T a i s c e
Dear Quinn,
Did you know what danger you were in the evening Taisce met you? From the sea, painted red by the gloaming, he watched you. He watched the way the sun painted the sand and sky to match your skin. The way it set so the moon could accompany the slender crescent upon your shoulder. It lit the stars to match the white one that also gleamed upon your skin.
Taisce watched all of those things and then he watched you step closer. He sank beneath the sea. You might not have seen the way his hair glinted like a coming storm in the rippling dark of the ocean. I do not blame you if you didn’t, Taisce did not want you to see him. But he was a coming storm.
In the silk cold of the water, he swam closer to the golden shore upon which you stood. His limbs rolled like the waves, his body seemed more water than horse. The gulls cried their warning above you – did you heed their call? They spiraled him and watched the way he watched you. They were hungry you see, hungry to feast upon the remains he might leave for them. They were to have been your remains, my friend.
As the waters rushed in, the kelpie let them pull him in too. Closer to you and closer, closer to the beach he drifted, unseen and unheard. Did you see the glint of his pearl eyes in the water when the sea became shallower still? Do not be filled with chagrin, if you did not, for if you looked closely, you could see the way his eyes were the swirling maelstrom of seaspray. It is an easy thing to miss, when a kelpie watches you from the ocean deep.
Eventually he was close enough. Eventually Taisce slunk from the sea, though it tried to grip him tight. It rose and fell from his torso, then his limbs as he ascended the beach. Water dripped (and never stopped) from his skin. To look at, he was the marbled blend of sandy gold and steel-sea-blue. At his throat, the collar he wore glinted mercury dark and red with rust. The water is unkind, you see, it turns everything it owns to rust.
He stood before you, a potent monster risen from the depths of the sea and the sea danced for him. Though he still stood within it, where it could lap against his shins, the sea was not content. It clawed at his long limbs, it threw foam up his neck and adorned him with all manner of ocean life. Taisce was its canvas and it painted him with all its fearsome splendour.
Quinn, Taisce spoke to you that night, didn’t he? A “Hello” that bubbled like a babbling brook and flowed like a stream. His skull tilted too, like a hunter regarding its most curious prey. I know Taisce wondered in that moment, just what to do with you: to feast, to play or to kill? He had so many options as he stood there, regarding you and stealing your view of the setting sun. It set his skin alight as it haloed him in fire and sank, down, down into the ocean.
Taisce smiled for you then and that predator’s smile seemed to say that all eventually sink into the ocean.
Oh Quinn, I hope you knew, just then, exactly what you had let yourself in for.
Signed: Unknown
@Quinn
