers who never lost their petals to winter. It feels like a lifetime ago when he asked a unicorn why she thought the spring couldn’t last forever, and in a way, it was. He has died since then; he has gone back down to the safety of his roots and waited for the right time to bloom. He has lived in the winter — he is stronger because of it. He has lived to see spring return with the first blooms breaking through the snow.
She tells him his roots are chains and he only smiles. “All that I am is roots.” Does she not see it? Ipomoea was not only fashioned from the earth — he was made for it. He is the earth, every flower his magic nurtures is another piece of himself that he gives to the dirt, and the grass, and the trees. “And they have never held me back before.” He does not sound as sad as he did before. My roots are not my weakness he is whispering to her with his magic, as the earth trembles with the way they begin to move beneath them.
Ipomoea does not want to forget the things that taught him how to be brave, and how to love, and how to sacrifice himself so that others might never know what it means to bleed. He will not forget the dead.
He looks at her, the dancer limned in light pretending to not cast shadows. And in her he sees a part of who he used to be, a part that makes him ache from the memory — but what is growth without change, without pain, without wistfulness?
“What did you dance to forget?” he asks her, this girl who is fragile wrapped in wild. And what he is really asking, as his flowers begin to rise, and bloom, and press themselves against their legs like kisses — is what are you so afraid of?
Sereia watches as realisation dawns warm as the early morning sun in the dark of his eyes. Their pain is not so sharp. It softens with hazy light. Sereia watches, transfixed. She could be in the sea then, watching as a new day rises, with new promises and revelations.
All that I am is roots. He says and she does not stop watching him. He slows something within her. Eases the beating of her heart. The adrenaline of dance is leeched from her veins by his quietude. He is comfortable in their silence and even as the earth grows around him and flowers rise at his magic, tickling at her knees, Sereia has never felt so wrapped by the sea. His groundedness, his earthliness only proves to push her back into the ocean where she belongs.
Ipomoea turns her skin more salty, the flowers at her knees feel nothing like flowers at all, but seaweed swaying in the tide. “Then you are content here?” She whispers, discontent to break the silence - like stillness underwater, like the young hours after midnight, in the midst of the wilderness. Her question is no question at all, it is an observation. Gone is the weight to his words, their sadness is no longer metallic and raw upon her tongue. Something changed in the moments they talked, in the dawning of that sun in his deep, dark gaze.
What was it?
What did you dance to forget?
Yes. Sereia knows what he is really asking. It is why the small, curious smile tumbles from her lips like the autumn leaves had from the fingers of trees. She yearns to know what eased the pain out of his voice and brought the sun to rise behind his eyes. The kelpie wants just the smallest piece of that.
“The terrible things I have done and that, no matter how hard I try, I am unable to stop myself doing them again and again.” Beneath the wave of her golden hair she watches him with wide and aching eyes. “I dance,” She breathes, “to forget what I am.”
@Ipomoea
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
There is still the darkness pressing in around them, and the things that hide in the dark are out there circling still. Ipomoea can feel them, even when he cannot see them — he supposes there was kinship in the shadows. Dark calling out to dark, night to his heart.
He can see it, too, when he looks at her. She had the same cracks as him, the same spaces in which shadows gathered.
And he can feel the flowers of his lungs trembling like so many petals being torn free when she breathes her confession. He is trying to pull them back together, trying to be a rose instead of its thorns, a blackbird singing instead of an eagle screaming for war (and justice, and reparations, and peace — but peace never came without violence.)
“Forgetting leaves more scars than it heals,” he tells her, because he can see the cracks of them scattered in the lines of her face. “You shouldn’t want to forget. You should want to remember—“ he sighs, and his words are lost in the music that filters past the arch like water. He wonders how he is not lost in it, how he has not yet been reduced to a ghost like so many others, like all the bones left weeping in the ground.
“—remember the good things, instead. They are more powerful.”
And then he is stepping forward at last, stepping into the music that he does not remember the sound of. He has not felt like a song, or a poem, or a story in so long — there has only been discord in his steps, and his voice, and his eyes every time he turned them to his forest and saw the memory of flames instead of helicopter seeds.
But he wants to. He wants to remember how to be the soft curl of a morning glory opening in the evening, and the shush, shush, shush of a willow against the water’s edge. He wants to be a thousand things that do not know the sound of war drums and screams.
He wants to be someone who remembers how to dance.
So he smiles at her, and dips his head in both a bow and an invitation. “Maybe we can remember together,” he tells her when he turns into the light of the bonfires. And he tries to follow the pattern of the other dancers’ hooves, when he falls back amongst them.
@Sereia“speech”
thank you for another lovely thread. ♥
He makes her weak with his words. They were made to offer comfort and make her braver. Instead she watches and listens and takes none of them in. Her self-hatred is a deeply rooted thing. It is virulent and as rooted and fast growing as bamboo. It seeds and shoots and flowers at his words. Remembering leaves her with more wounds. She feels them ripping open anew each time she thinks of them. It is easier to try to forget. It is easier to stop herself from ever eating meat again - if only she was so strong!
Sereia misses his meaning. Or, worse, she does not wish to acknowledge it at all.
Slowly she blinks, as if to clear the pictures his words paint behind her lovely eyes. She turns her angular head and looks out across the sea of dancers. Rising above the music, their heartbeats, the surssurations of their rushing blood sound like violins. It is a delectable sound, like life begging to play out across her tongue.
When Sereia looks back, the man is turning from her. He dips his head in an invitation. Dare she step again into the throng where the scent of warm, vital bodies breaks violently against her like the tide. She has danced amidst them once this night, she is sure she could do it again - even though her stomach twists with hunger and want. Slowly Sereia follows him, out into the dancers, into the deep ocean of feet and limbs and revelry.
He says not to forget, but to remember.
She dances as she did before: to forget. The kelpie is not ready to remember herself. She might never be and it is that truth that might one day be more than scars upon her skin. It might be death’s inescapable grasp.
@Ipomoea - Fin, thank you too <3 I so enjoy your words.
She wore her hope like a crown, an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
