It calls to me; it beckons. The waves are whispering a language I have only just learned; my body yearns for it and, in that yearning (somewhere in the pause, in the breath) my heart begins to break.
My back is to the waves. My back is to the bright, clear spring day.
I stand facing away from the sea. I stand facing the trees of the forest where the coastline ruts up against Terrastella’s shoreline.
I do not face the sea, because the first life I have ever ended to live lays behind me in the wake.
I can still taste the blood on my mouth. I brought it to shore because I could not stand the squelching beneath the surface; the way everything had been fluid, water and blood. I was breathing what I consumed. My gills fluttered with salt-sea and copper-blood and it had been too much.
Too much. That is the only way to describe the complicated feelings that well within me. Everything is too much. The corpse is unrecognizable, now. Bits of bone and flesh and organ strewn out in the pinkish surf.
My stomach is full, and I do not feel weak.
(Then why, I wonder, do I still feel so unlike myself?)
I close my eyes and let the sun bathe me, cleanse me. There is blood on my mouth.
(There is blood on my mouth, but I do not want to clean it).
The scars on my throat, new and pink, must look like a necklace of pearls in this light.
When I turn back toward the sea, Damascus is flying overhead. I wonder if I ought plunge back into the depths. Instinct says yes, yes, yes—there is an urge, insatiable, that says I must. And somehow I refrain.
Ironically, the water has already dragged the corpse away.
It was the smell of a fresh kill and it beckoned to her like a moth to a flame. Only, she has much more control than that. Her stomach does not ache with hunger, but every other part of her aches for chaos always. She will gladly kill for the fun of it, to see her victim squirm or the terror light up in their eyes. She is all powerful then, a true adrenaline rush. It reminds her how much better her new body is than before. She no longer needs her wings to work to feel alive, she just needs the sea and something to sink her teeth into.
So that is mostly what draws her in, slowly, carefully. She watches from afar and sees a man, but it's not just any man. It's him and he's eating meat by her sea.
That's when she knows.
At first, she wants to laugh at the irony. How before he turned away her offer to feast and now he's the one who is having a feast of his own. He doesn't look too impressed either.
Then again, maybe neither is she.
When she emerges from the sea, her legs take shape again and the weight of her useless wings returns as her fins disappear. The sun shines against her coat that is soaked in sea salt water, but it's absent of the glittering scales she has underneath. If it weren't for her sharp teeth, she would probably look like any ordinary pegasus.
And he no longer looks like any ordinary stallion. There is blood on his face and she has half a mind to lean in and have a taste herself. The corpse has since been dragged back into the hungry sea so it's just the two of them.
"I'm offended you didn't ask me to turn you," she says, her tone only slightly cold as she watches him with glowing eyes and a smirk to her lips. If anything, she feels more alive knowing he is one of them. There are so many more possibilities now.
But first, she must know. "Who did it?"
If he had asked her to turn him, she would have in a heartbeat. Of course, being a kelpie doesn't mean she doesn't still want to bring her teeth to his throat.
The sound is familiar to me. The reverse of slipping, of falling. The sound of a body emerging from water, slick and supple, nearly inaudible, unless one has a practiced ear. It is the exact sound my body makes, now, when I leave the waves. I turn to look and am surprised when I recognize her; but once the surprise is there, it flits away.
No. As it turns out, I am not surprised at all. The irony of her appearance seems fated. Is this not the exact setting of our first encounter, so many months ago? I had been a different man, then. I”m offended you didn’t ask me to turn you she says, somewhat coldly. She does not miss a beat.
I say nothing at first. I regard her. One predator, to another.
“I didn’t want to be changed,” I say. The difference is that my voice is clipped and bitterly cold. I find, in that moment, that her smile is detestable. That she finds humor in this situation. I regard her silently when she asks who is responsible. I do not know why it is of any concern; but perhaps this is my first lesson, in this world of water horses. I remember Sereia when she returned to me and laid teeth against my throat a second time. You are mine, she had said.
“Sereia,” I answer, at last. “In a starved frenzy.”
I turn my head then to expose the necklace of scars I wear at my throat. There is no finesse, no artistry, to them. The mark is not intentional. It is the mark of a lion at the throat of a bull; killing.
My eyes are gem-bright, sea-bright, when they lock on hers again. “Are you jealous, Lucinda?” For a moment, brief and flitting, there is an edge of humor to my voice. There is no telling how long it will last.
The sentence makes Lucinda's mouth twitch. She feels disappointed, but then hadn't she said the same to Anandi when she first made the offer? Hadn't she thought it to be some strange cult that involved answering to someone as her leader? She had been turned anyway and it changed her life for the better in the end. This should make her grateful for Anandi, but she would never say thank you to that woman. She would rather die a slow, horrible death.
For Torix, maybe he hasn't found the benefit in his new abilities yet. It didn't take long for Lu to feel drunk in the power and bloodlust. Maybe it will just take something more for him to realize it too. She could help him…
And she is about to offer, when he says the name of who turned him. She feels some relief that he didn't say Anandi, but the fact that it was Sereia makes her laugh. At first, it's a quiet laugh because she almost doesn't believe him. Sereia, the kelpie who didn't want to be a kelpie, the one who was too scared and resented her kind? After a few moments, she starts cackling so hard that her stomach hurts.
"Oh, oh dear," she finally says through the fit of laughter. "Sereia? Oh, I wish I had been there to witness that. She must have hated every moment of it." And she can't help but laugh a little longer because that woman probably did hate herself very much afterwards. She let herself become more of a monster than she had to be out of hunger and now she and Torix will have to pay the consequences. Although, it's not a bad outcome for Lucinda, not at all.
"Are you jealous, Lucinda?" he asks her and she has let her laughter settle for now. Instead she looks at him with a gaze that is both playful and cunning. "Maybe," is all she says as she steps closer to him. Whatever scent that had been his has since been claimed by the sea, just as it did for her. There is only the salt, brine and blood, and it's so, so lovely.
Lu brushes the tip of her wing down his neck, instead wishing it could be her tail wrapping around him under the water. "Why do you not want to be one of us? Are we too scary for you?" she is fake-pouting now, but there is more than just her humor in the questions. The way he answers may help her decide just what she should do to him here on this beach or if she should drag him into the water to consume him.
not heroes any longer; we are tragedies of firelight and flesh; unholy sacraments of blood and broken bodies. at night we swallow bitter herbs and shake our fists at fickle, callous deities--what use have we for our feeble hymns of wasted faith, our sordid songs of glory?
A
s young boys apprenticing under lieutenants one summer, we had observed them quietly from afar. Mostly, we tended to their armor and weaponry, and asked them questions on leadership or tactics. The lieutenants we were assigned treated us differently depending on their station and individual demeanor; some were polite, even courteous, and treated us as one would a beloved younger brother. Others were cruel, and forced us to perform petty—and degrading—tasks.
I think of this now because we—Bondike, Dagda, Ciaan, Kruor, more—used to take bets on which of the lieutenants killed for pleasure on the battlefield. Which of the lieutenants really loved it, the violence, the bloodshed, the killing. We had treated it as a joke, something to pass the time as we shined brass or sharpened swords. Now, as she begins to laugh so hard she cannot speak, I remember what we became.
The others, they never possessed it—the bloodlust. The genuine love of killing, the power of it. They did not receive the adrenal high. They were honorable, and courageous, and disciplined.
But I was not. I might present a facade; I might pretend so wholly that even I believed it. I knew, however, what separated me from them. The very attribute that made me elite also ensured I became detestable, even to myself. Especially to myself.
The secret—the one that kept me from drinking as my father did, or from falling apart when Bondike betrayed me—is that I loved it.
War did not destroy me as it destroyed other men. It enabled me to be myself without becoming a monstrosity. And in this moment with her laughing in the face of my tragedy, I remember the pleasure of killing. The way you are closer to god in that moment then in any other; when the scales of a life are held in the palm of your hand and you decide.
I am deciding now, Lucinda.
I am remembering the exact angle necessary to drive the point of my horns through the soft underpart of the armpit, where everyone’s skin feels like velvet. Where the heart rests so vulnerably just a few inches away, or arteries snake down the limb. (I think of how when I sleep with lovers, that is my favorite place to rest my head. To hear the thunderous beat, beat, beating of a heart).
Oh, in that moment, I want to kill her.
But I smile instead. I smile a smile that displays each newly altered tooth.
“She came back in a fit of guilt more than once,” I say, derisively, because there are few things I hate more than weakness disguised as mercy.
I cannot blame her, I suppose, for the way she regards me in this moment. She must think me a fool for succumb to such a deplorable example of her—our—breed. Maybe she says, and then extends a wing to brush down the side of my throat.
My violent thoughts remain subdued, a teaming sea beneath a calm surface. I laugh now. “Absolutely bone-chilling,” I say, with enough venom to sting.
“Do you want the real reason, Lucinda? Or the reason that might be more appropriate?” The smile I share then is curt. I glance over her shoulder, toward the sea, and try to forget the way my mouth tastes of blood, blood, blood. “The appropriate reason is that I have never been a fan of the sea. I prefer forests, fields, mountains.” I say it conversationally, nearly—and yet the irony exists there in an undercurrent, caustic and dramatic. “The real reason is that I spent a lifetime eliminating water horses on an island far from Novus. Committing a genocide. I lost friends, family, myself. And to become the very thing I hate? Well, that is nearly unbearable.”
And yet, I bear it. I bear it now with a grin whetted as sharply as a blade, and with eyes as brazen's as a lion. I dare her to challenge me; to take advantage of my truth. To be insulted, or enflamed.
There is some odd sense of pleasure Lucinda gets from imagining Sereia succumbing to her true instincts. The extreme guilt she must have felt after is laughable, especially if she had come to apologize to the man so many times after. She did him a favor, Lu thinks, and made him an even stronger creature of war than whoever he called a mother.
But he doesn't see it this way, does he? It both sickens and disappoints her.
He is sarcastic to her, but she smiles. There are many who find her bone-chilling, she would like to think. She would love to destroy him in this moment and let him see who she can truly become - who they can truly become. If he would accept it, they could create chaos together like they should have at the party if she hadn't been poisoned.
There is still a part of her that wonders, just a bit, if Torix had been behind that. He didn't kill her on that night, but he very well could have. She's not sure if she's grateful he hadn't or disappointed in that too. Because as he gives his reason, what they are is the very creature he had sought to kill some time ago.
Lucinda laughs again, but it's not as boisterous as before. It's a short laugh and she does not take her eyes off him when she says -
"Do you want to kill me, Vercingtorix?" She raises a brow and her smile is now a smirk. Her adrenaline is spiking and the sea is whispering kill, kill, kill into her ears. Her heart beats a song it so often sings to her while she eyes her prey from below. But then it begins to beat faster like a war song.
Lucinda wonders what his next move might be. She's not sure if she would consider it foolish or brave to take a lunge at her, but she wants him to. She wants to feel the way his new teeth feel piercing her skin. Then she'd return it with a bite of her own and taste his fresh kelpie blood on her tongue.
