the danger is i'm dangerous and i might just tear you apart
I
t's been over a year since Lucinda was turned into a kelpie. She's a couple seasons late, but today felt like a day worth celebrating. So in true kelpie fashion, that involved a hunt.
There is always excitement to hunting, no matter what it is that she's pursuing. Between the adrenaline rush and the bloodlust that consumes her, she always finds joy in it and doesn't know how she lived her life without this. She can understand now what Abraxia appreciates about life and their bond has only become stronger. Typically, the pair hunt together but today Lucinda is alone. The ocean water has begun to warm up with the changing seasons, so she's eager to spend even more time in the sea. It feels much more comfortable to stretch out her fins than it does with her legs.
Soon, she is in pursuit of a small brown shark. It's not nearly as big as some other sharks she's hunted, but a snack will do just fine to satisfy her hunger. It doesn't take long for the creature to spot her and she propels forward. She longs for that first bite, the one where the first drops of blood land on her tongue and the creature still thinks it can get away. They always try to squirm under her grasp like there is still some hope.
There never is.
This is what she thinks when she reaches that very moment. The shark is no match for her speed and power, so with one swift move, she kills the creature with her jaws. Lu comes up to the surface with the shark in her mouth to get an idea of her surroundings. When she first came to the water, she had been alone, but now there is another here at the edges of the shore. At first, she's not sure whether she wants to hunt them too, but as she swims closer, she thinks she recognizes him.
The kelpie begins to eat when she comes to the shore to meet the man. Her magic transforms her back into her other body and once again her wings feel too heavy on her back. The sea is already calling back to her and she will return to it, but first, she's curious why he is here. They have never properly met, but she's heard many things about the Court regimes.
"Well hello, King of Delumine. What brings you to the home of the kelpie?" she asks, her mouth likely bloody from her kill. She doesn't bother to clean herself up as it's all part of the image. Lucinda watches him closely and wonders if he longs to be part of the sea too.
The sound of it is a roar undercutting everything else: the birdsong, the whisper of the grasses against his legs, the sounds of his own hooves on the earth. He can hear it below the bright sounds of his flowers blooming up around him, can feel it in their smiling faces when they turn gently around to him.
Always it is there, like a heartbeat: the lub and dub of it, the push and pull, the rising and falling and breaking upon the sand. And beneath even that, there is the sand of the shores calling out to the sand in his soul.
He is not sure how he has never noticed it before.
But now he finds himself turning towards it even before he has decided to. And his steps quicken until the sound of the leaves shush, shush, shushing against his sides matches that of the distant sea. Until the sea-foam rears bright white before his eyes every time before it shatters itself like breaking glass against the beach. And the image of it flashes still behind his eyes as he closes them, and breathes in the salty air, and listens to the sand beneath the waves —
Calling him forward.
Calling him to be sharp like glass after a lightning strike.
The moment his hooves touch the sand it begins to tremble. It begins to rise, fluid as the ocean — and just as wild — alongside him. The waves it makes glitters like gold in the sunlight, dusts his side like fairy dust.
And it all collapses when he sees the dark figure breaking through the waves like a scythe, dragging a carcass to the shore. He likes to think he would have smiled, on another day — without the sand singing almost-violently through his veins in notes of roaring currents and black tides. Note by note he can feel it rising, echoing in his ears like a second heartbeat lifting itself to replace the first. It does not quiet when she settles herself on the beach.
The sand is still churning around his hooves when he speaks. “You call it a home, I call it a free land for all the people of Novus.” He can feel it whispering against his fetlocks, ever restless. Like it is chanting at her no, no, no, this one is not for the sea, this one is our’s — he would always belong to the earth.
He does not step closer to her. He does not look at the blood on her mouth, on her teeth, on her tongue when she speaks.
Ipomoea does not need another reason to be searching for monsters. And so he does not comment on the shark that is still bleeding on the beach, turning the sand dark and red.
“Who are you?” he asks instead, and he wonders if she can hear the sound of the earth singing below the crash of the waves.
the danger is i'm dangerous and i might just tear you apart
W
hat she knows of kings and queens is very little. For the most part, it's what she remembers of her own parents back home when she had been an heir to the throne. They had been too passive, she thinks, and that had been their downfall. They saw the good in everyone and it blinded them from seeing the shadows in others. In Novus, maybe some aren't very different from her parents but she would have to say this is the first time she's come face to face with one.
She's not sure if she likes it.
Lucinda watches the sand twirl around his hooves and she raises a brow. The sea laps the shore behind her but there is more than just the tide. There is a song it sings to her every day and night that gets louder the longer she's away from it. She never heard it before until she was turned.
"Just because the sand heeds your call does not make this your home too," she tells him, although it comes off almost as a warning as her eyes glow a bright green. She almost wants to laugh, but she shows her teeth instead. "The sea does not call to you like it calls to me, I can assure you."
She wonders if he's ever met a kelpie and, if he had, he hadn't met one like her. She wonders if a king's blood tastes sweeter.
Ipomoea has met many kelpies in his lifetime. Messalina, perhaps, had been the first; when he was still soft, when he was still a broken thing who did not know well enough to pull the pieces of him together. He is sure there had been others, those he did not know to be kelpies — but now the names flow through his mind like water.
Messalina. Boudika. Vercingtorix. Emersyn. Anandi. Sereia. He is sure there were others; all of them, all of them, had the same look to them as this woman. The same look Thana would get when she was on the trail of blood.
The look of a monster about to consume their prey.
It makes him reach for the magic inside of him, the magic that is growing teeth and claws begin to snarl. He is not prey to be consumed by her.
But Ipomoea does not smile. He does not react when she shows her teeth, or when she speaks, or when she lords over her kill like the god of the ocean (she was not. Ipomoea has met the ocean’s god and she was not a kelpie.) Ipomoea knows if he lets himself, he would not be able to stop; if he lets himself, he would destroy her.
“I did not call it my home.” His voice is flat, even. He does not show her his own warning that is brimming like a wave inside of his throat, he only dismisses her’s with the levelness of his tone. The sand shifts beneath his hooves, but that, too, is subtle, indistinct; like the wind stirring it.
Ipomoea is watching her teeth and thinking only that he has seen sharper teeth, more dangerous teeth in the mouths of more dangerous people than her. So it is with the same level tone that he nods curtly and tells her, “Charmed.” And in his voice there is only a hint of mockery in his voice that is as fleeting as the sun shifting behind a cloud.
And, without looking back at the kelpie woman, he turns and walks closer to the waves until the water laps at his hooves.
the danger is i'm dangerous and i might just tear you apart
S
he seems almost disappointed by his patience. He's nothing like Anandi who is so easy to disturb. But this only makes it more of a challenge to try and figure him out. Almost like a puzzle, except she will have to try harder to find the pieces that form his breaking point. Everyone had to have one somewhere.
He corrects her, but Lucinda still wonders what brought him here in the first place. For a man who is most known for how attuned he is to the flowers, why would the sand and sea interest him?
Unless, of course, he is as curious as some are. Kelpies are no secret to Novus and their numbers seem to be growing every season. While most might fear them, there are those who are interested in their way of life, perhaps even what makes them tick.
The man steps into the sea and the way the water laps at his hooves only makes her hungrier. Her eyes widen and she takes a few steps closer.
"Do you wonder what it's like?"To be one of us, she almost says. Does he wonder what blood tastes like when your senses are changed? Or how the body shifts beneath the waves and how the sea calls to you like a mother might to bring its child back home. There are so many things to wonder and so many things Lucinda craves in this moment, but she just watches and waits.
